SAG’s new face

The Screen Actors Guild lurched in a new direction this week, sacking its top executive and naming a new team to bargain with Hollywood’s largest studios. After months of infighting, the moderate Unite for Strength faction that won control of SAG’s national board in September brought in a pair of veteran negotiators to replace Executive Director Doug Allen, whose tenure was marked by a disastrous rift between SAG and its former partner in contract talks, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

The ouster sparked yet more acrimony, with SAG President Alan Rosenberg -- a staunch supporter of Allen -- accusing the new majority of being undemocratic and divisive. It’s an ironic accusation, considering that Rosenberg led the filibuster that prevented the board from voting on Allen at its last meeting (his opponents ultimately got their way through what amounted to a write-in campaign) and threatened to start a “civil war” if Allen were removed. But his remarks, coming on the heels of a “Kumbaya” message from interim Executive Director David White, show how hard it may be for the new negotiating team to strike a deal that the fratricidal membership will approve.

That’s why the studios should respond to SAG’s change with a move to the middle. They’ve been willing to make modest increases in wages and benefits, an improvement that workers in many other industries won’t see this year. But they’ve also sought to chip away at long-standing contract provisions, undermine the residuals system and employ more nonunion actors in made-for-Internet programs. Those proposals helped stoke the distrust that motivated Rosenberg and his allies in SAG’s Membership First faction to push back against the studios with demands that many union members came to believe were unrealistic.

As we said before the negotiations began, both sides should be open to experimentation and new business models. That can’t happen, however, without assurances that future successes won’t come at one side’s expense, and that results in the next few years will inform future negotiations, not lock in formulas. The studios need SAG members’ trust on those issues, and the actors’ experience with cable TV, VHS and DVD residuals and studio accounting in general give them every reason to be skeptical of their employers.

At the same time, SAG has to recognize the challenges posed by the tumbling economy as well as increasingly popular competitors online and in the living room. Movie theaters drew smaller crowds again in 2008, although higher ticket prices nearly offset the drop in sales. More alarming for the industry was the sharp drop in U.S. DVD sales. Meanwhile, cutbacks by advertisers are making it harder for new video businesses to thrive online. The studios and SAG need to face these challenges as partners, not disaffected and suspicious adversaries.