Actors set to pull the plug on Hollywood

Source: Agencies  |   2008-7-1  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

HOLLYWOOD'S actors and studios traded last-minute barbs on Sunday, a day before their film and TV labor pact was due to expire with no announcement of a new three-year deal.

The contract covering 120,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild expired at midnight last night and that date was widely seen as likely to pass without a settlement or work stoppage, plunging the world's entertainment capital into labor limbo.

In what the union said was a response to media speculation, SAG president Alan Rosenberg said in a statement that it had "taken no steps to initiate a strike authorization vote" and that any speculation was "simply a distraction."

Such a vote requires at least several weeks to organize, a SAG official said.

Hollywood studios are not waiting. Virtually all film production has shut down, because studios do not want to risk having costly projects halted by a walkout.

"The industry is shutting down because SAG's Hollywood leadership insisted on eleventh-hour negotiations and dragging these talks into July," said the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the studios' bargaining agent.

SAG countered in a statement that any industry slowdown was "by management's choice not because of negotiations or the expiration of our agreement."

The alliance has also taken out ads in today's issues of the Hollywood trade papers Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter declaring that a strike would be "harmful and unnecessary."

SAG's contract talks, which began in April, have bogged down on some of the same issues that led Hollywood writers to walk off the job months ago, including disagreements over how union talent should be paid for work created for the Internet.

Second front

SAG is also waging an offensive on a second front, against its small sister union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.