Search

ARCHIVES
CONTACT US
WORLD NEWS

Actors strike TV, radio commercial industry

LOS ANGELES-Actors who star in TV and radio commercials went on strike yesterday, demanding a bigger cut from the booming cable market, in the first major Hollywood walkout in 12 years.

Chanting "Hey, hey, ho, ho, corporate greed has got to go," hundreds gathered in a Los Angeles park and marched past Wilshire Boulevard ad agencies. Several hundred striking actors also rallied in New York City.

The Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists, representing about 135,000 actors, authorized the strike.

Celebrities lent support to the commercial actors on both coasts.

"Actors are the nicest people in the world, and they always give away the store," Richard Dreyfuss said at a rally in New York. "It's a habit we've got to stop."

The walkout centers on the pay structure for commercials.

TV commercials offer actors a minimum of $478 for a day's work. Actors also get "pay-per-play" residuals of roughly $50 to $120 each time a spot airs on network television. When it comes to cable TV commercials, however, actors receive only a flat fee of $1,000 or less for each 13-week run.

Now, with two-thirds of all TV ads now being made for cable, actors are demanding that pay-per-play be extended to cable as well. Advertisers, however, want to extend the flat fee from cable to the networks.

The current fee structure dates from the 1950s and '60s, when ABC, NBC and CBS claimed up to 95 percent of the audience.

Nowadays, six networks fight for 50 percent of the audience, while cable and satellite channels claim the rest.

SAG members last went on strike in 1988, a walkout that lasted three weeks. That also was the year of Hollywood's last major strike, the Writers Guild of America's 22-week walkout, which cost the industry an estimated $500 million.

Ad agencies have been stockpiling commercials and will run some existing ads longer. They said they will also produce new commercials using non-union actors or union members willing to work under the agencies' terms.

That scares Ernest Logan, a young Los Angeles actor who supports the strike but is worried. "It's scary because I know there's non-union actors waiting to jump on it," he said.