Actors as Activists

...Cable and VCRs have cut job opportunities for screen actors even more drastically than did television...

...The only answer to SAG'S factional crisis, in Prindle's judgment, lies in support by both sides of a merger with AFTRA, the union closest to it in identity of collective bargaining interests...

...The superstars and other elected officers serve the 60,000-member union without salary, devoting endless hours to labor activity and more to internal feuding, fully aware that the probable result will be involvement in controversies damaging to their highly perishable status as popular favorites...

...Charlton Heston, who had stepped down in 1971 after six years as SAG president, roared back into angTy activity in opposition to the Asner policies...

...The progressives have made such a merger the keystone of their current program, but the conservatives have given the plan half-hearted backing or none at all...

...The bitterness was a principal factor in the riot of democracy that erupted in 1981 when the progressives, led by Edward Asner, swept into control after a decade of seesaw conflict between the two factions...

...The author feels that hurdle could be overcome if the progressives entered into a compact with the conservatives under which they promised to stop making SAG the "moral den mother of the world...

...The history of the guild began to take on a radically different cast during the Red scares that stunned the film world in the '40s and '50s...

...Prindle warns of disintegration if the internecine struggle goes on, a warning that gains plausibility from the intractability of many of the problems that have already gnawed away much of SAG'S strength and worsened the astonishingly high rate of joblessness and insecurity among its members...

...Again the screen actors' leadership made a backdoor deal, doublecrossing Leftist insurgents who were fighting for mastery of thestagehands.Thequid pro quo was a permanent guarantee by the stagehands of respect for SAG'S jurisdiction over actors...

...These attacks wound up adding scores of prominent names to the industry's blacklist and left a legacy of factional division that continues to poison relations within the guild...

...Raskin Former chief Labor correspondent, New York "Times" Entrenched bureaucracy may account for much of the somnolence that enshrouds most American unions, but no such explanation can account for the very special difficulties besetting the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), a union in danger of self-extinction through a surfeit of democracy...

...Less than 1 per cent of SAG'S budget now goes to controversial causes, he notes, yet the conflict over them has blinded both sides to what is really important...

...The guild is the only labor group ever to see one of its former presidents installed as the President of the United States...

...in a suit against the American Federation of Television and Radio Actors (AFTRA) has made SAG vulnerable to mass defections by actors who oppose compulsory membership, and to the limitation of dues collections from those who want the union to stay out of political and social entanglements...

...And it is not about to roll over today at the command of the film producers or the television networks...

...Eddie Cantor, a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, accepted the guild presidency, and Robert Montgomery, Fredric March and Adolphe Menjou signed on as vice presidents...

...The plaudits the committee showered on the SAG establishment contrasted with the humiliation it had in store for the so-called "Hollywood Ten," hostile witnesses who were dragged from the witness stand in screaming rage, cited for contempt of Congress, blacklisted by the industry, and in most instances eventually jailed following years of vain efforts to win vindication in the courts...

...Bioff's goal was to fold all the organizations representing writers, directors and performers into the stagehands' union...

...In this thoughtful and remarkably objective study, David F. Prindle, an associate professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, provides illuminating insights into the complex crosspulls of economics and personality that helped to shape SAG...

...It fought the entertainment industry to a standstill on the issue of residual payments for TV reruns of old films, gaining members more than a billion dollars in supplemental income last year...

...Faced with the prospect of a disastrous strike, negotiators for the producers called four top SAG leaders to Louis B. Mayer's beach house, with Bioff present, and offered them union recognition in exchange for an understanding that SAG would not team up with the craft coalition...

...The fervor that continues to animate those on both sides of SAG'S ideological barricades is of particular interest not only because it contrasts so vividly with the apathy general in other unions but also because many mainstays of the organization have from the start questioned whether it should really be a union at all...

...Many superstars who were once the biggest guns in SAG'S arsenal in confrontations with the producers are now employers in their own right as heads of the independent producing companies they own...

...Even while the United States and the Soviet Union were allies against the Axis powers, Right-wingers in SAG felt called upon to counter what they saw as an attempt by the Kremlin to turn the film capital into a vehicle for brainwashing the American public...

...Their clout resulted in swift modification of the code along lines more favorable to the actors, although the guild still had fewer than 100 official members...

...Heston and other conservatives have publicly campaigned for the enactment of state right-to-work laws prohibiting any form of mandatory union membership...

...A workable accord, coupled with the establishment of regular unes of internal communication to keep the détente in place, is the price of survival for the screen actors...

...His efforts touched off what the trade press dubbed"Star Wars," in which many of Hollywood's biggest luminaries exchanged insults on a round-the-clock basis...

...It took four more years of conflict, however, before the moviemakers would grant SAG recognition as bargaining agent for the players, and that victory would not have come if the infant union had not entered into a cynical deal with some of the seamier elements in Hollywood labor...

...A coalition of building trades unions, under Left-wing leadership, was seeking to break the blue-collar monopoly in the studios of racketeer Willie Bioff, then West Coast chief of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees...

...Their acceptance doomed the revolt against the Bioff dictatorship...

...When Robert Montgomery and the other SAG leaders told him to get lost, their car tires were slashed, death threats rained down on them, and they were warned that acid would be thrown into their children's faces...

...A big part of their holdback, Prindle believes, stems from fear that the pooled organization will be more committed than the present SAG leaders to labor and Leftist causes...

...When the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities turned its spotlight on Communist infiltration in Hollywood shortly after V-J Day, Ronald Reagan had already made his personal pilgrimage from the Left side of the union spectrum to the Right...

...Not surprisingly, that estimable character promptly started exercising his reinforced muscle to push the screen actors around...

...This ushered in an era of fingerpointing attacks on actors, writers and directors, many of them with only the most tangential ties to Communist front organizations, by such professional Red-baiters as the editors oîRed Channels and Counterattack...

...Patty Duke, an Emmy and Oscar winner who succeeded Asner when he decided not to run again in 1985, has tried hard to still the hostilities, but her own identification with the progressive wing and a never-ending series of new friction points have made genuine reconciliation impossible...

...It is a caution the warriors would do well to heed...

...The Screen Actors Guild got its start in 1933 after the movie moguls cut actors' pay 25-50 per cent at the dawn of the New Deal era...

...A Supreme Court victory won by William F. Buckley Jr...

...What got the actors even madder was the drafting by the producers of a National Recovery Administration code aimed at stabilizing the near-bankrupt industry that would have created a system of modified slavery for the performers...

...Superstars, accustomed to annual earnings in the megamillion range, have been the prime activists in pushing up minimum scales for actors at the bottom of the pyramid, 85 per cent of whom are out of work most of the time...

...The new majority lost no time in outraging the Right-wingers by making a $5,000 gift to the 11,500 professional air traffic controllers fired by President Reagan for their illegal strike...

...That was quickly followed by the board's revocation of the honor its awards committee had approved for Reagan, and by Asner's participation with other wellknown actors in the presentation of $25,000 for medical aid to the El Salvador guerrillas...

...Yet when its awards committee decided in 1981 that Ronald Reagan ought to receive the organization's annual Lifetime Achievement Award for "fostering the finest ideals of the acting profession," the elected executive board took the unprecedented action of canceling the decision after a stormy clash between the union's warring progressive and conservative factions...

...It achieved great power in a world of makebelieve where many of the key weavers of dreams and manipulators of the power levers were temperamental, narcissistic exhibitionists...

...In 1941 Bioff went to jail for extortion and ceased to be a problem, but SAG still had to fight to keep from being swallowed up by the stagehands' union, a much more powerful organization in the politics of the American Federation of Labor...

...The view of these conservatives has been that SAG should concentrate on the craft needs of professional actors and give far less attention than it does to the welfare of unskilled screen extras, to expressions of solidarity with the larger labor movement, and to support of social causes ranging from nuclear disarmament to aid for Leftist guerrillas in Central America...

...Otherwise," Prindle warns, "this book, instead of being an analysis of politics in the Screen Actors Guild, may become its epitaph...

...He and other conservatives, then solidly in control, had no difficulty convincing the Congressional probers that the guild had successfully thwarted Moscow's designs...