LABOR MATTERS
IA Endorses Angelides for California Governor
compiled by Jeff Burman
 Jeffrey Burman |
After winning the hard-fought California gubernatorial primary in June, narrowly beating his opponent, State Controller Steve Westly, State Treasurer Phil Angelides will take on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in the November 7 election. Endorsed by the IATSE and the California Labor Federation, Angelides has been Schwarzenegger’s harshest partisan critic in Sacramento since the Hollywood action star won office in the 2003 recall election of former Democratic Governor Gray Davis.
“Angelides is an impassioned wonk who looks every bit the part,” wrote Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect. “Gangly, voluble, brilliant and not shy about showing it, Angelides was a developer who served as the state Democratic Party chairman in the early 1990s and who’s just wrapping up his second term as the state’s chief financial officer––and probably the country’s most powerful proponent of socially responsible capitalism. As a guiding force on the boards of California’s public employee retirement funds––the largest investment funds in the nation––Angelides has steered millions of dollars to inner-city development, small businesses and renewable energy technology.
 California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, State Treasurer, left, is joined by State Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, (D-Los Angeles) to celebrate his victory during an election party in Sacramento, California in June. AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli. |
“More than any other California Democrat, Angelides has opposed, from the start, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. While the ‘Governator’ was trying unsuccessfully to balance the budget by under-funding schools and cutting back admissions to the state’s universities, Angelides countered by proposing to raise taxes on California’s wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers,” adds Meyerson.
Angelides told The Los Angeles Times political analyst George Skelton that he’d need the $5-billion tax hike “to truly balance the state budget without borrowing, fully fund schools under Proposition 98 and finance $930 million in other new projects. These include rolling back university and college fees to the levels they were before Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, expanding student Cal Grants and providing healthcare for all poor kids.”
“And,” says Skelton, “Angelides makes the valid point that if he were elected, after campaigning on a platform to raise taxes, ‘I’d come into office with some capital to get it done.’”
Schwarzenegger Names IATSE VP to California Film Commission
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has asked industry colleagues Danny
DeVito, Bill Duke, Clint Eastwood and Tom Werner to return to the
13-member California Film Commission for two-year terms. The governor
also reappointed 20th Century Fox’s Joe Hartwick and picked
five new commissioners: IATSE Vice President Michael Miller, Fresno
Mayor Alan Autry, producers Stan Brooks and Al Ruddy, and Sony executive
Keith Weaver. Miller is in charge of the IA West Coast office, succeeding
Joe Aredas, who retired in February.
NY City and State Increase Tax Credits
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a reauthorization and expansion
of the “Made in NY” tax credit initiative, which is expected to
provide $30 million in City financing annually for local film and television
productions through 2011. The tax credit initiative has already helped to create
jobs and expand the City’s $5 billion film and TV sector, which supports
employment for more than 100,000 New Yorkers, according to the mayor’s
office.
The New York State Legislature passed a budget that makes its film and television
tax-incentive program permanent until 2012, increases the annual tax allotment
from $25 million to $60 million and crafts a separate and groundbreaking $42
million incentive for commercial producers.
The budget, passed by state lawmakers, allows for New York City to opt in to
the program at its current 5 percent tax rebate with a new $30 million annual
allotment, up from the current $12.5 million. The city recently ran through
its four-year, $50 million cap three years ahead of schedule.
Permitted Production Rises in LA and NY
The Los Angeles region saw a 9 percent rise in off-lot feature activity during
the first quarter, along with a 7 percent gain in TV shooting, the Film LA agency
reports. Permitted feature days rose by 196 to 2,386––though the
figure was well below the first-quarter peak of 3,178 days in 1996. First-quarter
TV activity increased by 7 percent over the 2005 period to 4,996 days, a figure
that eclipsed the record-setting 2004 first quarter by 22 days. Film LA noted
that the most recent gains stemmed almost solely from a 127 percent spike in
reality TV production to 1,942 days.
Film LA president Steve MacDonald cited a 35 percent hike in New York City production days last year and pointed to production spending increases during 2005 of 36 percent in Louisiana, 28 percent in Illinois and 348 percent in New Mexico.
“When you take into account that other regions are just beginning to develop a talent pool and long-term infrastructure, LA’s modest growth is not that encouraging,” he added.
Film Piracy Surpasses $6 Billion, Says Study
Hollywood lost $6.1 billion last year to bootlegging, illegal copying and internet
piracy––about 75 percent higher than previously thought––according
to a new study commissioned by the Motion Picture Association of America.
The study, conducted by LEK Consulting LLC, also put a number on the cost of internet piracy for the first time––$2.3 billion in annual losses––while bootlegging accounted for $2.4 billion and illegal copying hovered at $1.4 billion.
‘Who Needs Sleep?’
Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler is known for the big movies he
has filmed––Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?, In the Heat of
the Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest––as well as
some well-known labor and “movement” films like Bound for Glory,
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine and Matewan, writes Jordan Barab in the online
Confined Space.
His new film, Who Needs Sleep? is a documentary inspired by the death of assistant
camera operator Brent Hershman in a 1997 car crash. Hershman was driving home
from the set of the movie Pleasantville.
Among those interviewed are producer Richard Zanuck, director Sam Mendes, writer-director John Sayles, actors Paul Newman, Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks; AMPTP President Nick Counter and IATSE President Tom Short. Wexler hopes to awaken the industry to the problem of sleep deprivation plaguing its crews.
DGA, WGA, SAG Reach Disney Deal
The Walt Disney Company reached a deal with Hollywood unions that will put the
long-delayed “mobisode’’ spin-off of hit ABC series Lost back
on track, said the company in April. Lost Video Diaries will air as mini-episodes
on mobile telephones (hence the term “mobisode”).
The Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America all hailed the unprecedented agreement for establishing a template covering compensation for future programming on new digital platforms.
The agreements could help lessen labor tensions that have been running high in Hollywood. Writers, actors and directors had blasted ABC’s decision to pay residuals on TV episode sales to video iPod users under the same payment formula for DVD sales, writes Richard Verrier in The Los Angeles Times.
Canadian Writers Capture Digital Sector
A few weeks later, the union representing Canadian screenwriters signed a collective
agreement with producers in both English- and French-speaking Canada. Once ratified
by members of the Writers Guild of Canada (WGC), the new three-year contract
will offer a modest fee increase of 4 percent over the term of the agreement,
increase insurance contributions for producers and give television movies and
miniseries writers a 6.5 percent pay raise, writes Tamsen Tillson in Variety.
Notably, it also extends coverage to the burgeoning digital sector, including “webisodes,” “mobisodes” and digital downloading. The WGC represents 1,800 screenwriters in Canada.
AFL-CIO, CTW Form Political Coordinating Committee
The AFL-CIO and several unions that quit the federation announced the formation
of a coordinating committee to allow the rival federations to cooperate closely
on political efforts this fall, writes Steven Greenhouse in The New York Times.
The two groups also announced an agreement in which the breakaway federation,
known as the Change to Win Coalition, would withdraw its threat to have its
union locals stop paying dues to state and local central labor councils.
“The entire labor movement is united by the desire to make working people’s issues the country’s priorities this election year, and we are taking all the necessary steps to effectively coordinate our efforts toward this end,” said AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and Change to Win Coalition chair Anna Burger.
Jeff Burman represents Sound Editors on the Guild's Board of Directors. He can be reached at jeffrey.burman@nbcuni.com.
 John Kenneth Galbraith, 1971. © Barnabas Bosshart/CORBIS |
Galbraith Challenged ‘Conventional Wisdom’
“John Kenneth Galbraith, a longtime professor of economics whose
best-selling books challenged the idea that a surging economy was
a measure of social excellence, and instead urged government to divert
more of the nation’s wealth to social needs,” writes Barry
Stavro in The Los Angeles Times. Galbraith died on April 29, at 97.
His writing influenced a “surge of federal spending on social
programs in the 1960s, in what came to be known as the Great Society
during Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration,” adds Stavro.
Here are a few more thoughts inspired by Galbraith’s analysis
and advocacy.
“He lamented what he believed was an excess accumulation of private wealth at the expense of public needs, and he warned that an unfettered free market system and capitalism without regulation would fail to meet basic social demands,” writes Bart Barnes in The Washington Post.
Galbraith was “a mixture of sociologist, political scientist and journalist. His three most influential books were snapshots of the America of their time. In American Capitalism (1952), giant firms were balanced by the ‘countervailing power’ of, for instance, unions. In The Affluent Society (1958), massive private consumption co-existed with public decay; in The New Industrial State (1967), producers held all the economic power and competition was irrelevant,” says an unsigned essay in The Economist.
“Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics,” writes Holcomb Noble and Douglas Martin in The New York Times. “Among his 33 books was The Affluent Society, one of those rare works that forces a nation to re-examine its values.”
“Galbraith, in his 90s, could look back to a time when a reformer could not only body forth a social vision, but tentatively identify the agencies, whereby that vision could be put into practice,” writes Alexander Cockburn in The Nation. “As I read The Nation’s recent special issue on reforming the world’s economic arrangements, with fine contributions by Stiglitz, D’Arista, Galbraith’s son James and others, not once in all the essays was the question of agency raised or the Democratic Party alluded to.”
Jeff Burman represents Sound Editors on the Guild's Board of Directors. He can be reached at jeffrey.burman@nbcuni.com.