Screen Actors Guild

• 1. Introduction

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  The Screen Actors Guild began with six people sitting in a room in March 1933, trying to figure out how to stop Hollywood studios from treating actors like property. Ralph Morgan, Kenneth Thomson, Alden Gay, Berton Churchill, Charles Miller, and Grant Mitchell had gathered with a simple, urgent problem: the major movie studios held performers in contracts that dictated not just their working hours but their public and private lives, with renewal clauses that fired automatically at the studios' discretion. Performers had no right to walk away.

  What emerged from that meeting would eventually represent over 100,000 film and television performers worldwide. SAG would survive blacklists, strikes, and boycotts. It would produce a future United States President as its leader. It would force studios to the bargaining table, win residuals that paid actors long after the cameras stopped rolling, and ultimately merge with a sister union in 2012 to become something larger than either had been alone.

  How did a small gathering of six actors become a force that reshaped the relationship between performers and the institutions that employed them? And what did it cost along the way?

• 2. Foundation and Early Struggle

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  Alan Mowbray personally funded the Screen Actors Guild when it was first founded, a gesture that captures just how precarious the organization's beginnings were. Three months after that initial March 1933 meeting, twenty-two people were named as the Guild's first officers and board of directors, with Ralph Morgan serving as its first president.

  Many established stars refused to join initially. The studios held enormous power, and the risks of antagonizing them were real. What broke the logjam was a decision by the producers themselves: they agreed among themselves not to bid competitively for talent. This created a common enemy and a common cause.

  Eddie Cantor pushed the decisive moment. At a meeting held in the home of Frank Morgan, Ralph's brother and the actor who played the title role in The Wizard of Oz, Cantor insisted that any response to the producers' agreement had to help all actors, not just the already-established ones. That argument proved persuasive. Within three weeks, SAG's membership climbed from around 80 people to more than 4,000.

  Cantor's friendship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the Guild political weight at a critical time. Several more years passed before the producers formally agreed to negotiate, which they did in 1937, after the passage of the National Labor Relations Act. Among the actors who supported SAG in those early years were Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Boris Karloff, and Edward G. Robinson.

• 3. Blacklist and the HUAC Years

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  In October 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities summoned a group of suspected communists working in Hollywood to testify about alleged Communist influence in the film industry's labor unions. Ten of those summoned, who became known as the Hollywood Ten, refused to cooperate. They were charged with contempt of Congress and sentenced to prison.

  Several SAG members, led by Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, and Gene Kelly, formed the Committee for the First Amendment and flew to Washington, DC, in late October 1947 to show their support for the Hollywood Ten.

  Ronald Reagan was president of SAG during this period. He was also known to the FBI as Confidential Informant T-10. Reagan testified before the committee but did not publicly name names. An FBI memorandum from 1947 described his account of being placed on a committee headed by someone named Mayer, whose stated purpose was to purge the motion-picture industry of Communist Party members.

  On the 17th of November 1947, SAG voted to require its officers to take a non-communist pledge. A week later, on the 25th of November, Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, issued what became known as the Waldorf Statement, declaring that the studios would not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party advocating the overthrow of the government. None of those blacklisted were proven to advocate that position; most held Marxist or socialist views.

  At a 1997 ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the Blacklist, SAG's president read a statement acknowledging the Guild's failure: only Actors Equity Association had stood behind its members during those years. The statement noted that blacklisted actors, unlike blacklisted writers, could not work under assumed names or use surrogates, because an actor's work and identity are inseparable.

• 4. Strikes and Labor Battles

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  In July 1948, a potential strike was averted at the last minute when SAG and major producers agreed on a new collective bargaining contract. That deal included full union shop status for actors and protections against producers suing actors for breach of contract if they struck.

  March 1960 brought the first industry-wide strike in the fifty-year history of movie making, as SAG walked out against the seven major studios. The Writers Guild of America had already been on strike since the 31st of January that year, pressing similar demands. Actors wanted to be paid 6% or 7% of the gross earnings of pictures made since 1948 and sold to television, along with a pension and welfare fund.

  In December 1978, SAG members struck for the fourth time in the Guild's 45-year history. The dispute centered on filming commercials; management had offered to raise pay from $218 to $250 per scene, but with a condition that if a scene went unused, the actor would receive nothing.

  The Emmy boycott of 1980 became one of the Guild's most visible public actions. SAG and AFTRA called for a boycott of that year's prime-time Emmy Awards. Of the 52 nominated actors, only Powers Boothe attended. He quipped during his acceptance speech that the moment was either the most courageous of his career or the dumbest. That same year's strike ended on the 25th of October, with a new pact delivering a 32.25% increase in minimum salaries and a 4.5% share of movies made for pay TV.

  The commercials strike of 2000 proved more contentious. SAG and AFTRA gathered evidence on over 1,500 non-members who had worked during the strike. Trial boards found both Elizabeth Hurley and Tiger Woods guilty of performing in non-union commercials. Each was fined $100,000.

• 5. The Fight for Gender Equity

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  In 1972, a study commissioned through Brigham Young University found that 81.7% of television roles went to male actors, versus 18.3% to female actors. That same year, SAG founded both the Women's Committee and the Ethnic Minorities Committee, the latter co-founded by actors Henry Darrow, Edith Diaz, Ricardo Montalbán, and Carmen Zapata.

  Kathleen Nolan became SAG's first female president in 1975 and led a Women and Minorities Rally on the 10th of October 1979, with signs reading "Women and Minorities: Not Seen on the American Scene" and "Window Dressing on the Set".

  A 1979 study documented that between 1949 and 1979, major distributors released 7,332 feature films. Of those, fourteen, representing 0.19%, were directed by women. A decade later, a 1989 SAG report found that 71% of all feature film roles and 64% of all television roles went to men, and that the combined income of male SAG members more than doubled that of women: $644 million versus $296 million.

  A 1986 voice-over study by McCollum/Spielman and Company found that there was absolutely no difference in effectiveness between male and female voices in television commercial voice-overs, directly contradicting the advertising industry's longstanding claim that male voices sold better and carried more authority. Despite this finding, a 1984 SAG study had already documented that women received only 10-20% of voiceover work.

  By 1997, SAG contracts for actresses totaled more than $472 million, while male SAG contracts received more than $928 million. Meryl Streep had keynoted SAG's first National Women's Conference in 1990, focusing specifically on the decline in women's work opportunities and pay parity. In 2009, research found that of the top 250 films at the box office, women comprised only 16% of directors, producers, writers, and other top jobs, a drop of 3% from a similar study conducted in 2001.

• 6. Rules, Membership, and Global Reach

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  The SAG Constitution contained a rule that defined the Guild's relationship to the broader entertainment industry: no member could work as a performer, or agree to work, for any producer who had not signed a basic minimum agreement with the Guild. Beginning in 2002, the Guild pursued worldwide enforcement of this rule and renamed it Global Rule One.

  Membership carried a distinct cost in the major markets. Actors joining the Los Angeles, New York, or Miami locals paid an initial fee of $3,000, plus a first semi-annual dues payment of $58, bringing the total to $3,058 at initiation. Dues were calculated on earnings from SAG productions, with a minimum annual payment of $116, and a top rate of 1.85% on income up to $200,000. The maximum any member could owe in a single year was $6,566, regardless of earnings above $1 million.

  SAG also enforced a rule that no two members could share identical working names. Michael Keaton's legal name was Michael Douglas, which was already registered. Michael J. Fox was born Michael Fox, and the J was added because another actor already held that name. Emma Stone was registered as Emily Stone to avoid a conflict with a prior member.

  In 1995, SAG began presenting the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which became recognized as a significant predictor of success at the Academy Awards. The awards continued under SAG-AFTRA after the merger. SAGIndie, founded in 1997, worked to connect independent productions with union talent, and the Guild maintained low-budget contract structures designed to keep film productions from leaving the United States entirely.

• 7. Merger and Legacy

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  On the 30th of March 2012, SAG's membership voted to merge with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The new organization, SAG-AFTRA, unified two unions that had already shared 44,000 dual members and divided jurisdiction over radio, television, the internet, and other new media.

  At the time of the merger, roughly 30% of SAG's total membership had been classified as withdrawn, suspended, or otherwise inactive for years. Honorable withdrawals made up the largest portion, at 20% of total membership, or 36,284 people. Suspended members represented another 10%, or 18,402 people. These members were ineligible to vote in Guild elections.

  The Guild's records from 1933 through 2012 trace a long list of presidents drawn from the ranks of working actors: from Ralph Morgan and Eddie Cantor in the 1930s, through Ronald Reagan's two terms (1947-1952 and 1959-1960), to Charlton Heston's tenure from 1965 to 1971, and continuing through Ken Howard, who held the presidency from 2009 until the merger. Charlton Heston, notably, was apparently a supporter of Financial Core status, the mechanism defined by the Supreme Court in 1963 that allowed someone to pay union dues without formal membership. SAG had characterized Fi-Core members as scabs.

  The Guild's mission, to negotiate collective bargaining agreements, collect compensation for recorded performances, and protect members against unauthorized use of their work, passed intact to SAG-AFTRA, which continued the membership classification scheme and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.