Screen Actors Guild

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.

Hollywood's largest actors union is cutting 8% of its staff in the face of investment losses and declining membership dues. The Screen Actors Guild plans to lay off about 35 workers to help close a $6.5-million deficit in the union's fiscal 2009 budget. The cuts affect several departments and include those who work in the union's organizing and information technology departments, according to people familiar with the matter. Affected workers will be notified this week.

On the eighth floor of the Screen Actors Guild headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard, interim Executive Director David White is pacing his new office, marshaling arguments in support of the union's recently negotiated film and TV contract. "It's a good contract with solid gains," said White, who was installed in late January after moderates on the union's board orchestrated a revolt against the former leadership.

When members of the Screen Actors Guild cast their ballots for president in the coming weeks, they will be voting for a leader who can best repair the damage inflicted on Hollywood's largest talent union over the last two years. With 125,000 members, the 76-year-old SAG is still the mightiest union in Hollywood. But its clout has been diminished by internal bickering, a divided boardroom and a disastrous power struggle with a smaller union that represents actors as well as broadcast journalists, disc jockeys and recording artists.

Several senior staff members of the Screen Actors Guild received substantial pay hikes in a year when Hollywood's largest actors union faced a nearly $6-million deficit, federal records show. The disclosures are likely to add fuel to an already heated guild election that has pitted so-called moderates who ousted the union's former executive director, Doug Allen, against the group that backed his yearlong contract standoff with the major studios. The moderates installed a new chief negotiator and tapped former general counsel David White as interim executive director.

Ken Howard scored his second big win this week. Screen Actors Guild members elected the veteran character actor, who on Sunday won an Emmy for his role in HBO's "Grey Gardens," as the group's new president, capping a bitter election campaign that divided Hollywood's largest union. Howard soundly defeated "In the Heat of the Night" actress Anne-Marie Johnson, SAG's first vice president, who was backed by the faction that swept outgoing president Alan Rosenberg into office four years ago. A coalition led by Howard consolidated its power on the national board, winning a majority of the 22 seats up for grabs on the 69-member board.

It's not always easy being a towering figure in Hollywood -- just ask 6-foot-6 veteran character actor Ken Howard. For one of his first jobs in Hollywood, the wardrobe department tried to put him in an old Union Army uniform that had been worn by John Wayne in "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," but the sleeves were too short. More recently, when the 65-year-old was cast as New York white-shoe lawyer Phelan Beale in the HBO film "Grey Gardens," the costumers had to sew round the clock because they couldn't find real 1930s suits that fit. Yet in politics, "height helps," says Howard, with a laugh.

Screen Actors Guild: An article in Thursday's Business section on payments made to senior executives of the Screen Actors Guild in the last fiscal year did not make clear that some of the pay increases consisted largely of accrued vacation that, under guild policy, employees could elect to cash out. The union's executive director does not approve such one-time payments.

People 15, pigs 0. The cast of "Apollo 13" and Nicolas Cage and Susan Sarandon took top honors Saturday night at the second annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, which passed out 15 film and TV acting honors. But the talking pig from the Oscar-nominated film "Babe" was nowhere to be found. Cage won the Actor statuette for best male actor in a movie for playing a dying alcoholic in the moody and elegiac "Leaving Las Vegas."

Is the freeway halfempty or half full? Paul Ecker of Diamond Bar says the survey that found L.A. to have the nation's most congested roadways was unduly negative. "We have the emptiest carpool lanes," Ecker bragged. METRO HOOF: Marino Pascal of L.A., meanwhile, snapped a photo in Pasadena that points up one of the primary causes of the gridlock. It's all those darn horse carriages.