What box does this go in? (Part Two)

With less than a week before we wanted to start shooting scenes from Airport Security on HD video, we still had not received word from the local ACTRA office on what options, if any, we might be able to use in order to allow union members to participate at our level of budget.  And while you may, dear reader, feel the urge to vent frustration with ACTRA, I caution you against it: this is exactly the same thing that happens every time I — or any entrepreneurial artist with a gut understanding of how a 14-year-old with a camcorder has more freedom to create digital media than any trained, unionized professional — talks to any non-grass-roots organization about ideas that don’t fit into older notions of what theatre, film, and promotion should be.  The truth is that the waters are so murky and so complex that nobody is willing to take the lead on setting guidelines and making things happen; in the meantime, innovators in this area are left expressing frustration at a system that that can’t keep pace with the rapidly-changing world of media technology and self-production.

There was a time when — probably thanks to my Catholic, prairie upbringing — I would have simply shrugged, defeated, and put my visions of cross-media and cross-discipline work on a shelf until the gatekeepers defined the rules.  But I am rapidly learning that the way to push the yardstick forward is to transgress, to show that such transgressions do not make the sky fall, and then force someone else’s hand.  I’m not proud of it, in the least… but it works.

One week before shooting, then, Patrick and I were faced with the prospect of doing an all non-union version of our video project.  It wouldn’t be too hard, actually: the only union member who was supposed to be in front of the camera was me.  The other members of the theatre cast who were available for the shoot were not members of ACTRA or Equity, and were therefore as free to perform on a non-union shoot as any other member of the public.  Many of the characters in the three scenes we wanted to film will not appear again in the theatre incarnation of Airport Security, so we could conceivably cast other non-union friends in those roles as well.  As time pressure mounted, it became clear that the best option would be to put out a non-union casting call for our video.

And so we did.  And in what felt like minutes after the casting breakdown was posted on Facebook, we got a call from the local ACTRA office.  There were options available to us, after all.  I have no doubt that the office would have gotten back to us at some point — they really were trying to see what they could do for us — but the tight nature of our timeline forced us to act, and the visibility of the casting call forced other people to act as well.

One of the other fun things about the relationship between Equity and ACTRA is something called the reciprocal agreement.  Written in 1971, this agreement between the two organizations essentially states that you can’t be a professional stage actor and an amateur film actor, and vice versa.  It states that Equity members who want to work in film and television must join ACTRA, and ACTRA members who want to work on stage must join Equity.  Many, many Canadian actors (including me) are members of both organizations (with all the surreal strangeness that entails: two sets of union dues, two insurance plans, and two retirement plans for people doing the same job in two different contexts — that’s a whole other quagmire), but there are many Equity actors who are not in ACTRA, and vice versa.  I tell you this because, in our region, there have been problems with members of one union working “illegally” in the jurisdiction of the other union, generally due to ignorance of the reciprocal agreement; and I suspect that one of the reasons we were called so quickly after our casting breakdown was posted was because it was suspected that our intention was to put Equity members in front of a camera — which is not true.  But I digress.

In the midst of being inundated with resumes from non-union people who were keen on being in our video (more on that in another post), I met with the ACTRA branch office staff member and came away, less than an hour later, with a plan.  In fact, it’s important to point out that they bent over backwards to help us, on an impossibly-short timeline, and we owe them a huge debt of thanks.  We were given permission to set up our project under the low-budget production agreement, and while they usually do not allow non-union members to take part in such projects, the idea that we wanted to preserve cast members from the Equity-approved theatre production was seen as reasonable justification for getting a few permits.  Once we have a theatrical screening of the finished video (which we plan to do at a theatre company fundraiser in March), we can post video to the web.  And we were able to audition and cast all the other speaking roles from the ACTRA talent pool, which was a huge bonus for us.  Turning the production into a union shoot also allowed us access to a couple of other terrific services, such as posting our union casting call to a local mailing list of ACTRA talent and talent agents, and an incredible insurance package. Less than 12 hours after that non-union casting call went out, we updated it to a union casting call; 24 hours after that, we had an almost all-ACTRA cast for our project, and were ready to begin shooting.

In the midst of this, some people asked why we’d want to go union in the first place.  Aside from the fact that Patrick and I are both proud union members ourselves, the simple answer is that the project is too important to us: with a two-day shooting schedule and a sixteen-page script, we did not have time to teach non-union actors, with limited on-camera experience, how to animate a performance within the technical machinery of a film set.  Patrick and I have also never produced a video of this length or magnitude before, and in a sense we wanted to cover our asses by bringing people to the set who could help us along.  The ability to use ACTRA talent on-set was a huge factor in the success of our shoot.

In my next post, I’ll talk about casting!