Negotiations between actors and the Hollywood studios broke down Thursday night, dashing high hopes for a quick resolution in a stalemate that has kept the union's 120,000 members working without a new contract for seven months.
The Screen Actors Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of the studios, ended talks after just three days. No further talks are scheduled.
Actors' optimism that a new contract would be quickly hammered out swelled after moderates on the SAG board mounted a rebellion last month against the leadership, firing the union's executive director and installing a new negotiating team led by SAG consultant John McGuire.
Directors had complained that former chief negotiator Doug Allen mishandled talks and vowed to move swiftly toward a deal. But those efforts appear to have been thwarted by a tougher-than-expected bargaining posture by studios, which are increasingly impatient as their own businesses are squeezed by a deep recession, said people close to the talks.
Unlike their predecessors, the new SAG negotiators indicated that they were prepared to accept the studios' long-standing demand to accept a new-media pay framework already agreed to by three other Hollywood unions.
In return, the studios offered some “tweaks" to their previous “final offer," agreeing, for example, to drop a proposal that would have eliminated scheduled meal breaks. They also offered to increase from two to five the number of background performers who would be covered under the contract and provide residual payments for stunt coordinators.
