What’s A Union President Have to Do to get A Around Here?

As Bill Daniels guides his sea green Jaguar XJ6 through suburban Studio City, he hardly looks the part of someone who scares the bejesus out of most people in Hollywood. Approaching age 74, the familiar actor’s face is warm and grandfatherly, betraying none of the hard lines you might expect for a man leading the 100,000-member Screen Actors Guild into a new era of militancy.

It’s the morning of Valentine’s Day. Daniels drives past a camel and a man dressed as an Arab as a crew of workers films a Gogurt commercial in his neighborhood. He parks on crowded Ventura Boulevard, a half block from his destination, a red leather corner booth by the window at Art’s Deli. “This is where it all began,” he says as he slips behind the table and orders bran flakes topped with banana slices and nonfat milk.

More than a year earlier, Daniels had sat in the booth for a three-hour lunch with a half-dozen actors he’d never heard of. They complained that their venerable Screen Actors Guild had become a pushover for Hollywood studios and Madison Avenue advertisers. Actors weren’t being paid fairly, and the union wasn’t standing up for them, they said. SAG seemed to embody the conventional wisdom of the 1990s in Hollywood--that entertainment industry unions no longer had the nerve to strike, nor the resolve to hang together.

As the actors lunched, time was growing short. SAG elections were just weeks away. The little band had begun a guerrilla e-mail campaign to voice its demands, but it needed a respected actor to head its slate of reformers in the election. Oscar-winner Jon Voight had considered the post, but turned it down because his acting career had taken off again.

Daniels had already said he wasn’t interested in the job, but agreed to meet with the actors because they wanted his advice about potential candidates. He was nearing an idyllic retirement, planned for Montecito, after working for nearly 60 years compiling a long list of credits that included playing Dustin Hoffman’s father in “The Graduate,” two Emmys for his part as Dr. Mark Craig on “St. Elsewhere,” the voice of David Hasselhoff’s car K.I.T.T. on “Knight Rider” and, for the previous seven television seasons, high school principal George Feeny on the teen sitcom “Boy Meets World.” He had made it clear he didn’t want to end that career in the role of a union leader. Besides, he was, in his own words, “not a very good member at all.”

But the more he listened, the more upset he became. Finally, he turned to his wife, actress Bonnie Bartlett, and asked: “Is this something I should do?” The decision that followed is why Hollywood hasn’t fretted this much about its labor relations in a generation. Daniels entered the race talking tough. He labeled SAG’s leaders “pussycats,” he promised to “go to the wall” for actors, and he declared that “there’s nobody in this town who frightens me.”

It worked. Daniels upset incumbent Richard Masur in the November 1999 election. What’s

more, a slate of like-minded actors was swept into seats on the SAG board. The newly aggressive union soon waged a strike against advertisers over contracts governing the making of television commercials. A debate continues in Hollywood--and among SAG members--over whether the painful six-month strike helped or hurt the union.

This spring, Daniels and SAG are to sit down with the most powerful entertainment conglomerates on the planet to negotiate a new film and TV contract before the current one expires July 1. If the bargaining fails, the result could be a strike that shuts down Hollywood, costing the Los Angeles economy as much as $250 million a week in direct costs, according to the L.A. County Economic Development Corp.

Any time the stakes are that high, studio executives, agents and other Hollywood unions will be anxious. But what has them doubly nervous is Daniels--and not because he’s become a Jimmy Hoffa-style tough union leader, or one of the MBA-types that lead many of today’s unions by using sophisticated campaigns to wage war. He is neither of those.

Instead, Hollywood is running scared because it doesn’t know what Daniels is, or wants. He might be a radical who will lead actors off a cliff. Or perhaps he’s a puppet of a militant group of rarely employed actors who have seized control of the union. He certainly says little at board meetings, often letting others run the show. Or maybe he’s the kind of president needed to ready SAG for the future.

In a town where powerful people gain leverage from information, from sizing people up quickly, learning their desires, weaknesses, unfulfilled goals, insecurities and personality defects, Daniels is an unknown. Power brokers such as Michael Ovitz and Jeffrey Katzenberg have spent countless hours in the past year trying to get to know Daniels. Even former MCA chief Lew Wasserman, Hollywood’s reigning patriarch who, at age 88 now watches from the sidelines, went out of his way to meet with Daniels. None can honestly say they came away with a clear sense of his direction.

Perhaps Daniels himself doesn’t know.

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AS THE 22ND SAG PRESIDENT SINCE THE UNION WAS FOUNDED IN 1933, Daniels joins a pantheon of actors that includes James Cagney, Walter Pidgeon, Ed Asner, Patty Duke, Charlton Heston, Eddie Cantor--and Ronald Reagan, who leveraged his SAG presidency into a political career that took him to the White House. Daniels concedes he was unprepared. He had no clue, for example, that SAG’s contracts with advertisers and, later, those with studios were about to expire. Also, tellingly, he had no idea how utterly dysfunctional SAG can be. The union is plagued by internal power struggles and is bogged down by an entrenched, bloated bureaucracy.

“I didn’t investigate it,” Daniels says. “I didn’t know the contracts were coming up. I didn’t know the factionalism in the union. I didn’t know a lot of things. I never thought about it because I impulsively said: ‘How about me?’ It was an impulse. I’m not proud of that. I think the ideal way to come into this job is to become a board member and to attend meetings.”

As a result, Daniels had a steep learning curve, which, combined with a quiet personal style and the aggressive tendencies of others around him, gave the impression that the new president wasn’t up to the task. As could be expected from an actors organization, he was characterized by movie roles. Some SAG staff members referred to him behind his back as “Chauncey,” as in Chauncey Gardner, the quiet, simple gardener played by Peter Sellers in the film “Being There” who, by a quirk of fate, is suddenly regarded as a profound thinker. Still others called him “Dave,” after Kevin Kline’s character in the movie of the same name about an ordinary owner of a temporary employment agency who ends up impersonating a look-alike president.

Outside the union, Daniels was seen as a puppet run by militant actors who had taken over the union, notably Chuck Sloan, an actor in commercials and on TV. Sloan, whose credits include commercials for AC Delco and parts in the cable TV show “Silk Stalkings,” often spoke for Daniels in the early days. He was nicknamed “the prime minister.” Soon after a group of Hollywood agents met with Daniels, Sloan and other top SAG officials, the agents joked among themselves that they had witnessed a miracle: Bill Daniels was seen talking while Chuck Sloan was sipping water.

It’s a suggestion that makes Sloan and Daniels bristle. “It’s categorically wrong that I’m speaking for Bill Daniels,” Sloan says. He says his role was in helping him to understand SAG and its numerous rules. Sloan adds that the two have had plenty of differences. At one point three months into the strike against advertisers, Sloan recalls, Daniels even called him and other SAG board members “weasels” because they couldn’t agree on a strategy.

Yet Daniels is an enigma to many in Hollywood. And he has lent ammunition to critics with his personal style. “I’m not the off-the-cuff speaker some people are,” he says. “I’ve learned that if I haven’t anything to say, to shut up and not make something up because there’s a pause. Sometimes you look smartest by keeping quiet.” If Daniels hasn’t appeared to be a strong leader at SAG decision sessions, perhaps it’s because of a self-professed difficulty in digesting Roberts Rules of Order, the procedural guide to meetings. He adds that despite being an actor, he’s basically shy, and “I’ve always been a hard guy to figure.”

Actor, director and producer Warren Beatty has known Daniels for nearly 30 years; he first worked with him in 1974’s “The Parallax View” and then cast Daniels in his 1981 film “Reds.” In carefully measured words, Beatty voices the kind of frustration many actors have at not knowing exactly where Daniels is taking them. “I like Bill very much,” Beatty says. “My opinion is he’s at his best when he says, ‘This is the direction I want to go in and let me tell you why.’ ”

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IT MAY BE THAT DANIELS’ UNCERTAINTY IN HEADING THE UNION IS ROOTED in how he feels about show business overall. “I’m ambivalent about this business, period. I was put in it very early by my mother and I never made the choice myself.” Those were the days of “Billy and Jacqueline Daniels,” a brother-and-sister act that was a regular in the late 1930s and early 1940s on the Horn & Hardardt Children’s Hour in New York. Daniels grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a union bricklayer and a mother he compares to Mama Rose, Gypsy Rose Lee’s quintessential driven stage mother in the musical “Gypsy.” By age 3, Daniels was taking tap dance lessons.

Some of his most vivid memories involve the exploitation of performers. It still bothers him that a man who promoted children’s shows in which Daniels and his sister performed was secretly being paid, while the children received nothing.

It wasn’t until Daniels was hired as a 15-year-old in the Broadway play “Life With Father” that he became interested in acting as a career. He grew up with the play, losing the role when he was drafted into the Army in the waning days of World War II. He served in the Allied occupational forces in Europe after the war, then returned to the United States and enrolled at Northwestern University. During an audition there, he met Bonnie, his wife of nearly 50 years, who first told him that, at 5 feet, 7inches, he was too short for her. After graduating, the two moved to New York, where she supported them initially by landing a role in the soap opera “Love of Life.”

Hardly an aggressive, pound-the-pavement actor, Daniels spent most of the 1950s struggling for small stage parts or roles in the early days of television. For $25 each, he and Bonnie would provide laughs as audience members in television shows, or help game shows rehearse stunts they were planning to ask contestants to perform.

“I didn’t really have a huge ambition, to tell you the truth,” he recalls. “Some of my friends said: ‘I don’t know how you ever succeed in this business with your lack of push.’ ”

But as with most successful actors, smaller roles led to bigger ones. A role in “A Thousand Clowns” onstage led to his playing the part in the Oscar-nominated film version. That led to Mike Nichols casting him as Dustin Hoffman’s father--even though the two are only a few years apart in age--in the classic film “The Graduate.”

Daniels’ biggest break came in 1982, when producer and director Bruce Paltrow offered him a small part in the NBC medical series “St. Elsewhere.” Paltrow promised him the role would expand once the writers saw what Daniels could do. Daniels ended up winning the Emmy twice in a row as best actor in a dramatic series, while Bartlett, who on a lark had been cast as his wife, won for best actress.

Not that it mattered all that much to Daniels. One of the years he won, the limousine broke down on the way to the telecast. Daniels didn’t want to attend anyway, figuring Don Johnson would win for “Miami Vice,” so he left Bartlett to wait for a backup limo and went home. Bartlett then followed, steaming. After spending all day getting into her dress and having her hair done, she said he was going to the Emmys. They arrived just in time for Daniels to hear his name being called.

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AS THE ELEVATOR STOPS ON the eighth floor of SAG’s headquarters next to the La Brea Tar Pits, the first thing you see is a life-size mural of actors, the centerpiece of which is Sally Field holding up her hand-drawn sign from “Norma Rae” that reads “Union.” For SAG, it is a symbolic gesture because it is a guild of professionals that aspires to be a full-fledged union. Technically, it isn’t a union because it’s not a hiring hall. Actors can’t drop by to look for jobs like a carpenter can at his union.

SAG labors under two unusual realities, each of them inherently contradictory. The members SAG needs the most--major stars--are the ones who need the union the least. In addition to the stars, SAG represents many bit-part actors, and extras, dancers, stunt specialists and others, each with somewhat different agendas. Equally unusual is the haphazard employment patterns of its members. Roughly 85% of SAG’s members are unemployed at any given time, and while a handful of actors are multimillionaires, most can’t make a living exclusively at acting.

“I don’t know of another [union] that has in it such a disparity of income and such a wide contrast between employed and unemployed members,” Beatty says. “That makes it difficult. It makes it a real challenge to manage.”

In truth, the makeup of the union is but one of many problems at SAG. The union suffers from long-standing political rifts and from glaring inefficiencies in procedures and structure. Internally, SAG’s Los Angeles members believe that more moderate SAG members in New York and outlying offices have disproportionate power, given that as many as 58% of the actors and 64% of the union money comes from Los Angeles, yet Los Angeles doesn’t have a majority of the board seats. The rift between moderates and the new leaders grew as the strike against advertisers wore on last year.

Daniels says he is aware of the tension but doubts he can end it. “I don’t think I’m going to solve all these problems. I’m not going to solve the problems between SAG in New York versus SAG in California. There’s just too much distrust, too much distance and there’s too much lack of information between the two. There’s all of kinds of things no one man can solve.”

As for the union’s inefficiencies, the former SAG leadership, in exchange for a dues increase, agreed to hire the consulting firm of Towers Perrin to evaluate its structure and procedures. The findings, released after Daniels came to power, were blistering. SAG is “schizophrenic,” the report said. It suggested reorganization that would save the guild $6 million to $8 million a year, enough to pay the cost of two strikes like the one SAG staged last year, on its nearly $50-million budget. The report also criticized the union for an inability to make quick decisions. For instance, 38 of the union’s 400 employees report to a single executive. The number should be no more than eight, the report says.

The consultants also confirmed what many in and out of the union have known for years: SAG’s board is terribly unwieldy, with a staggering 105 members, many of them frustrated thespians who haven’t acted in years. The board is so large that meetings drag on endlessly. “If each of those people has two minutes at the microphone, do the math. That’s 210 minutes before you even come to a vote,” says actor Gary Epp, a SAG board member active in trying to carry out the report’s suggestions.

Regarding SAG bureaucracy, the consultants found that checks for residuals take eight weeks to reach actors because checks are sent by the studios to SAG, where they are recorded and checked. You could mail a letter to Pakistan and get an answer in the time it takes to get a check from Warner Bros. into the hands of an actor living a mile from the studio’s Burbank lot. Why not send the payments directly from studios to actors, and simply cross-check the data using a computer disk? the report asks.

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FOR VARIOUS REASONS, SAG’S IMAGE in Hollywood during the past year has been one of a car careening without brakes while the driver continues to step on the gas. The union’s newly aggressive attitude has alienated agents, normally natural allies during a strike, by scrapping a proposal that would have given them more flexibility to enter into other kinds of businesses--provided those ventures did not put them in conflict with their duties to actors.

SAG also has alienated the Directors Guild of America by cozying up to the Writers Guild of America, which is feuding with the directors over how much power writers should enjoy in movie-making, an issue in the writers’ current negotiations with studios. What’s more, Hollywood’s blue-collar unions believe the strike against advertisers lasted far too long, costing their members 1 million hours of lost work. Even the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, a sister union that wants to merge with SAG, feels jilted by the new militants.

Some of its own members and former officers and other Hollywood union officials say the chaos wrought by the new leaders was most evident during the advertisers strike. The AFL-CIO, which had offered to help, nearly walked away in frustration after SAG dragged its heels organizing a consumer boycott to put pressure on advertisers. Eventually, one was launched against Procter & Gamble.

Feeling empowered by their election victory, SAG leaders had said they would settle for nothing less than to be paid residuals whenever commercials they acted in ran on cable TV. To Masur, the ousted and understandably bitter former president, the claim was unfair to the actors. “It’s irresponsible to lead members on a strike for something you have no hope of delivering. That is a failure of leadership. Everyone knows there was no hope of delivering it except for a handful of people who must have been delusional.”

In the end, SAG didn’t win that concession, but it did get a substantial increase in payments, as well as an agreement that ads made exclusively for the Internet will include union actors. The guild also turned away a request by advertisers for a pay cut in commercials airing on major networks. More important, the union didn’t fall apart as many had predicted, and major stars, including Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Richard Dreyfuss, Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey lent support or donated big checks to SAG’s strike fund.

SAG’s new leaders have also feuded with the union’s full-time staff, especially contract negotiator John McGuire, whom they viewed as too cozy with management. That led to the hiring in February of former top Writers Guild executive Brian Walton. Recommended by a host of people, including Ovitz and future negotiating adversary Katzenberg, the London-born lawyer led the writers during their 1988 strike. Later, however, he was forced out of the Writers Guild after members complained he was too soft.

Studios believe the hiring lessens the odds of a strike because Walton knows what it takes to make a deal. But SAG leaders believe Walton is tougher than his reputation, and will be eager to put to rest the image that he grew soft.

One reality Daniels faces is that the early tough talk by him and his supporters created lofty expectations for the coming negotiations, in which actors will seek big gains in residuals they receive when their work airs on cable TV, in foreign markets and on video or DVD. They also want to gain a toehold in the fledging Internet entertainment arena in case it takes off. On the other side, studios aren’t likely to budget much. They have been preparing for a possible strike over the last year by rushing projects into production and developing more shows like “Survivor,” which don’t require professional actors.

If Daniels doesn’t succeed in securing huge gains, he will no doubt be harshly criticized--and actors, as a lot, are easily disappointed. David Prindle, a University of Texas professor and author of “The Politics of Glamour” about SAG, says he found that actors as a rule have a “permanent reservoir of paranoia” that makes them easily disgruntled not only with studios, but with their union leaders as well. “The phrase that is always on actors lips is ‘sold out,’ ” Prindle says. “They always harbor suspicions that they have just been betrayed. Any time you go into a negotiation, you have to compromise, but many of them see compromise as betrayal.”

Masur, who knows Daniels and his wife from acting, hasn’t spoken to the new president in more than a year. After keeping silent through last year’s strike, he has emerged as a blistering critic of Daniels.

“To say he was caught off guard is an understatement,” Masur says. “He also came in and said there’s no need for politics and dissent anymore. That’s easy to say, but you have to earn that respect and earn that unification, and the way you do that is by reaching out to people who were not your allies initially. He has totally failed to do that.”

Daniels did call for an end to the divisions in the union, but nothing changed. Already a Web site called RadioFreeSAG.com has emerged criticizing his leadership.

SAG leaders say they have learned from the mistakes they made and from the examination by the consultants. The result, they say, will be a better and more proactive union. “We are aware now that we need to streamline,” says actress Anne-Marie Johnson, a SAG activist. “I would say the mood is very hopeful. Those of us who go out to sets on a regular basis get a sampling of what the other half is feeling. There’s a lot of sense of hope, aggressiveness and ‘let’s do this’ because we were so successful in the commercial strike.”

Daniels believes critics such as Masur and others can’t accept that they were kicked out of office. “It’s only natural for them to say, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ ” Daniels says. “There’s a lot to be said for that. But the membership elected me overwhelmingly and elected my entire slate, which means the past administrations had not pleased the membership. They felt alienated and ignored.”

Daniels’ two-year term ends later this year, and he isn’t tipping his hand on whether he’ll seek another term. Asked if he would have run in the first place knowing what he knows now about the job, he responds: “I don’t know how to answer that question--if I had to do it again, would I do it?” He ponders the question for a minute, but doesn’t answer.

“I only get the good news: that on the street, they love Bill Daniels. But if Bill Daniels doesn’t come in with a good contract, I may have to escape town.”