Salary cap for stars? Why not

THANK YOU, Scott Collins, for your truly groundbreaking and courageous column about runaway celebrity salaries [“Films, TV Sag Under the $tar System,” May 12]. The only contention I take issue with is that the Screen Actors Guild is simply a victim of circumstances, or as you paraphrase SAG’s Doug Allen: “ . . . the union can only negotiate the minimum rates on the pay scale, not what the studios pay the mega-stars.”

What’s needed is not just discipline by the studio chiefs in negotiating celebrity salaries but some backbone by guild bosses to proactively ask them to cap the salaries. The unions that represent players of some of the professional sports teams support such caps. Why can’t the entertainment unions?

Otherwise, the only alternative is to establish a union that truly represents the working- and middle-class industry workers, and leave the mega-stars (and their entourages) to their own devices.

Greg Ptacek

Los Angeles