This year, I’m thankful for:

• My job, because it’s nice to have a job I like, let alone any job whatsoever after spending a third of the year unemployed
• My family for being understanding about me not schlepping my ass to the East Coast for a whopping two days of family time.
• My friends, for putting together so many awesome thanksgiving celebrations that I’ve had to bake multiple pies instead of the usual one.
• The fact that there is not a major union on strike shutting down my entire industry (yet).

And finally, a card I was highly amused by from someecards.com, which describes the entire conversation with my father I’d be having had I dragged my ass to Atlanta to get attacked by my 8 nieces and nephews:

Hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving!

I don’t know if it’s been reading about the potential SAG strike or the fact that we’re going to have a double-unit Monday to welcome us back from Thanksgiving, but apparently my problem of grinding my teeth has gotten a bit worse.

And by “a bit worse” I mean, goddamn, the tendons in my jaw are killing me. It started early this afternoon (I thought it was a cavity until I realized I could push on the teeth I thought were affected and felt nothing, but opening my mouth absolutely killed) and has been getting worse throughout the day.

I mean, perhaps it’s a good thing for my continued weight loss attempts that at the rate I’m going I’m not going to be able to open my mouth on Thanksgiving, but goddamn it, I want to be able to eat at least one of the three Thanksgiving dinners I’m stopping by.

Bah.

You know, if you’re a federal mediator and you give up on trying to get SAG and the studios to agree to something after TWO DAYS, you’re not very good at your job.

I seriously can’t believe we’re about to go into another round of this craziness.

Trying to explain why, even though it does not appear the Screen Actors’ Guild is actually going to strike anytime soon, I am frustrated with the lack of progress in the talks, is a little hard to explain.

The stalemate has brought all feature production to a grinding halt, and because of the weird timing of the pilot I’m on (even if it gets picked up, it won’t go for a few months, and almost all other TV in town has already started up), I had been looking to hop on a feature when it finishes in a couple weeks.

So, why is a stalemate a bad thing for feature films? Well, I’ll try to explain.

Were the Screen Actors’ Guild to strike, everything would shut down immediately because without actors, there is nothing to shoot. That’s the easy-to-explain, apocalyptic part.

In a stalemate, which is where we are now, the actors are not striking, but they have not signed a deal and could theoretically strike at any time.

With a stalemate, TV shows keep shooting because they have all the actors under contract for basically the entire year. Were a strike to happen, they would give the crew an unpaid hiatus for the duration of the strike, and then everyone would come back to work when it’s over (assuming a short strike of about a month or so, which everyone is).

With films during a stalemate, you run into the big problem of actor scheduling: While television shows have the principal actors under contract essentially year-round, every film has a very short window in which its principals are under contract.

For example, pulling a name that’s fun to type out of the air, let’s say Jake Gyllenhaal is scheduled to do a film that starts tomorrow, and finishes in early September. Then, he’s scheduled to go on to a second film that starts in mid-September.

If the actors strike, it will eat up all the time that he was on film #1, and they still lose him to film #2 in mid-September. The fact that the strike is happening does not push everything back, it just makes the time disappear.

Why is this a problem? Well, the main issue is that because a SAG strike could completely fuck up actors’ schedules, major films can’t get what’s called a completion bond.

This is a very large insurance policy that will pay the a substantial portion of the cost of production should the film not be completed for some reason beyond the control of production (actor is hit by a bus and/or drops dead in the middle of production, earthquake destroys Los Angeles during shooting, whatever).

The insurance companies don’t want to give completion bonds right now because if Gyllenhaal starts shooting film #1 and SAG strikes for a month in August, he will still have to move on to film #2 on the same schedule. Film #1 could potentially only be half-finished and largely unusable, and the insurance company would be on the hook for the money.

If you can’t get a completion bond (and right now, you can’t unless you have a waiver from SAG, which you can only get if you’re a small independent production not part of the AMPTP), the studio will not give you the money to make your movie.

So everyone on the features side is pretty much sitting tight, waiting for SAG to make a deal. Once they make a deal, plenty of stuff will start up, and hopefully many of us will be gainfully employed once again.

We’ll see what happens. Again, I’m in a bit of an odd spot with scheduling, but hopefully by the end of July this will get sorted out, and I’ll land on something or other. I’ll probably get an involuntary break of a month or so, but hopefully not much longer.

I hope that sort of clarifies for those of you who don’t have to deal with this glorious horseshit on a daily basis what’s happening and why, and why while people in LA are worried about this, most of the national entertainment press is pretty much ignoring it.

It’s always fun to read a story in Variety and, before reaching the end of it, start mentally calculating how much plasma and/or heroin I’ll need to sell to make rent.

Why can’t strikes here be like French strikes? They’re going to have a TV strike, but it’s been announced well in advance and is only lasting one day.

I’d rather that sort of strike than the sort I fear we’re about to have. The sort where I look at my pile of old shoes and think, “Which of these will be the most edible if I boil them long enough to kill all the germs?”

I suppose I should say something here before it starts, since I will likely be sucked into a black hole for a couple months once it does: I’ve got a new job starting Wednesday.

I’m leaving the HBO pilot I’m on as a PA up in Santa Clarita to work on a Fox pilot as an APOC (assistant production office coordinator) downtown. The good news on this change is severalfold:

First, this brings me back roughly to the level I was on back at House, though on a wholly different track. This track will have me joining a union and thereby getting health insurance that isn’t tied to my job, which is a huge thing for my broke ass at the moment.

Secondly, my base pay is finally back to where it was. Oddly, I probably won’t take home as much as I do at my current job, if only because I’m not driving 400-800 miles a week for work and getting mileage for it. However, I also won’t be having to buy 3-5 tanks of gas a week, so it evens out.

Thirdly, I won’t have to drive anywhere near as much. 15 miles to downtown instead of 35 to Santa Clarita, and very few (if any) runs. My poor car, which I’ve driven almost eight thousand miles over the last two months, is ready for the break.

Hopefully, if the show gets picked up to go to series, they’ll take me along for the ride, bringing yet another period of random employment to an end. But, if it doesn’t get picked up (or they elect not to take me with them if they do), I’ll at least be in the union, and it’ll be a hell of a lot easier for me to get another job.

So all in all, I’m pretty excited about this, although I’m fairly nervous since I have a short time to make an impression, and I have to knock it out of the park pretty much immediately and constantly.

The bad news is that with the shooting schedule perilously close to the SAG strike deadline, I may be working a Saturday or four, so we’ll see what shred of my sanity remains after we wrap. Whee!

Depending on who you read, talks between the AMPTP and the Screen Actors’ Guild either ended without a deal or completely fucking imploded tonight. You know it’s serious when Nikki Finke breaks out the clip-art alarm bells.

So now, we’re staring down the barrel of another potential strike, this time by the Actors.

A smaller union, AFTRA, is probably going to cut a quick a deal to undercut SAG on TV deals in order to gain a larger percentage of jurisdiction, but the vast majority of primetime TV (which I work in) and all feature films are SAG signatories.

The threat of a SAG strike has already ground a lot of stuff on the features end to a halt. Anything that’s not already filming or that couldn’t use the time without actors wisely (for example, Transformers 2 building more models and working on the VFX while everyone twiddles their thumbs) is not getting greenlit, because nobody will insure anything with a post SAG-deadline end date.

SAG’s contract doesn’t actually expire until June 30th, so there’s about two months where TV shows are going to try and crank out as many episodes as they can, and networks will jam in as many pilots as they can (I’m actually leaving the pilot I’m on at the moment to go work on another in a couple weeks; more on that in a later post).

The difference between SAG and the WGA is that if SAG walks, everything grinds to a halt immediately. With the writers, people could still shoot finished scripts, with the directors making “tweaks” on set.

But without actors? No shows. No movies. No nothin’. No jobs almost immediately for a huge chunk of the already-hurting SoCal economy.

A SAG strike would be a colossal disaster for everyone involved, but SAG and the AMPTP seem to hate each other enough that they’d rather destroy themselves in order to destroy the other than let the other side even appear to win.

That mentality is almost exactly the same one that led to a three month writers’ strike that drove a fair few people I know to the brink of bankruptcy.

I wish I could be more optimistic that both sides are going to pull their heads out of their respective asses and make a deal in the next few weeks, but at this point, I’m stocking up on ramen.

SAG’s next up in the Great Strike-ocolypse of 2008.

The problem this time? SAG and AFTRA, two sister unions that have bargained jointly for the last 30 years, have chosen this critical moment to get in a massive pissing contest with each other.

Their infighting has (as far as I can tell) delayed the start of negotiations, and left everyone in town on edge that there’s going to be a second strike.

Already, with the SAG contract expiring June 30th, nothing that would finish past June 15th has been able to get any funding, which is part of why I had such a shit time finding a job after I got the ax.

I hope to hell this settles soon, mostly because no one, and I mean no one, can afford another strike right now. Least of all my broke ass.

The Strike is dead.