The New Hollywood Blacklist
The fight over the impending SAG strike has gotten uglier, now with an anonymous emailer urging the Hollywood community to awards-boycott eight well-known actors who do not support a referendum that would authorize a strike.
Variety reports that vocal strike authorization supporter Frances Fisher recently forwarded an email, to a "significant number" of Screen Actors Guild members, which encourages voters to cast their SAG Awards ballots for anyone but the several notable nominees who have publicly opposed the union's possible strike, some citing the troubled economy. The emailer wrote:
If I were a regular, ordinary, not-rich-and-famous actor, and if I wanted my union to be strong so it could fight for me ... would I want to give any of these rich-and-famous UNION-UNDERMINERS my vote?
He or she was referring to: Steve Carell, Michael C. Hall, Kevin Spacey, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Tony Shalhoub, Sally Field, and Josh Brolin. In, sum, all of these rich and famous folks are nominated for SAG awards this year, and the anonymous actor doesn't want them to win a beautiful trophy. That'd be showing 'em!
What's a bit strange is that some of these richie rich actors against the strike—which would, in part, fight to guarantee a residuals system for online content—are noted godless lefty progressives who should be down with the union's struggle against big bad corporate-minded producers! (I'm looking at you, Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin.) It's a tricky matter when the industry's myriad behind-the-scenes workers are considered—workers who would be, like they were during the WGA strike early last year, shit out of luck if a work-stoppage (which even those who support the authorization referendum are hoping desperately to avoid) were to go through. That's probably the concern of these eight people, though they may, overall, not feel quite as adamant about heckling over residual dollars as some of their lesser-known peers who, like, need to pay the rent and stuff.
Fisher had asked that her name be removed from the email if any of the recipients decided to forward the missive on to anyone else, but, well, oops! Former SAG president (and Veda Sultenfuss' uncle) Richard Masur compared the email to a blacklist and said that Fisher should publicly condemn the boycott, by way of an apology. The glittery, beautiful TNT-aired SAG awards shouldn't be sullied by politics!, the argument seems to be.
Meanwhile the 90% of SAG members who are out of work and not invited to the awards show and don't know these fools from Adam, shrug their shoulders and say "spare a quarter?"
