Michael Hagerty is a novice producer on a new feature film with a tiny bottom line--$75,000--none of which went to actors.
"Every dime we spent, you'll see it on the screen. And look here: I still have all my hair," Hagerty said, pointing to a frame on an editing monitor.
Hopwood Productions--an enterprise of the film's writer-director-star Hopwood Depree--is making the movie under a Screen Actors Guild low-budget agreement.
Such agreements are not new, but guild officials have promoted them recently in a push to organize the independent film industry.
The guild has hired half a dozen clerical workers to cut red tape, sent staffers to glad-hand filmmakers on the festival circuit and even mounted a savvy advertising campaign--all aimed at putting SAG actors on the sets of films shot on even the flimsiest of shoestrings.
The campaign began two years ago when less than 30% of nondocumentary films in American festivals were covered by SAG. Now 93% of the films in the current Sundance festival are under contract, SAG officials said. The campaign's success even has officials of below-the-line, or non-actor, labor unions talking about pressing harder to reach mini-budget productions.
There are two key benefits in using low-budget agreements:
* A producer pays guild actors far less than the standard principal performer's minimum of $2,000 a week. Full-scale pay and residuals are paid later only if the film attracts audiences.
* Actors avoid fines for working in a nonunion indie--which many young actors are pressured to do before they establish their careers.
"When I came out of college, a buddy was making a nonunion film," explained Richard Speight Jr., one of the actors in Hagerty's film, describing a typical scenario. "I was working at a restaurant. I couldn't afford to pay a SAG fine."
The effort, sponsored by the Industry Advancement and Cooperative Fund, a joint venture of SAG and movie producers, has sharply increased the number of films shot under contract, mostly in the lowest budget categories, which have notoriously little commercial value.
In the 12 months ending Oct. 31, 1998, SAG contracts covered 1,790 low-budget films, a 90% increase over 940 such films in the same period four years earlier.
The SAG low-budget agreements cover five categories of films, with budget caps ranging from $75,000 to $2.75 million.
