The sun was setting in Alan Rosenberg’s sitting room at his home in Santa Monica on Wednesday, as he considered the state of his life two days after an internal coup ousted his hand-chosen negotiator, Doug Allen. He’d been writing a song about the union, and sang it for TheWrap. (Hear the song, or read the lyrics.)
“My life sucks,” Rosenberg, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, acknowledged. “Here I am – my partner was fired. I’m muzzled. It’s certainly disappointing. I’ve seen all my hard work of the past three and a half years amounting to nothing. The liars and manipulators have won.”
He was speaking about his fellow unionists, of course, not about his opponents in the contract talks.(He has also split recently with his wife, actress Marg Helgenberger.) In a 90-minute talk about what went wrong this week and what has gone wrong in the past seven months of negotiations, Rosenberg blamed the lack of a deal on those who opposed him and who now control the fate of negotiations.
And he continued to defend the ousted national executive director, Doug Allen, lauding him as “extraordinary” and “the best thing that’s ever happened to our union.”
“Yeah, I’m angry,” he said. “Sad. Disappointed. The last two days I feel sort of isolated. I’m shut out from planning meetings. I feel isolated from the operations of the union.”
Indeed he is. Within a few hours Rosenberg’s replacements at SAG and counterparts at the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers jointly announced two days of meetings on Feb. 3 and 4 in Sherman Oaks.
When asked why he considered Allen so extraordinary, Rosenberg said he and Allen had been willing “to move mountains” to get a deal with the studios, but the studios would not move an inch, while his negotiator was undermined by the moderate factions in New York and Los Angeles.
“How do you get anything done when 48% of your board is going to trash you in the press?” he asked.
Rosenberg said he has been buoyed by a flood of emails of support, but encounters angry guild members when he goes to auditions. Their anger confuses him, he said. “Why are people angry at us when everyone knows it’s a bad deal?” “We did something wrong because we continue to fight?”
The fact that the economy is in recession is no reason to take a bad deal, he said, which gave no concessions on residuals for new media. “People talk about the economy, but you don’t abdicate your responsibility,” he said. “No deal is better than a bad deal.”
Rosenberg admitted that he “did a little filibustering” at a contentious, 28-hour meeting on Jan 12 and 13, where moderates tried to oust Allen. But he insisted he followed the rules, and drew out the meeting to defend an unjustly targeted Allen. “I was not going to allow a man as extraordinary as he is, who has done so much for the membership, be scapegoated in a kangaroo court.”
