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Offscreen, loose cannons at work

Thursday, December 18, 2008

SO HOW DID WE GET here, with an actors’ strike threatening the movie industry, less than a year after a writers’ strike that was painful for all concerned and in the end did little benefit to anyone?

Primarily it is just two men - and it has to be said they behave stereotypically like men from an era when “men were men”, at least in hang-tough American movies - who have pressed the zig-zagging course that has so disastrously brought the Screen Actors’ Guild face-to-face now with a "nuclear option". In other words a membership referendum to authorize an all-out strike - in pursuit, supposedly, of a new theatrical and television contract.

 

They are Allen Rosenberg and Doug Allen (pictured above, respectively right and left).

 

Rosenberg, the union’s President, has an acting background, and is noted, among some audiences at least, for TV roles in LA Law and Cybill. Allen, who is Rosenberg’s own hired hand of an Executive Director, has no experience in the entertainment industry at all, having previously served as No 2 in the ranks of the National Football League’s Players’ Association – and a lot longer ago having been a linebacker for the Buffalo Bills.

 

(My assessments of relevant experience assume that the NFL is not a branch of the entertainment industry … but perhaps that is an argument for another time.)

 

Rosenberg has been disingenuously claiming that the opposition to his strike plans which has welled up among the membership is the result of a long-standing geographical divide in the union. "There's always been a war between New York and Los Angeles”, he has said, adding with something like crocodile tears, “and it's tragic". But what he’s blithely trying to avoid here is that opposition to striking is strong on the left coast as well, notably from prominent actors like Morgan Freeman, Glenn Close and Tom Hanks.

 

What’s also missing from Rosenberg's blustering drive for strike-authorization, and from much showbiz reportage of his maneuvers, is that his own support base is largely comprised of individuals who are most kindly described, in the industry’s term of art, as “the background community”.

 

That is, they are largely movie extras - and those SAG members whose livelihood is earned more substantially in other businesses (like restaurants) than by actually acting.

   

 

**CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN EVERY WEEK - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.

 

  

 

AS THIS FINANCIAL “ANNUS HORRIBILIS” GRINDS TOWARD its end, my lovely wife Melissa Bellinelli has developed another adorable habit. She’s started to stockpile cute motion pictures – employing all the resources available nowadays to the home archivist, like Netflix movies-by-mail, a domestic DVR machine and cable television's On Demand services. To ensure the sweetness standard remains high she’s largely focusing on the back-catalogue of the Walt Disney Company. To date she has screened and re-screened Pollyanna, starring the young Hayley Mills, a number of times that I am not at liberty to report.

 

Then, to redress my professed bafflement, she read aloud to me Michael Cieply’s Hollywood dispatch for the New York Times this week, about how Tinseltown “is still trying to get this recession thing sorted out”, but that “moviegoers have delivered a message in the last few months … that they want their films, for the moment at least, to be a lot more fun than their lives.”

 

The unempathic, even seasonably Scrooge-like side of me wants to dismiss this notion. But perhaps the following fresh piece of global business news should set me right.

 

The economy of Russia – which for a while basked in a booming oil-producers’ bonanza – is now hit with a double-whammy of collapsing oil prices as well as the international credit squeeze. And what has now suddenly happened?

 

None other than the Walt Disney Company has been rewarded for some intense negotiation by a deal with Media-One Holdings Ltd, bringing what both companies describe as “great Disney family entertainment” into millions of Russian homes. The shows and movies will be carried by at least 30 of the 86 regional broadcasting stations that Media-One’s main shareholders, the acquisitive tycoons Ivan Tavrin and Igor Mishin, have accumulated over the past few years.

 

Maybe we can now expect Russian TV to be more fun than Russian lives.

   

  

 

WELCOME TO THE VERBAL FELICITIES DEPARTMENT, both planned and unplanned.

 

Much media chortling has inevitably broken out over an accused fraudster called Bernard Madoff (pronounced "made-off") having allegedly made off with billions of investors’ dollars. Less remarked upon has been some chance chiming in Governor Rod Blagojevich’s name.

 

“To blag” is British slang (especially favored in music business circles during the 1980s) meaning to con one’s way into receiving unmerited perks.

 

I’ve also enjoyed choice wordplay in this week’s competing New York tabloids. More usually it is Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post that wins the front-page headline war, but on Monday victory laurels went decidedly to the Daily News (owned incidentally by one reported Madoff victim, Mort Zuckerman).

 

The Post had tried hard, with a headline affixed to a freeze-frame from the video of George W Bush dodging downward to avoid the first infamous flying shoe of his farewell appearance in Baghdad. It said “LAME DUCK”. Not too bad, I suppose.

 

The News’ triumph, though, was assured with “SHOE-ICIDE ATTACK”

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