SAG Gives Big Break to Low-Budget Projects

Michael Hagerty is a novice producer on a new feature film with a tiny bottom line--$75,000--none of which went to actors.

“Every dime we spent, you’ll see it on the screen. And look here: I still have all my hair,� Hagerty said, pointing to a frame on an editing monitor.

Hopwood Productions--an enterprise of the film’s writer-director-star Hopwood Depree--is making the movie under a Screen Actors Guild low-budget agreement.

Such agreements are not new, but guild officials have promoted them recently in a push to organize the independent film industry.

The guild has hired half a dozen clerical workers to cut red tape, sent staffers to glad-hand filmmakers on the festival circuit and even mounted a savvy advertising campaign--all aimed at putting SAG actors on the sets of films shot on even the flimsiest of shoestrings.

The campaign began two years ago when less than 30% of nondocumentary films in American festivals were covered by SAG. Now 93% of the films in the current Sundance festival are under contract, SAG officials said. The campaign’s success even has officials of below-the-line, or non-actor, labor unions talking about pressing harder to reach mini-budget productions.

There are two key benefits in using low-budget agreements:

* A producer pays guild actors far less than the standard principal performer’s minimum of $2,000 a week. Full-scale pay and residuals are paid later only if the film attracts audiences.

* Actors avoid fines for working in a nonunion indie--which many young actors are pressured to do before they establish their careers.

“When I came out of college, a buddy was making a nonunion film,� explained Richard Speight Jr., one of the actors in Hagerty’s film, describing a typical scenario. “I was working at a restaurant. I couldn’t afford to pay a SAG fine.�

The effort, sponsored by the Industry Advancement and Cooperative Fund, a joint venture of SAG and movie producers, has sharply increased the number of films shot under contract, mostly in the lowest budget categories, which have notoriously little commercial value.

In the 12 months ending Oct. 31, 1998, SAG contracts covered 1,790 low-budget films, a 90% increase over 940 such films in the same period four years earlier.

The SAG low-budget agreements cover five categories of films, with budget caps ranging from $75,000 to $2.75 million.

In the lowest-budget films--categorized as experimental--the actors may be paid nothing, and producers get festival exhibition rights plus rights limited to a weeklong theatrical engagement for Oscar qualification.

In highest-cap films--$2 million, or $2.75 million for affirmative action projects with a high percentage of minority participation--the actors must be paid at least $1,620 a week. In return, the producer retains all U.S. theatrical distribution rights.

It’s a longshot for films made under these agreements to make any money at all--but a few break out of the pack every year. One recently was “Pi.� Director Darren Aronofsky made it for $134,815, and it has grossed more than $3.2 million.

“This was the only way I could get SAG actors,� “Pi� producer Eric Watson said, noting that only one of the 14 guild members in the cast refused to work for the reduced scale.

Crisscrossing the country on the festival circuit meeting producers last year, SAG outreach coordinator Shawna Brakefield said that occasionally a filmmaker would sidle up and say: “I have a friend who used SAG actors in a film but didn’t use a low-budget agreement. Can he sign one after the film is made?�

“I’ll say, ‘Tell your friend to call me,’ � she says. Guild executives, she added, generally have greater interest in assuring future compliance than catching and fining scofflaws--although some guild officers said they expect that policy to tighten this year.

SAG has produced a popular series of posters, one of which shows a young woman running out of the frame, with a toe mark visible in the background. “Your sister,� the caption reads. “She can hit the mall. But can she hit her mark?�

Actors seem to appreciate the wry slap at amateurism--and they can relate to being motivated for reasons other than money.

The guild’s outreach program may be offering a useful lesson for the below-the-line unions, said Lyle Trachtenberg, international representative for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which has its own low-budget scale.

Cody G. Cluff, president of the Hollywood Entertainment Industry Development Corp., estimated that 70% of feature film production in Los Angeles County is covered by union contracts, compared to 1989, when 70% of production was nonunion. Further, most of those agreements cover production anywhere in the United States, in theory keeping producers from fleeing studio centers for outlying areas to avoid union activity.