My union is on strike.
Given that I’m a writer, you might think I’d be in the Writer’s Guild, but I have belonged to SAG/AFTRA, the Screen Actors Guild/American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, since 1978.
When I left acting, I was told to never let my SAG membership lapse. That’s how valuable it was. Getting into the union was a catch 22- you couldn’t appear in a television or movie role unless you were in SAG, and you couldn’t join SAG unless you had a film or TV role credit. The trick was to get a director or producer to say you were the only person on earth for a role, and that no union actor would do.
I am grateful to Alan King and Rupert Hitzig, the producers who cast me in their made-for-TV movie How to Pick Up Girls, as the only actor who could play the role of Pretty Girl on Sidewalk.
Membership in SAG got me into television commercials, numerous blink-and-you-miss-me roles in big movies and marginally larger roles in small ones. But for the past forty years, my membership has consisted of paying dues and scoring awards season movie screeners.
Until now. The current SAG strike is about streaming platform residual payments and building limits and protections around A.I., and we struck in solidary with the WGA. I am seriously thinking of going into New York to stand on a picket line. What goes through my mind is the scene from the movie Norma Rae, where Sally Field defiantly stands on a table holding a handmade UNION sign over her head, and her fellow textile workers shut their machines down one by one.
It is significant that what inspires me is a character portrayal in a movie that would not exist, save for the members of the unions that are striking.
For SAG and WGA, striking feels existential. We are standing up for the unique forms and vital function of human art in human culture. We stand for Norma Rae, and Norma Rae.