So you’ve decided to make a movie. Congratulations! You’ve picked the single most expensive medium there is to express your artistic vision. (Or, God forbid, to attempt to entertain people.) You’ve got a script, you’ve got filmmakers, but now you need the wonderful people who will bring your words to life: actors.
If you live in Los Angeles, there are plenty of actors to choose from. That guy ranting to himself on the street corner? He’s an actor. The woman who took your lunch order? Also an actor. The lady in the car behind you, reading a highlighted copy of Waiting for Godot while she should be watching the road … you get the idea.
When you’re making a movie, one of the first questions you have to answer in pre-production is whether or not you’re going to use actors who are in the Screen Actors Guild. For those who don’t know, this is the huge union that represents players in all filmed formats, and makes sure they don’t get taken advantage of. Unfortunately for you, you’re an indie filmmaker with no money, so you’ll probably be the one getting taken. To the bank.
Yes, you can use non-union actors. But since most of the good actors are in SAG, trying to make a solid low-budget film without them is a bit of a Catch-22. Unless you cast yourself. Which, unless you’re Mel Gibson or Kevin Costner, is probably not going to help.
So you’re casting SAG actors. In our case, we happen to have a lot of filmmaker friends, so we asked around to find people for our specific parts. As we were doing that, we began talking to SAG about making “Fugue” a union picture.
You see, if you’re making a feature, SAG has very strict rules about how their actors get paid. First, they WILL be paid. Up front, in cash. No matter if your budget is ten dollars or ten million. The days of deferred pay for low-budget features are gone, my friends. You could fudge things and try to make it for the Internets, deferring the pay, but a) once you show it anywhere outside the Interwebs, the actors must be paid immediately, and b) their rate is eight times what it costs to pay them up front.
Bearing all this in mind, we decided to sign the SAG Ultra-Low Budget agreement. This lets us hire SAG actors at the rate of $100 per day, and we can take the movie anywhere we want. But no so fast – as an employer, you also have to pay workman’s comp and unemployment insurance. “But I’m a low-budget filmmaker!” you cry. “I’m not even paying myself.”
“Too bad,” responds SAG while reclining on a large pile of money. (Actually, what they said was much nicer and more useful. Sometimes I can’t resist a caricatured villain.) What our rep Margaret told us was – guess what? There are payroll companies that specialize in low-budget films. For a low one-time administration fee, those companies will process your paperwork, send the checks to SAG, make sure the unemployment is taken care, and even act as the employer of record for tax purposes. Literally, all you have to do is send them the check.
Our company was NPI, and I recommend them highly to anyone wanting to make a film. They answered all our questions, turned around paperwork fast, and were generally nice and helpful.
One more wrinkle I found interesting: once you sign a contract with SAG, you are required to send them a percentage of what you plan to pay the actors in your movie. This is so if you skip town without paying your performers, the actors get paid something for their effort. Here’s the thing: SAG holds this money in an interest-bearing account until you send them the final cast list and budget, usually once you’re done with shooting. Once they get that, they send you back the deposit within four to six weeks.
But the whole time they have it, they’re making money off it. For a small movie like ours, it’s not that big a deal. But for a $40 million rom com? In which the actors’ salaries are at least half that? We’re talking millions in interest. Which, in the age of Bernie Madoff, seems kind of shady to me. Especially because the actors still have to pay dues every year.
Other than that, we had a pretty good time being a SAG signatory. For more specific and certainly more correct information, you can check out sagindie.org. If you have any questions for us, feel free to ask. I’m by no means an expert, but always willing to share our experience.
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