Actors and Producers Reach Tentative Pact : Delay of Fall TV Season Apparently Averted; Three-Year Agreement Still Must Be Ratified

Negotiators for two major actors’ unions and producers reached a tentative contract agreement early Saturday, apparently averting a strike that could have delayed the start of the fall television season.

The agreement on a three-year contract--which includes a 10% pay increase and no major changes on the sticky issue of residual payments--still must be ratified by the 92,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). And after a hectic week of negotiations culminating in the early morning announcement, neither side claimed a major victory.

“We met the Chicago Bears in the Super Bowl and we won 3-0. I’m pleased,” said Frank Maxwell, president of AFTRA. “Anytime you don’t get clobbered by management, you win,” the veteran actor added as he entered a special meeting of the joint board of the two unions Saturday afternoon to ratify the agreement the negotiators had finally hammered out at 2 a.m.

An Arduous Process

A member of the industry negotiating team who spoke on the condition that he not be identified said the negotiations turned out reasonably well. “On a 10 scale, I’d say it was a 5,” he said, calling the talks “tiring, arduous and painful.”

Officially, Carol Akiyama, senior vice president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, said “the alliance is pleased with the tentative package,” but she would not comment on details of the agreement.

Union officials disclosed that the actors’ minimum pay of $361 a day will immediately be increased by 5% and go up another 5% on Jan. 1, 1988. This is slightly more than the 9% the producers originally offered, but considerably less than the 22% the unions had been seeking.

More importantly, Maxwell said the unions fought off several demands of the producers that would have changed the complicated formulas used to determine the size of residuals, the extra pay performers receive for reruns of filmed or taped material.

Four separate matters involving residuals were among the most critical issues in the negotiations.

The unions conceded a key point to the producers--the formula used to calculate residual payments from the sale of videocassettes, an increasingly lucrative market.

Currently, actors get 3.6% of the producers’ gross receipts on cassette sales. The unions were seeking the same percentage of the distributors’ gross receipts, a considerably larger amount.

The producers prevailed on this issue in the same fashion that they had in 1984 and 1985 negotiations with with the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America. The actors agreed to a lump sum payment of $3 million and to accept an increase in their share of the producers’ gross on cassette sales. They will get 4.5% on the first $1 million of sales and 5.4% on sales thereafter.

Last year, domestic sales of videocassettes totaled $1.5 billion and this is expected to grow in coming years.

‘Pay Per View’ Issue

The producers agreed to drop a proposal that would have freed them from paying residuals for “pay per view” showings of movies within the first year of their release in a theater. This means, for example, that if in the next year there were a special showing of “Aliens” on television that viewers had to pay an extra fee for, there would be residual payments to actors.

Thus far, the “pay per view” market has been limited, but the actors feel it could become very lucrative in the future.

The actors agreed to modify the way residuals are paid on some television shows that are rerun in syndication, meaning either on a non-network station or on a network after 11:30 p.m. The producers had asserted that they have been unable to syndicate some of these shows because they were priced out of the market by high residual payments.

An industry source said he believes that the change will stimulate the syndication market and that both the producers and the actors will benefit as a result.

Some Points Lost

Maxwell and other union leaders readily acknowledged that they did not get everything they wanted. In particular, Maxwell said the actors failed to increase pay rates for guest stars on series television shows, which have topped out at $2,500 for several years.

Mark Locher, public relations director of SAG, said the unions had won improvements in health and pension benefits and “on a number of non-economic issues,” including affirmative-action hiring, safety procedures for stunt people and the use of child actors. For example, stunt men will have the right to test equipment in advance of shooting.

He said that production companies working under SAG and AFTRA’s jurisdiction no longer would be able to escape the strict child labor laws of California by making films in other states. The California restrictions, he said, would now be part of all SAG and AFTRA agreements throughout the country.

Locher said that concern for the safety of child actors had increased considerably since the 1983 accident in which two Vietnamese children and veteran actor Vic Morrow were killed in the filming of the movie, “The Twilight Zone.” A jury is currently being selected in Los Angeles Superior Court for a criminal trial stemming from that tragedy.

The industry source said that Patty Duke, president of SAG, played “a very dominant role on the minors issue.”

Through a spokesman, Duke said she was not thrilled with the contract. “To say that I am totally happy with this would be a falsehood, but I understand the realities we’re facing. We’re holding our own now and determined to do even better in the future,” she said.

Balloting by Mail

The agreement, approved by the joint union board by a vote of 42 to 10, next goes to New York union leaders Monday and a mail ballot of all union members, which should be concluded in three weeks.

The settlement came at the end of the fifth negotiating session of the week and the third consecutive round of talks that went past midnight. The two sides had resumed bargaining Monday afternoon after a hiatus of nearly a month.

Talks started May 27 and were broken off July 2. More than 30,000 of the performers returned mail ballots and 87% of them voted to authorize the unions’ executive boards to call a strike if necessary.

Duke and Maxwell maintained throughout the negotiations that they wanted to avoid a strike, mindful of the fact that when the actors staged a 10-week walkout in 1980 it cost them millions of dollars in lost wages. That strike reportedly cost the industry $40 million.

This concern also was reflected by actress Beverly Garland, a member of the SAG negotiating team, as she entered Saturday’s board meeting. “This is not the climate in which to strike,” she said, referring to the troubled era organized labor is undergoing. “There is no issue here that’s so incredibly big we can afford to walk out.”

Of the 92,000 union members, only about 15% make a full-time living acting.