For Hollywood actors, the third act was anticlimactic.
After a year of warring with studios, another union and even among themselves, Hollywood's actors finally reached an accord Friday for a new labor contract, signaling an end to a costly drama that roiled the entertainment industry just as it tumbled into the worst economic downturn in decades.
The tentative agreement between the Screen Actors Guild and the studios provides actors, who have been working without a contract since last summer, a two-year pact that the union's president has vowed to oppose.
But it also provides relief to the 120,000 actors, nearly all of whom face the worst job climate in their lives as a result of a steep drop in movie and TV production.
If actors were celebrating, they were doing do so privately backstage, far from the limelight.
Despite repeated saber rattling by the union last year that it would win members a superior contract, in the end SAG negotiators had to accept a deal that was modeled on those negotiated by other talent unions, including the Writers Guild of America, which forged a pact amid a 100-day strike 14 months ago.
The proposed agreement, which grants a 3.5% annual pay increase and establishes fees for shows currently streamed on the Internet, was mostly the same contract that studios offered last summer. That is likely to raise questions inside and outside of SAG over what the union accomplished by its months-long standoff with producers.
The negotiations, which began a year ago, ultimately left SAG in a weaker state by splitting the union into two warring factions and pushing most new TV shows into the arms of a rival actors union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which negotiated its own contract last year.
Since then, AFTRA has in effect taken over new TV production, signing for 66 of 70 prime-time broadcast TV pilots this season, an especially worrisome development for SAG, which has traditionally dominated prime-time television.
With fewer members working in television, SAG has seen a sharp falloff in income from membership dues. The loss of income combined with heavy expenditures, including more than $100,000 on an unsuccessful campaign to defeat AFTRA's contract, left SAG with a deficit exceeding $6 million, people close to the guild say.
SAG's negotiators also had the ill luck of bad timing: The recession severely undermined the union's negotiating clout.
