SAG & AMPTP TO TRY TALKS (talks to continue Wednesday 2/28)

SAG, AMPTP to try talks

Fresh from a jaw-dropping series of internal fights, leaders of the Screen Actors Guild will sit down today with the congloms to put the final touches on a tentative deal on its long-stalled feature-primetime contract.
In a sign of how contentious SAG's unresolved contract has become, dueling demonstrations have been set to take place today outside the talks at the Sherman Oaks, Calif., headquarters of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The "Let's Get Back to Work" coalition of below-the-liners and SAG's Membership First faction -- which has already proclaimed that it will oppose any deal -- have each issued appeals to supporters to attend.

The talks, set to continue Wednesday, may go relatively quickly and lead to a deal -- although that was also the expectation two weeks ago, when similar talks were scheduled but were delayed after SAG president Alan Rosenberg sued to block the firing of national exec director Doug Allen and the ouster of the negotiating committee.

The congloms haven't indicated what parts of the final offer -- which has been on the table since June 30 --they're willing to sweeten in the interests of closing a deal quickly to end the disruption to the business.

During the holiday weekend, interim national exec director David White scheduled a meeting of the national board for Saturday. If that panel votes up a tentative deal, ratification ballots could be sent out as early as next week to SAG's 120,000 members and returned by mid-March.

The talks launch with SAG senior adviser John McGuire as chief negotiator, a role he's filled repeatedly. The negotiating committee, which had been dominated by Membership First, has been replaced by a task force in which moderates fill seven of the 10 slots.

SAG's moderate majority fired Allen twice out of exasperation with his inability to close a deal on the feature-primetime contract, which expired June 30.

The AMPTP companies have insisted they won't revise the final offer despite Allen and Rosenberg's repeated insistence that the proposal's unacceptable. SAG and the AMPTP held 46 separate negotiating sessions between April and November, so each side has full knowledge of the other's positions.

Key areas at the talks may include making the new deal retroactive, the expiration date of the new deal, SAG's proposed product placement language and the companies' demand to eliminate force majeure language. SAG has made million of dollars in claims for actors left without work when TV series went dark during the WGA strike.

In the latest development in Rosenberg's suit, he failed for a third time Friday to overturn the firing of Allen and the abolition of SAG's negotiating committee. A three-judge appeals court panel denied his petition for an expedited ruling to overturn the denial of his request for a temporary restraining order.

The appeals court ruling leaves Rosenberg and his three fellow plaintiffs -- board members Anne-Marie Johnson, Diane Ladd and Kent McCord -- with only long-term options, either through continuing the appeals process or by taking the lawsuit to trial.

Rosenberg led an extraordinary 28-hour filibuster at the last SAG board meeting on Jan. 12-13 to block any vote, prompting the moderates to take the "written assent" route to fire Allen and abolish the negotiating committee on Jan. 26. In order to make the lawsuit moot, the moderates took those steps again Feb. 8.

White, who worked at SAG as general counsel between 2002 and 2006, hasn't yet signed a contract with the guild. Due to filibustering at the five-hour Feb. 8 meeting, the agenda item covering White's contract did not come up for a vote.