Screen Actors Guild
By James Decker
If a robot showed up in your office chair one day would you respond
with shock, dismay, perhaps violence toward the thing? Or would you
take it under your wing, show it the ropes, seize the opportunity
to declare yourself its designer and creator also. Would you be cool
headed enough to treat the tool as a tool? For the labor union known
as the Screen Actors Guild, the sight of Jurassic Park and Toy Story
with heels resting high on what should have been Sylvester Stallone's
desk must have prompted at least some shock. But as Wired magazine
rushed to mangle the English lexicon with words like synthespian
and vactor as they hailed the new revolution of actorless feature
films, the Screen Actors Guild responded with the grace of Gene Kelly.
Not only will professional actors and dancers be indispensable to
Hollywood's three-dimensional rendering and animation units, the guild
recognized right away that this was their cue to enter the new economy.
As Jar-Jar Binks learned to walk, the Screen Actors Guild ran ahead
to define new pricing models for production, distribution, and residual
payments for redistribution. Standard contracts for actors on digital
sets have not yet been settled, and until the novelty of Jurassic
Park 3 has worn off and iTV rises from the swamp perhaps the guild
does not want a settled contract just yet. This is not the first time
SAG has had to react to the new rules that accompany new media. In
1945 the FCC licensed TV airwaves and Pan-Am began to show in-flight
movies. Several years later the guild staged its first strike. The
issue was per-use payments and the strike resulted in the first contract
where residual payments were made to actors for reruns. In the mid-sixties
the guild acknowledged the need for separate pricing schemes for low-budget
independent film productions. And by the early seventies the guild
had turned its attention to the lack of roles for minority actors
who suffered unequal pay, underemployment, and consistently negative
roles. Sexual harassment and child labor laws would also become core
issues for SAG. See http://www.sag.org/sagstory.html
for a useful timeline, and pure optimism regarding digital acting
http://www.sag.org/dgtlacting.html.
The guild's 1987 strike to demand minimum session fees and extra
pay for extra voices on production of animated features may seem like
the most important precedent for the era of digital film production.
But, the guild's early commitment to equity issues, political causes,
and expectations that programming should represent, and thereby employ,
minorities may prove the more significant precedents. By focusing
their influence and collective bargaining power on humanist issues,
the Screen Actors Guild assures the entertainment industry that they
will not be distracted by the emergence of new production methods.
Whether animators and engineers should cooperate or belong to SAG
is an important and unresolved issue. As the kind of work they do
becomes more commonplace, the issue will become more salient. Setting
aside for the moment the larger issues of globalization and the recent
film production exodus into Canada during the most recent SAG strike,
labor strikes in the entertainment industry can work wonders to avoid
more serious conflicts and abuses of new production efficiencies.
Tiger Woods needs to be on board, however. After all, purely market
driven entertainment not only stifles innovation, it misses opportunities
to cultivate new markets by recognizing the varied talents of women,
ethnic minorities, physically and mentally disabled performers, and…
well, just where would this year's Fall line-up be without queer content?
There is one more possibility that bears mentioning here. As mathematics
and science provide increasingly powerful tools to the entertainment
where those tools find both funding and rigorous use, the potential
for content to explore and promote new representations of human mental
and physical potential is truly exciting. Science really does begin
to see the boundaries where it can meet the Arts. Lo and behold, the
two disciplines are finding something to talk about after all. Not
only can we expect narrative conventions to change in the coming years,
the opportunities of user participation in entertainment and educational
programming will necessitate content that explores a variety of human
experiences and cultures. Down the road, characters may accompany
us beyond the borders of the stories and settings where we meet them.
Mentors, authors, experts, artists, henchmen, it may be that individual
persona are the only content that can sustain interest in immersive
media. Warhol's predictions of fifteen-minute fame may actually promise
more than Jerry Springer.