Rancor Moves to Center Stage in Actors' Strike

Irwin Keyes has the type of rubbery, comic-strip features that Hollywood casting agents refer to as a "great look." His square-jawed, pop-eyed visage has served him well over 25-odd years as a commercial actor, landing him parts as a nose-picking cowboy thug, a lunkheaded Neanderthal who gets bonked from the sky by a keg of Budweiser and a gluttonous Goliath slain by David for refusing to share his Subway sandwich.

A couple of years ago he even won a Clio, the TV commercial industry's top award, for his gothic-Method portrayal of a 14th century hunchbacked messenger in the Dark Ages before Southwestern Bell. "It was really cute," says Keyes' actor-wife, Vicki.

But the Keyeses, like thousands of fellow performers across the country, now find themselves assigned the role of anonymous bit players in a rancorous Information Age epic where the possibility of a happy ending grows fainter by the day.

As the Hollywood commercial actors' strike against the advertising industry grinds into its fifth month--one of the longest actors' strikes in U.S. history--anger and anxiety are spilling over on all sides of the picket line. With the actors' unions and their ad industry opponents hunkering down, the labor dispute that began May 1 over the industry's desire to pay actors a flat fee with no residuals for appearances in network and cable TV ads has curdled into a sour cocktail of bitter accusations and wounded friendships.

In Greater Los Angeles, home to about 60,000 of the Screen Actors Guild's 97,000 members, the strike's hyper-real emotional atmosphere has bled into the personal realm, touching actors, producers, casting agents, camera operators, electricians, even caterers. Heated rows break out at West Hollywood dinner parties. Longtime colleagues refuse to speak with one another. Friends who attended each other's weddings now go out of their way to avoid contact.

Although advertisers so far have hesitated to yank their big-name Hollywood pitchmen in favor of no-name replacements, the strike's foot soldiers must rely on strength in numbers, while growing painfully aware that the ad industry apparently doesn't prize their talents as much as they themselves do.

"In the last two weeks the anger has been building. You can see it in people's eyes, you can see it in their actions," says casting director Tom Reudy, who, like many in his business, professes to be "stuck in the middle" of the strike. "It's very difficult because no one expected this strike to go on like this."