This semester we had the privilege of speaking with former Screen Actors Guild President (1995-1999) Richard Masur. Our conversation touched on a wide range of topics including the history of Hollywood unions, working conditions in the motion picture and television industries, intellectual property and digital theft, the erosion of union protections, and the global dimension of labor economics in the entertainment industry. We really enjoyed this discussion and were very pleased to have the opportunity to engage with an institution as distinguished as Screen Actors Guild. Below is a transcript of the proceedings in their entirety. Many thanks to Richard Masur and Nancy Fox of Screen Actors Guild for taking the time to speak with us.

Interview with Richard Masur

Interviewer:       Brett Caraway

Interviewee:      Richard Masur

Date:                  April 20, 2011

Brett: Today we are really excited about having Richard Masur join us. He has been an actor in television and motion pictures all the way back to the 1970s, a very prolific television and motion picture actor. I have a long list of things to say about your performances. You’ve been featured in All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H, Hawaii Five-O, Happy Days, One Day at a Time…

Richard: Brett you don’t have to do this for me and I’m sure every single one of them can access IMDB and they can do it for themselves.

Brett: The one thing I do have to pay some homage to is that he was in The Thing, which as I’ve told you all is one of my favorite movies of all time.

Richard: Well I’m glad you enjoyed it. (laughter)

Brett: For those of you who don’t know he’s also a two-term President of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). He’s currently, and correct me if I’m wrong, a national board member and he’s chairing the Screen Actors Guild National Legislative Committee. The other person who’s on the line with us today is Nancy Fox and she’s the Screen Actors Guild National Director of Government Relations and Policy which is charged with overseeing the Screen Actors Guild’s legislative work and government relations. And so you all know who you are talking to, this is a class called Introduction to Digital Media. We are in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. So there are quite a few aspiring filmmakers in the room today. And so right off the bat and for the benefit of those students who may only have a passing familiarity with the Screen Actors Guild can I get you to tell us a little about the Screen Actors Guild, who it represents, and what its mission is?

Richard: Okay sure. First of all Brett could you be our eyes and ears and let me ask how many people have heard of the Screen Actors Guild in the room?

Brett: A show of hands. A vast majority. Probably almost a hundred percent.

Richard: Okay and a second question, are you aware of Screen Actors Guild because of Screen Actors Guild Awards or some other reason? If it’s the awards put your hands up.

Brett: About half, maybe a little over half.

Richard: Okay and some other reason is the rest of the people. Right?

Brett: Looks like it.

Richard: Okay great. It’s very gratifying and I’ll tell you why because I was on the board when we began the Screen Actors Guild Awards and we hoped that one of the things we would accomplish was to raise awareness of the existence of the guild and what it does in the industry. So I’ll tell you very quickly. We were formed in the middle of the big explosion of union forming in the 1930s. We were formed because it really was a feudal society at that point in Hollywood. The studio heads were despots, sometimes relatively benevolent despots, but still despots. They made all the decisions. In the 1930s contracts were made with actors, directors, and writers that were lifetime contracts. And here’s a little interesting tidbit: it wasn’t until during the Second World War that a women named Olivia de Havilland went to court and broke her contract with I believe it was MGM on the basis of the fact that a contract in excess of seven years for personal services constituted slavery under British common law and as a result any contract for personal services in excess of seven years was illegal under our Constitution. And she prevailed and because of that a whole lot of these lifetime contracts suddenly terminated—several of them for men who were actors serving in the Second World War and came home and got to renegotiate their contracts for the first time in their careers. So a little interesting point is that Screen Actors Guild was extremely involved in the de Havilland suit [and] very helpful to her. The reason we were formed initially was really about working conditions more than anything else—much less wages and much more working conditions. They wanted to have something approximating human-length workdays. Commonly workdays went 16 to 18 hours in a row. Very famous stars would operate on four or five hours sleep. It was very common. Ginger Rogers when she was shooting the films with Fred Astaire commonly slept on a cot on the soundstage after everyone had gone home because she could get more sleep by staying there and sleeping on the cot than if she had to go home and come back. She had so little time to rest that she did that. And she was one of the early adopters of Screen Actors Guild as a result. And what we’ve done since then is we started out in the motion picture industry and we very slowly, too slowly some of us thought, moved into television. We have also now, of course, moved into all other forms of media that involve scripted programming, dramatic programming. And when I say dramatic I don’t mean drama, I mean anything that isn’t what’s laughingly referred to as reality programming. That’s who we represent. We have 125,000 members nationally. We represent actors. We represent singers, stunt performers, [and] puppeteers. We represent  background actors who were referred to in the past as extras. We represent dancers and here’s an interesting little tidbit: we also represent aircraft pilots working on film productions. And if anybody is interested in that I can expand on that later.

Brett: Besides the Screen Actors Guild what are the other guilds that would be affiliated with you all? I know AFTRA is one.

Richard: Right. There are three, well actually there are several unions that represent performers. The Screen Actors Guild started in Hollywood. The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists started in radio and were originally called AFRA, the American Federation of Radio Artists, and strangely they started with dramatic scripted programming. They—the original people who organized AFRA— were actors. Not long thereafter, broadcasters, newscasters, and then disc jockeys and others who were announcers on radio started trying to get involved with AFRA. And AFRA started organizing in a very traditional union organizing model which was to say on a shop by shop basis. They would organize individual stations and the people who work in those stations. Screen Actors Guild, on the other hand, organized industry wide. We’ve always had contracts with the major studios and as time went along we were also able to suck up a lot of the independent filmmaking community as well. That was a pejorative term—suck up—but I didn’t mean it that way. We had been able to convince independent filmmakers that it’s to their advantage to work with Screen Actors Guild. Now the way Screen Actors Guild is organized over the years is we’ve basically said look we have the people you want to work with and if you want to work with them then you can only work with them by coming in and signing our contract. And that has been very very effective for us for many years. AFTRA, on the other hand, [moved] into television in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Weirdly, all of these things happened, this strange nexus of unions came together around television at that time. Actors Equity Association, which is commonly referred to as Equity, was the original acting union in this country. Originally they represented the New York Broadway theater actors. Over time they expanded into representing people all over the country but always theater. There are a couple of smaller unions, AGVA which is the American Guild of Variety Artists and they represented burlesque and vaudeville players back in the day and now they represent Vegas shows and things like that. They are what one would have to refer to as a somewhat dwindling union. Another one, AGMA, the American Guild of Musical Artists, represents opera singers primarily and maybe ballet dancers as well. There’s the Italian Actors Guild and the Jewish Actors Guild and a few other extremely tiny little groups but basically that’s the full spectrum. And we all came together around the beginnings of television because initially Actors Equity, because television was all broadcast live. Dramatic programming was basically live productions that were being broadcast directly to people’s homes. Equity took the position that it was actually live theater and the fact that it was being broadcast was not the most important thing. AFRA took the position that it was basically identical to radio only it also involved pictures and that they were the appropriate organization to represent folks. And at that point, early on, Screen Actors Guild went go with god we represent movies and this is a silly little novelty item we’re not interested in. So Screen Actors Guild was not incredibly forward thinking at that moment in time. But shortly thereafter the TV stations quickly realized it was very expensive to keep producing all of this original programming so they started hunting around for stuff that they could fill time with and they realized there were these huge libraries of film sitting in vaults just waiting to be rented. What they started with interestingly was serialized films which some of us older people grew up with. Things like the Our Gang comedies which were one or two reelers which is to say ten minutes or twenty minutes long. They became the kind of daytime staple programming for kids—the Our Gang comedies, The Bowery Boys, things like that. Then a huge bunch of western serials went on television. The Roy Rogers stuff started out as serialized film; The Red Rider was a serialized film; some other stuff like Buck Rogers—these little short one reelers that were shown on Saturday afternoons in the movie theater before the feature. Television scooped all this material up and started putting it on. It turned out that nobody realized that they didn’t have the right to use a lot of this material without paying for it, paying the actors anyway, because in our contracts we had granted them the rights for theatrical distribution in the old contracts but they had no rights for redistribution in this other way. And all of a sudden there was an income stream that developed of residual payments that we insisted be paid to these folks. Then as other movies came out of the vaults and were shown there were whole TV shows in lots of stations around the country that were dedicated to showing nothing but old movies, like two hour blocks of time which would show movies on a daily basis. The one in New York was called the Million Dollar Movie. It was on every day, twice a day. You could watch movies on television that were old movies. A lot of us grew up on those black and white [movies]. Some of them were fairly cheesy films but a lot of us grew up on that stuff. Then as that started going on Screen Actors Guild realized more and more they had to get involved in this medium. And then they started directly producing for television the same kind of material they had made for the serials in film. I mean identical kinds of material. These little quick hit one and two reelers which then they would patch together. The early Disney programming involved a lot of these ten minute films that ended up becoming their own little spin-off series. There was a show called Spin and Marty which would come on the Mickey Mouse Club which turned into its own show. There was a show called Davy Crockett which started out as one reelers on Walt Disney Presents and then turned into its own series. So all of that stuff started happening and because it was all and because it was all shot on film Screen Actors Guild claimed jurisdiction over that because we clearly owned anything that was recorded on film. That was our jurisdiction. And AFTRA only had jurisdiction over stuff that was direct broadcast from a live performance. And all of that was fine until a thing called video tape started coming along where they would delay the broadcast. Once that happened all of a sudden AFTRA claimed jurisdiction over this recorded programming and we said absolutely not. We and we alone have jurisdiction over this recorded programming. Equity had bowed out years before because they realized they were going nowhere with this. And we ended up in quite a battle over this which was eventually settled by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) [which] helped us adjudicate this. It was decided that we would divvy up the jurisdiction in the following way: anything that was shot on film for television belonged to Screen Actors Guild; anything that was live broadcast belonged to AFTRA; and anything that was shot on tape the jurisdiction was open but we made an agreement that it would fall to the union which had jurisdiction over the site at which the production was recorded. And since the recording of this kind of material involved enormous cameras with enormous tape decks and super-cooled rooms to keep the tape decks from overheating, you needed dedicated facilities to do this—all of which were in AFTRA broadcast facilities. So virtually all of that tape work went to AFTRA for many years. As the equipment got smaller [and] became more portable they realized that they could start shooting video tape on a film lot relatively inexpensively and easily. That’s what really busted open the jurisdiction between us and AFTRA which [was] late 1960s early 1970s and it’s been fairly chaotic ever since. Okay I hope that answers the question.

Brett: I am just sitting here thinking I wished I had called you a couple of semesters ago which I was teaching a history of Hollywood (laughter).

Richard: Well you can call me anytime about this stuff Brett. We’re happy to talk to folks. We’re really interested in having contact with people who are aiming to be in this business both as actors but also as producers and directors because the future of this industry, we believe very strongly, is going to be determined by the talented people that are coming up right now. And many of them are coming up with no consciousness of the fact that we are the most intensely organized union industry in the entire economy. The entertainment— and specifically the film and television industry—remains the most intensely organized of any industry. We want to keep it that way and the reason that we want to is because not only is it good for our members but we firmly believe that it makes for a better product because it allows a talent pool of real professionals to stay dedicated to working as professionals in the industry. If these union contracts were to be sufficiently eroded, and they have been eroded over recent years, we’re all very nervous about this becoming much more of a hobbyist industry. We refer to it as the YouTube-ization of this industry. Insofar as that brings creativity and new thinking in, that’s great. But insofar as it amateurizes the industry and the product that is definitely going to negatively impact not only the quality of the product in our opinion, but also our position in the global economy. Because right now our industry has the second largest positive balance of trade of any industry in the U.S. economy, second only to the aircraft industry. In other words, we export far, far more than we import in terms of entertainment in this country and bring in billions and billions of dollars into our economy as a result. We are one of the only industries that can make that statement. We believe that one of the reasons that continues to be the truth is because of…and I think frankly our employers as much as they aren’t particularly happy about it, I think also understand that keeping this industry professional is vital to their maintaining the kind of footprint they have in the global market for entertainment.

Brett: On that note, let me open it up. Is there anybody here who has a question before I hijack this conversation? Yes?

Student: I was wondering about…we’re talking about decent working hours and stuff like that, but how specific can you get? How specific can SAG get with actors who have problems on the set with their directors or producers? I saw a video recently of Lily Tomlin and David O Russell and that seemed like a lawsuit waiting to happen. How involved are you [at] that level?

Richard: I don’t know what you mean about the video with Lily Tomlin but we do not involve ourselves in rules about how professionals interact with each other except in terms of hours, in terms of working conditions, which is to say rest periods [and] things like that. And also the necessity for feeding people which used to be completely optional before the advent of these unions. In terms of, if you are describing a situation where say one actor is say acting inappropriately with another actor, we do have a grievance system within the union where one member can proffer charges against another for unprofessional behavior or, for example, for sexual harassment just like any other professional organization would have. In terms of a director or producer being abusive to an actor, if that abuse is along the lines of the issues that are covered in our contract that’s something the union would absolutely get involved in and in a very immediate way. If on the other hand it’s somebody being emotionally challenging with someone else we really don’t get into that. Can you give me a little more information about the Lily Tomlin thing?

Student: Well it was a really hostile frustration happening between [Lily Tomlin and] the director and he was throwing things across the room and getting in her face, screaming and cussing in her face, it was really abusive. I just couldn’t believe that that could actually take place and she’d still finish the movie.

Richard: Well you should know that stuff like that happens sometimes and this is why you want to keep this a professional relationship. Someone will intervene usually whether it’s the producer, the assistant director who has a lot of authority on the set and is actually responsible for shutting down that kind of behavior. The truth is on a grown-up film set there are different people on each set, there are different fields of flux, and there are different power gradients. And it varies tremendously from one situation to another. So back twenty years ago or fifteen years ago Lily Tomlin would have had an enormous amount of power in that situation and she easily, I don’t know if this is something she would have done because she’s a highly professional person in my experience, but she easily could have turned on her heel and said tell this guy to get his shit together or I’m out of here and I’m getting in my car and going home. Now she’s at a different part of her career and David O Russell probably has more clout than she does just at this moment in time and that option might not be available to her right now. As I said, if it comes under the heading of harassment we will absolutely intervene in a situation like that. Any kind of physical danger, the actor has the absolute right to refuse to go on a set if for any reason they feel there is some kind of physical danger. That can have to do with the way the shot is set up, what the scene calls for, or frankly the behavior of other people including other actors. I was on a set once working on a movie for television where they were asking us to line up to do the blocking on a scene between two of us where I’m supposed to throw punches at an actor named Jeff DeMunn who is half my size and a great actor. But I said I don’t want to do this without a stunt coordinator being here. And there was no stunt coordinator there. Because I know how to throw a punch but I don’t know if Jeff knows how to take a punch and I don’t want to do this unless there’s a professional observing what’s going on. And they said well just for the camera, just to line it up, just do it really safe. And as slow motion as we could I swept my hand past him and he leaned forward and I didn’t hit him but I knocked his glasses off. I said that’s it. I’m done. When the stunt coordinator gets here give me a call. Now they had not hired a stunt coordinator to be there on that day because they didn’t think that warranted it. I said I’m not doing this unless there is a stunt coordinator on the set and goes through this action with us. And that is every actor’s right under a Screen Actors Guild contract to say no this is inappropriate. I won’t do it. Again, I had a certain amount of position on that particular film. If I was a day player and I had come in and said I wasn’t going to do it there’s every possibility they would have pulled somebody else out and said you step in. You’re not doing this. We’ll pay you but you’re not going to be doing this role now because we want to get this done right now. So it varies but every member of the Screen Actors Guild has the right to not put themselves in danger positions. Did that answer your question?

Student: Yes thank you.

Richard: Okay.

Brett: I’ve got a question submitted by a student here. One of the things that I find interesting about the Screen Actors Guild is you are one of the few labor organizations that has a real focus on intellectual property law. So I’d like for you to maybe expand on the Screen Actors Guild and their position on intellectual property but the actual student question is getting at whether or not the Screen Actors Guild interacts or coordinates with performance rights organizations like ASCAP or BMI. So I’ll just throw all of that at you at once and see what you can do with it.

Richard: Actually as I understand it ASCAP and BMI are less performer rights than they are author rights organizations though there are definitely performer rights elements to what they do. We have a different situation. Remember that I was talking about the reuse of film on television, that beginning of that process of what now has come to be called supplemental markets. In other words, markets which were not the original market for which the product was made. Since the advent of that in the 1950s on television started we have been involved in intellectual property issues de facto because our residual structures frankly are based, many of them are based on producer’s gross, which is a complicated formula, determines what the amount of money flowing to the people who have employed us initially, from which we and the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, and AFTRA, depending on what the project is, we all derive some kind of income based on that producer’s gross. Therefore, anything that impacts that producer’s gross impacts our ability to continue to make money on these products through supplemental use. As digital theft has increased—and I want to have a little moment here to discuss briefly the term piracy. We don’t call this piracy anymore in our industry because everybody thinks it’s cool when it’s called piracy. They think pirates are cool. They think pirating stuff is cool [when] really [it’s] theft. So we don’t call it piracy anymore and insofar as this group of 40 people goes out and explains that to their friends that anything which you take down off of the Internet which you have not paid for but is something that has a copyright attached to it, you have stolen. You haven’t pirated it, you haven’t downloaded it, you’ve stolen it. And when you steal it you’re stealing work of the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, AFTRA, even the stage hands [the IATSE] because all of us count on this income stream. It used to be back in the day in Screen Actors Guild one hundred percent of our income was derived from the initial work that we did in which we granted rights to the producers to exploit the product in perpetuity in any movie theater they chose. Once these supplemental markets started growing up—broadcast television first, then videocassettes, then cable television, then DVDs, then direct downloads—once these supplemental markets started arising the percentage of our income that we derive from the initial compensation and our employers derive from the initial exhibition in movie theaters or on television, these percentages started shifting dramatically. Now 45 percent of all the income that our members derive from their work comes through these supplemental uses. Every single one of these supplemental uses is involved in intellectual property. That’s why we are involved in intellectual property rights because if our employers are getting ripped off because their stuff is getting stolen and they’re not being paid appropriate rental fees or license fees or percentages based on sales for the product they own then they can’t distribute to us what we have coming to us. And that kills them, it kills us. And as I said, we’ll eventually de-professionalize this industry. So that’s what our involvement is in intellectual property rights. Does that answer your question Brett?

Brett: Yes it did. Does anyone else have a question?

Student: What kind of requirements are there to be a part of the Screen Actors Guild? You said you receive those kinds of benefits so do you have some sort of payment?

Richard: Well first of all [here is a] very quick little course in U.S. labor which I understand Brett is particularly interested in and knows this already but just very quickly. Under laws which exist in this country, some of which were legislated and some of which were determined by court precedent, no one can be required to join Screen Actors Guild period. What we can require people to do in many states, not actually in the state in which you are sitting, not in Texas where you have what we like to refer to as a right to work for less law, which is basically a law written by people who frankly don’t understand that the vaunted beautiful days of the 1950s and 1960s which many “fiscal conservatives” yearn to return to was based almost entirely on organized labor. What created the middle class in this country was not small business. What created the middle class in this country was labor unions that sprung up in the 1930s which is why by the 1950s and 1960s we had a huge and prosperous middle class of working Americans. We no longer have that because we systematically have had legislation passed to weaken labor unions around the country. That’s a little bit political but unfortunately or fortunately this is a political issue and has been on both sides. The people who control the means of production always want to keep the proceeds of that production away from the people who actually produce the goods. As you get out into the world and stop being in school you will find that painfully true. Those of us who’ve been out here for a while know that to be true. Anyway, I think I’ve talked myself away from remembering what the original question was.

Brett: Steven correct me if I’m wrong, like your membership requirements?

Richard: Oh right sorry. So we can’t actually require that anybody join. What we can require in almost all states is that they pay, not in right to work for less states as I said, but we can require that someone who has worked more than once in a thirty day period pay the fees associated with membership. They don’t actually have to join but they have to at least pay those fees. In Texas, in Arizona, in North Carolina, in many places in the south actually that are all right to work for less states, we can’t even require that. So we have many people who work under our contracts and who benefit from our contracts who are not members of Screen Actors Guild, but not only are they not members, they don’t provide any support to Screen Actors Guild. Yet under the law we must protect them under our contract identically as if they were members. So if something happens where they have a grievance or they feel they’ve been under paid, we have to file a claim against the employer for them just like we have to file for a member. We have to make every effort to collect that claim, including the very expensive process of going to arbitration on behalf of these nonmembers. Now I mentioned earlier that piracy was not cool because it was actually theft, this in my opinion and in the opinion of many of us is also theft because the people in these right to work for less states who are working under Screen Actors Guild agreements and choosing not to pay to help support the organization that is taking care of them, that is supporting them, that is providing them, I mean every residual that comes in for a nonmember has to be processed at about $2.30 per check and sent to that nonmember identically to the way it’s done for a member. In my opinion that’s not fair that people get to do that but under U.S. law that is the case. Whether you are a member or not we provide all these protections in the workplace and we provide also other services like processing residuals etcetera. What also happens is if you earn enough to qualify for our pension and health plan you also will qualify whether or not you are a member. You do not have to be a member of this organization to qualify for the pension and health plan. And here is a really interesting little tidbit. The question has been raised in the past why don’t we just tell the employers not to make their contribution on behalf of nonmembers so that the plans won’t have to cover them? Because the reason the plans have to cover them is because insofar as employers make a sufficient number of contributions to the plans then they have to be treated exactly the same way as members do and if they have a sufficient number of contributions made then they have to be covered. So the question is if we were in fact to tell our employers, which we could, that we wanted them not to pay into the pension and health plan when they employ nonmembers they would happily agree to that but we would give a competitive advantage to every nonunion person who tries to work under a Screen Actors Guild agreement, especially nonunion people trying to work under a guild agreement in a right to work for less state. But more directly to what you asked me which is how do you join? Is that what you were asking? How do you join the guild?

Student: Yes.

Richard: I’m sorry I completely missed it. For many, many years there was one way to join and that was by getting a days work under a principal contract. A principal contract in commercials—which we represent performers in commercials, TV and theatrical, or in non-broadcast corporate films—if you get a day of principal work which is defined differently in each of the contracts but basically it’s for the purposes of this conversation it’s a speaking role. If you get a speaking role then you are qualified to join. If you get two speaking roles after 30 days has elapsed you become what’s called a must pay and in order to work, if you’re not in a right to work for less state, in order to work under a contract you must at least pay your fees if not join. But in 1992 we took on the jurisdiction of background actors in Hollywood—that’s a very long story which I won’t go in to; we used to represent them, then we didn’t, now we do again—when we took over that jurisdiction in 1992 we were advised that we had to offer a separate membership test for people just doing background work. So someone could join just through doing background work. So we put in place a test which is still in place which nobody likes and which we’ve been trying to figure out how to get rid of but we haven’t yet figured that out. The test is if you go to work on a Screen Actors Guild covered project in areas where we have jurisdiction over background performers which is not everywhere, for example we don’t in Texas, but let’s say in Los Angeles and New York, in San Francisco and Boston and several other places, under our contract the employer is required to hire a certain number of people as Screen Actors Guild covered people and then once they have fulfilled that number—and it varies depending on whether it’s TV or film or commercials though there’s no cap in commercials—but once they’ve hit that required number they can then hire people on what are called non-SAG  vouchers. If you are one of the people that gets hired under the Screen Actors Guild coverage then you get what’s called a SAG voucher. Now if you get three of those vouchers and you’re not yet a member you then are qualified to join. That’s a very long answer to what was meant to be I’m sure a very simple question. Does that answer your question?

Student: Yes.

Brett: There’s another question.

Student: Could you explain the Film Incentive Legislation and how it would affect future filmmakers…

Richard: I’m sorry can you repeat that?

Student: Can you explain the Film Incentive Legislation and how it would affect future filmmakers?

Richard: For many, many years now, or a couple of decades anyway, there has been a kind of an economic war going on. At first it was a one-sided war where a number of countries outside the United States decided they wanted to aggressively compete for filmmaking dollars and for film work—the primary one of which for our purposes was Canada. They started putting in place very attractive incentives, tax incentives and in some cases actual cash give-backs where you could take cash out simply for showing up and employing Canadian workers. And they constructed a very lucrative tax incentive in Canada which drew an enormous amount of work up to Canada for a period of time. That combined with the disparity between American and Canadian dollars, which doesn’t exist right now but often the Canadian dollar is worth less than the American dollar which gives additional financial incentive, caused a lot of work to head north. But many, many other countries—Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Great Britain, South Africa, now believe it or not Argentina and two or three other South American countries, many countries in the former Soviet Union or Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe [in] what was Czechoslovakia and now the smaller states which made up Czechoslovakia, the Balkans, Bulgaria, places like that—have made extremely lucrative deals with film producers to get them to come over there and shoot. And they’ve shot stuff like, there was a Civil War movie, On Cold Mountain I think it was called, and it was a big Civil War movie shot entirely on location in Romania, never came anywhere near the United States to shoot the film. There have been many of these examples. So what happened was about 18 years ago we and other unions in the industry started very aggressively [to] try and convince the United States government, the federal government, we needed to come up with tax incentives to keep work in the United States. That initiative kind of went up on the rocks after a while. We ended up with a very small incentive which frankly is too small to do anything. But the states started coming up with their own incentives and that’s probably to what you are referring. There are now state incentives all over the country which vary dramatically from one state to another. That’s why it’s very difficult to answer your question in terms of what impact it has except all I can tell you is that the state incentives have done amazing work in keeping work in the U.S. Screen Actors Guild is a national union and even though the majority of our members, a slight majority of our members, live and work in the Los Angeles area and a quarter of our members live and work in New York, those are the two major concentrations, we one hundred percent fight for and support tax incentives all over the country because any work that stays in the U.S. is almost certainly going to be done by U.S. performers working under our contracts. And that’s a plus for U.S. performers and a plus for us. It can have nothing but a positive effect. It makes producing films less expensive. It also has a tremendous benefit to the communities in which the films and television shows get made. There’s a wonderful case of a film a couple of years ago called Saving Woodstock which was shot not actually in Woodstock but very close by in upstate New York in a very economically depressed area. This was a very small budget film relatively speaking. It was about a seven million dollar film which in today’s major film market is nothing. I know it seems like a lot but it’s very low budget for this day and age for a big movie. And that seven million dollar film left about four million dollars behind in that community and changed the future of a lot of businesses in that community because they were there for four or five months with pre-production and production. They injected an enormous amount of income into the local economy. So tax incentives are extremely effective [and] very important. They save American jobs and bring jobs to the U.S. which otherwise would absolutely be going outside the country. When films get made in Canada or New Zealand or Australia, they’re going to take two or three, or maybe five or six even on a big film, actors with them but everybody else is going to get hired locally. If you have 150 people working on an average film and 80 or so working on an average television program, that’s a lot of jobs that are not going to be going to U.S. workers. Does that answer your question?

Brett: Yes. We’ve got about seven minutes left so we have time for probably one more question. Does anyone have a question?

Student: I just have personal questions because I want to direct films. I have personal questions about experience for actors not so much to do with SAG but since you have such a great history of acting. They say hindsight is 20/20 so is there any kind of advice you could give to actors [or] directors about their careers?

Brett: That’s a question that I’m sure everybody wants to ask so that’s a good one to go out on.

Richard: Well first of all, the one thing that I can tell you is there is no right way to do this as an actor or as a director. For both groups, and I’ll speak to both groups because I do both things, for both groups it’s an incredibly terrific time in one way [because] for the first time ever you can actually put together pieces that can look fairly decent and create little calling cards of short videos, short digital films, that you guys can make both as directors and as actors which will help you to try and not only display your wears as it were but also it will help you to get some experience. Because there’s nothing like actually getting in front of a camera or getting behind a camera and doing this stuff to help you to learn how to do it. That’s one thing. Another thing is there are lots and lots of really good schools that are training people in acting, both film and stage, and in directing. They’re expensive and there are not [enough to accommodate the number] of people who would like to go to them. But if you can get into one and swing doing it…I went to the Yale School of Drama through an extraordinarily bizarre set of circumstances which is way too long a story for me to tell you now. And when I went to the Yale School of Drama which was before all of you were born and maybe even before some of your parents were born, being a Yale alumnus was not a ticket to very much. Nowadays if you go to Yale, if you go to NYU, if you go to Columbia, if you go to UCLA, USC, a bunch of other schools I don’t even know, the chances are you will come out of there with a cadre of people and an alumni group that is maybe interested in giving you a hand and helping you along. [There are] very good networking possibilities. However, I know many people who have gone that route and done very well; I’ve known people who have gone that route and haven’t done anything at all; I know many people who have not gone that route and done very well; and many people who have not gone that route and not done that well at all. So what I can tell you is the most important thing in my experience for an actor, a director, anybody who is trying to make a life in this business, is number one that if you want to do this you’ll figure out a way to do it or you’ll realize that it’s not for you. But you are certainly not going to be able to do it unless you really, really want to do it because it’s really, really hard. There are thousands and thousands—we have 125,000 people and about five thousand of them make under our contract what anyone in the country would consider to be a living wage on a yearly basis. What is that? Seven and change percent of the members of Screen Actors Guild. These are people who are already members of Screen Actors Guild. In any given year that small percentage are making anything like what you would consider to be a living wage. And then, of the people that actually make the money and the people that you are actually aware of, well that’s about five to six hundred people total. And that’s a really tiny percentage. And the DGA numbers are maybe a little better than that because if you can get into the DGA you have probably already demonstrated a fairly high level of skill before you end up getting into the DGA. It’s harder to get to that point as a director than as an actor. As we said, if you book one commercial where you have a principal role you can join Screen Actors Guild. You can join AFTRA at this moment in time in Texas by walking in and putting down an initiation fee and you’re a member. You don’t have to have any work first. I would highly recommend that you not do that because once you join a labor union you don’t get to work non-union anymore unless of course you live in a right to work for less state which Texas is. But if you are going to be a good union member you try and follow the rules of the union and you don’t get to work non-union anymore. Frankly, if you join Screen Actors Guild, whether you live in a right to work for less state or not, you will be disciplined for working off the card and getting caught. You would have the right to resign and walk away if you’re in a right to work for less state but you will be hunted down and killed by us if we have the chance. (laughter)

Brett: Well we are out of time. I want to thank you Richard and Nancy for taking the time to talk with us today. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks now and it has been a lot of fun. We always appreciate people in your position taking the time to talk to our meager little class.

Richard: Well as I said we appreciate your initiative Brett in even having this idea and we are very, very interested in having contact with your department going forward because we want to make it clear to people that Screen Actors Guild is a good thing and an important element in keeping this industry professionalized and healthy. We hope that your students end up going on to careers in this business. We want them taking that information with them as they do.