SAG strike update (for those who haven't been paying attention)

Is SAG really going to do it -- shut down Hollywood and take every network show off the air for the second time in two years?

It just might.

The 120,000-member Screen Actors Guild is spoiling for a fight with the major studios over the same issues that drove the Writers Guild of America out on the picket lines 13 months ago. But this time, the esprit de corps among the Hollywood unions is gone, replaced by new jitters over the cratering economy and the knowledge that if there's one thing the public hates, it's a rerun.

On Jan. 2 the union will mail out strike authorization ballots to its rank-and-file. If 75 percent or more of voters say yes, the SAG leadership will be emboldened and, according to one labor lawyer and veteran Hollywood strike watcher, SAG will almost certainly take to the streets, throwing the rest of the 2008-2009 television season into doubt.

"There's a very real possibility of a (SAG) strike," said Jonathan Handel of TroyGould in Los Angeles, who practices digital media, entertainment and technology law.

And for what? Basically, the actors would be striking for deal points that are even sweeter than the ones negotiated earlier this year by the writers and directors' unions after a crippling 14-week strike. Those terms included, for the very first time, payments for new media such as Internet TV shows. (The Directors Guild of America didn't strike.)

Handel can give you a pile of reasons why the actors, unlike the writers, shouldn't even think of striking: The other two Hollywood unions extracted hard-won concessions out of the big studios earlier this year. The effects of the writers' strike are still being felt, so another work stoppage will not benefit from the kind of pent-up, solidarity-fueled enthusiasm as the last walkout.

All of this reduces SAG's bargaining power, said Handel, who's been in the thick of earlier WGA strikes and was highly supportive of the 2007 strike authorization vote by WGA.

To me, it seems that SAG has forgotten the way labor politics are played in that industry town, which -- as another observer, Mark Evanier, has quipped -- is that the studios always try to use one union as a club to beat down the others. In the last strike, for instance, the directors struck a deal quickly with the studios containing many of the terms the writers had been asking for. That put pressure on the writers guild to sit down at the table, which it eventually did.

And now? "Not surprisingly, management is not willing to punish the other unions for being willing to negotiate," said Handel. In other words, the studios are using the DGA and WGA to beat back the SAG.

But it may not work. SAG is an interesting, some might say dysfunctional, union: a huge membership organization the vast majority of whose members don't work enough in one year to qualify for these benefits. A group whose New York and Los Angeles leadership disagree sharply about the next steps to take.

Though SAG leadership was earlier given near-unanimous authorization to continue its hard line with the studios, dissenting voices have begun making themselves heard. The reluctance to strike is being expressed more vocally than it ever was during the writers' strike (when John Ridley became practically a one-man opposition on NPR).

In fact, there are now dueling pro-strike and anti-strike websites. Over 1,000 of its members have signed a "No to SAG Strike" petition posted online, to counter the more than 2,300 names signed to the pro-strike petition. Stargazers are counting up the numbers of A-listers who've thrown in with the "yes" camp (Sandra Oh, Mel Gibson, Eric Bogosian) and "no" camp (George Clooney, Jason Alexander, Jennifer Garner).

Such posturing, warns Handel, obscures the significant fact that almost no A-lister relies on SAG contract language when doing a deal to star in a movie or TV show -- those terms are worked out separately.

"These are middle-class aspirations," said Handel in a conference call on Thursday. "The A-listers don't care about them."

SAG's website has a series of videos featuring high-profile actors urging a strike authorization vote.

"New media is not something we can negotiate 10 years from now or five years from now or three years from now," says Alicia Witt in one video.

Hal Holbrook's video invokes "the working man, who has been treated very poorly lately by the corporations of this country, not to mention the administration, who are giving billions of dollars away to people who ride in limousines." In other words, the economic argument cuts both ways. Holbrook isn't the only actor who is urging a strike on principle. Tom Wilkinson, Blair Underwood and others have said they will strike because that's what you do when leadership calls for one.

So what does SAG leadership want?

It wants a bigger cut of income from Internet and other new media than the concessions the writers and directors guilds were able to extract earlier this year. And it wants those payments to cover a wider range of new media productions -- that's too complicated to summarize here.

Also, it would like actors to be compensated for "product integration," like working that crime-solving Denali into "CSI" episodes, and for money that was withheld during the writers' strike when the studios invoked the dreaded Force Majeure.

Handel, who's been in such negotiations before with Hollywood writers, thinks SAG can win on these other points if it drops the new-media demands. In three years, its deal will expire at about the same time as the writers, allowing the two groups to negotiate together and be the club pounding on the studios for greater DVD and Internet residuals.

So how does he think the strike authorization vote will go?

"I have no idea," he admitted.

He's not the only one.

This is a version of a story that appeared in Saturday's Kansas City Star.