Don’t Act, Reason #27: You’ll have to join an actor’s union (or several.)

For the longest time, the Screen Actors Guild—generally referred to by its unflattering acronym, SAG—was nothing but a thorn in my side.  It became the number one excuse casting directors gave me for not auditioning me for this, that, or the other thing.  “Sorry,” they would say, “you’ve got to be SAG for this project.”  I became convinced that word had gotten around town that I was no longer buying that bullshit “you’ve got to pay your dues” excuse, so Hollywood quickly formed an actor’s union to keep me from the work that I wanted.  (I realize this kind of paranoia makes me insane, but remember—if you are thinking of pursuing acting, that puts us in the same boat.  It’s called The Crazy Boat.  Don’t forget to take your Dramamine.)  The union called SAG that was constructed in order to keep Mr. Todd Robert Anderson from getting what he wanted was brilliantly conceived with an airtight catch-22.  In order to be in the union, I had to be working—but in order to be working, I had to get in the union!  Diabolical genius!

“How was a person supposed to get in the union?” I wondered, “Was there an auditioning process?”  I quickly realized there couldn’t be an auditioning process, because if actors were selected purely on the basis of their artistic merit…well, you know, a number of movie stars simply wouldn’t be movie stars.  They’d be really good looking tire salesmen.  Beyond the good looking tire salesmen element, auditions would also clearly cancel out people like Tiger Woods and Joe Montana, athletes who do lots of union commercials but clearly can’t act their way out of paper bags. 

I wondered in addition to that other wondering I was doing: “Why isn’t this alleged actors’ union called the Screen Personalities Guild instead of the Screen Actors Guild, when that is clearly what it is?”  This question has yet to be answered probably because show business is absolutely full of shit, even in regards to organizations that are supposed to be protecting their members from the same said shit.  I did, however, find the answer to the initial question: an actor could circumvent the catch-22 in one of two ways.  Two whole ways! 

The first of the two was to collect three “vouchers” which an actor (or personality, as it were) can get when he or she[1] works union extra jobs.  There isn’t a guarantee that you will be given a voucher on an extra job, as you have to actually be put on camera to get it.  On many extra gigs, extras just sit around all day and never get used.  I did one extra job on an industrial video (a video made exclusively for employees of a company to view, not for air) during my college years in New York City.  The video was set up as this faux talk show called “Georgia” which was supposed to be not-so-gently reminiscent of Oprah.  At a certain point, the director handed out various lines to the extras, so Oprah—I mean, Georgia—could take questions from the audience.  The questions were randomly handed out, and the taping stretched from five boring hours into ten torturously tedious hours just because most of these extras had no idea how to deliver lines.  This one dude must have done about one hundred takes before a teleprompter was dragged out so he could get through his two-sentence line without flubbing it.  By the end of that day, for which I was paid forty dollars, I wanted to gouge my eyes out and feed them to an alley cat.  So, needless to say, extra work was not something I was going to do again. 

I was left with only the second of the two paths to SAG, which was to be what they call getting “Taft Hartley-ed.”  Apparently, this senator fellow named Robert Taft and his good buddy Fred Hartley, Jr. lobbied for this Labor-Management Relations Act which is generally called the Taft-Hartley Act—I think maybe because of their names, but I can’t be too sure on that.  As I understand it, one of the provisions of this law is that a union can’t stop an employee and employer from working together if said employee and employer really, really, really want to work together.  The employer has to pay a fine to the union, and at that point the employee becomes eligible to join the union.  So, the only trick a non-union actor has to pull off is finding an agent who is willing to represent him even though he isn’t eligible to do any high-paying work, and then find a production that wants him or her so much that they are willing to pay a fine to the union for the privilege of working with a no-name.  Easy as pie, all y’all motherfuckers, easy as pie.  Only took me a year.  (If you don’t include all the years I struggled before the first year I struggled auditioning for union commercial jobs.) 

            Of course, SAG is only for the silver screen and major television series, you see.  If you want to do radio or host a television talk show, you’ve got to join the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and if you want to do stage work, you’ve got to join the Actors’ Equity Association.  (I think there’s another actors’ union out there, but I don’t know what it’s for.  Maybe porn or something.)  The good news here is that once you are in one union, you are automatically eligible to join one of the other ones, which means you only have to get ludicrously lucky the one time (unless you can stand to do extra work, in which case it’s just a waiting game that requires only a moderate amount of luck.  But the patience you must have is ludicrous.  So, as you can clearly see, it is very hard to avoid the ludicrous once you’ve set sail on The Crazy Boat.  Don’t forget to take your Wellbutrin.)  The bad news is that each of these unions requires an initiation fee of somewhere between a grand and fifteen hundred bucks depending on about which one we are talking.  So, you’re going to have to whip out that credit card (if it hasn’t already been cancelled) and pay up, which means your first paycheck (or more) goes directly to the union.  And getting into the union certainly doesn’t guarantee that you’ll ever work again.  All it means is that you’ve circumvented that horrid catch-22.  Of course, if any really interesting non-union work comes up, you can’t do it.

You’re a union man now (or woman! Or woman!  Fuck!)

            And here’s the real fun of it: after you finally get into the union, you’ll go over to their offices to hand in a large cashier’s check (they won’t accept a personal one because they know most actors have no money) and then they’ll ask you what your name is.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that your name is “Todd Anderson.”  When you tell them that is what your name is, they’ll tell you that it isn’t.  That’s right, you can’t be “Todd Anderson” because there is already someone with that name in the union, and they don’t allow their members to share the same names.  You’ll have to pick something else.  You might try, “Todd R. Anderson,” but that will already be taken, and don’t bother with, “T.R. Anderson,” because that’s taken as well.  In the end, you’ll be forced to become one of those pretentious-sounding three (or more) name actors you always made fun of like Sarah Michelle Gellar and Neil Patrick Harris and Sean William Everett Scott Campbell Lee Jones.  And while you will now understand why actors are forced to use more than just two names, no one else will, nor will they care, and you will be made fun of for the rest or your life, Mr. Todd Robert Anderson.  Doofus.