This evening, hundreds of stars will line the Shrine Auditorium to toast their peers in the 15th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Behind the showbiz glitz and glamour, however, an ugly boardroom drama has paralyzed Hollywood's largest union, founded in 1933 when veteran character actor Ralph Morgan and other actors rebelled against an exploitative studio system.
The notoriously fractious guild has a colorful history of infighting. SAG members still debate whether onetime guild president Ronald Reagan and his allies shortchanged members when the union accepted a compromise from the studios that would pay residuals only for movies made after Jan. 31, 1960.
But the latest brawling between moderate and hard-line factions on the board over the guild's strategy and leadership has startled even veteran labor watchers and severely damaged SAG's standing.
"You have to really go back to the post-World War II period to find something that's even close to what we're seeing now at SAG," said Dan Mitchell, a professor of management and public policy at UCLA, referring to the fierce ideological battles that divided Hollywood's unions and contributed to the blacklisting of actors in the late 1940s and 1950s.
The conflict has spilled over into tonight's SAG Awards. A widely circulated anonymous e-mail forwarded by board member and "Titanic" actress Frances Fisher called on SAG members to withhold their votes for eight actors who are up for SAG awards -- including Josh Brolin, Steve Carell and Sally Field -- for their opposition to a planned strike-authorization vote. That prompted former SAG President Richard Masur to compare the action to the blacklist of the 1950s.
"There have been many times in the history of this union that there has been infighting, dissension and internal friction, but there's never been anything like this," Masur, a board member, lamented in an interview.
While the 1950s conflict was rooted in the Cold War, the current fracas centers on the more parochial: how to end a stalemate with the studios, whose "final offer" has been rejected by the union's leadership as threatening the very future of actors in the digital era. The actors have been working without a contract for seven months, unable to strike a new deal largely because of sharp disagreements over how actors should be paid when they appear in shows created for the Internet.
