Mockingbird Hill Cottage

They’re finally opening. I love brown-eyed susans/black-eyed susans, which I will refer to in the future as ‘susans.’ They’re self-seeding, of course – my favorite thing. I’d say that most of the flowers in the big garden bed self-seed. It makes gardening so much easier.

I love their autumnal colors, a little prediction of what is to come.

Some more information on the need for the strike:

When Don was acting in Hollywood, and indeed, when I first met him, he had amassed an extensive body of work in television. In those days, if you were working fairly consistently, after several years, your agent could negotiate your day fee. When he was playing a recurring role in LA Law, he was getting $3500/day. And in those days, the first rerun of an episode paid the exact same amount. So he would earn $7000 for that one appearance. That may seem like a lot, but the average actor might work 4 times a year, so $7000 x 4 equals $28,000 a year. Not much.

Then the studios and networks stopped any negotiations as to fee. Period. Now, you get offered the day rate, which is a little over a thousand dollars. That’s it. If you question it, you get this response: Either take it or don’t take the job. It’s what I got paid for my acting work on Spoiler Alert. That’s less than a third of what Don used to get.

Do you see what’s happening here?

If it isn’t streaming, you’ll get a residual, but the residual is based on that greatly decreased day rate.

If it is for streaming, you will get NO RESIDUALS AT ALL. Most actors live on their residuals because there are so many weeks and months where they can’t get work. Don still gets residuals from Three’s Company  and you know how long ago that was. After all this time, the residuals are very, very small, but they help, and when you’re trying to make your rent, feed your kids, pay your mortgage, you need them,

SAG also changed their health insurance requirements a few years back – remember when they took away the great insurance Don had earned because he was a Senior Performer? They also changed the requirements for qualifying for health insurance – now, you have to make $26,000 a year to qualify. Because of low pay, no residuals for anything made for streaming, and the difficulty of finding work, 87% of union members don’t qualify. Only 13% of members have health insurance.

When studios systematically chip away at an actor’s earning potential, they take away the chance to actually make a living, to provide for families.

Don would tell you that the business has changed dramatically and that he doesn’t recognize it anymore.

When you treat actors as a commodity for your use and not as talented creative artists that you’re lucky to have on your project, you become soulless, corporate bean counters. Meanwhile, the CEO of Warner Brothers/Discovery, David Zaslow, makes $246.6 million dollars a year. Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, who makes $27 million dollars a year, said that he found the demands of actors were not “realistic” and that “it is very disturbing to me.” I’d say that we find your utter disconnect very disturbing.

A ‘Let ’em eat cake’ mentality that did not go over well at all. He’s been repeatedly under fire for those comments.

This is what SAG is up against. The studios have become part of massive corporate entities, entities that feel that scanning a background actor’s body and using it over and over again so that they don’t have to deal with background actors – or pay them – ever again is a good idea.

I’m so disillusioned with this world we live in. We have a broken lawn mower, a dehumidifier that stopped working, a washing machine that stopped working, and we’ve already had to replace our window a/c unit. We have to try a figure out a way to pay for replacements, which in actuality means we’ll use the lawn mower but only do a bit at a time because it’s so hard to push now, we’ll stick paper towels under the washer until we can afford to call a repairman and hope against hope that we don’t have to replace the stacked unit, and, because we have a 140 year-old half-basement that gets wet when it rains and all we have had is rain lately, we’ll choose to replace the dehumidifier first because more rain is coming tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.

But, Don and I are not special. So this isn’t a ‘poor me’ thing. This is the reality for more than 90% of actors in the union. I suspect it’s the same with Actor’s Equity (the theatrical union.) And these studio heads want to keep chipping away at any possible income for actors.

Added note about me: As a dialect coach, I don’t even have the protection of a union. None. I don’t have a manager, I don’t have an agent. I have to negotiate the very small fees I get all by myself. It’s draining. And I wouldn’t have health insurance if I was not married to Don, so thank God for that, at least.

Just sharing a bit of the reality that every actor (and writer) deals with on a daily basis and why the strike is absolutely necessary.

Stay safe.

Happy Tuesday.