Canadian Union Takes Bite Out of U.S. Actors' Residuals (Exclusive)...

The Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists charges American actors and other non-members a 25 percent processing fee, while members of the Canadians-only organization pay a fraction of that amount. The union blames "U.S. actors coming up and taking Canadian jobs."

An Arctic blast swept in from Canada last week as that country's largest performers union rebuffed efforts by American actors seeking refunds of a 25 percent "service charge" the union withholds from their residuals checks, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The fee, which applies to non-members only, is as much as 11 times higher than what members pay, but according to the union – the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists – membership is only open to Canadian citizens or residents.

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The size of the fee appears to be unprecedented. A source close to SAG – which charges no service fee on residuals – indicated that the guild will be looking into the matter. AFTRA declined to comment.
The 25 percent service charge is "grossly unfair," said Vincent Spano, who starred in Alive, a 1993 film shot in British Columbia. "It feels like a penalty for working in the country and being an American," he added, while noting that he loved Canada and its people.
An official of ACTRA's Vancouver-based branch, the Union of British Columbia Performers, left a voicemail for another performer on Alive, saying "you guys signed a contract, there was a statement in there about what the residual fees would be when you're a non-member." However, the official – UBCP's chief financial officer, Connie Brown – wouldn't explain what contract she was referring to, despite THR's requests.
ACTRA national executive director Stephen Waddell told THR in a statement that "the provision for a service charge for non-members can be found in the ACTRA Constitution." Left unexplained was how non-members could be bound by the constitution of an organization they weren't permitted to join.
David Marciano, who appeared in the Toronto-shot series Due South, told THR he had contacted ACTRA about five years ago and was told that the 25 percent fee was charged on all residuals checks that were sent outside the country.
UBCP and ACTRA offered a series of shifting and inconsistent explanations for the size of the fee, and for a 2008 hike from a prior level of 5 percent. Initially, Brown told at least one performer that the increase was due to rollbacks imposed by producers in 2007, and that the fee was set by ACTRA's national head office, leaving UBCP powerless to change it.
In response, an ACTRA national spokeswoman in Toronto told THR that the fee had been 25 percent since the mid-1990's. Informed by a reporter that this was not the case – THR had reviewed a series of payments made by UBCP to Alive actors – the spokeswoman had no explanation. She suggested calling UBCP – and also said that UBCP operates its own residuals processing department and was free to set its fee at whatever level it chose, contrary to Brown's explanation.
Told of this, Brown changed course, saying that the fee had indeed been 25 percent for many years and was set at the same level as ACTRA national's out of "solidarity with our parent union." Solidarity has its limits though: ACTRA national charges members a 5 percent service fee on residuals in addition to 2.25 percent dues, while UBCP charges members the same dues but no service fee.
Brown added in an email that "I did misinterpret one of my colleagues when they said that `we can no longer charge admin fees' as being related to the 25 percent change." That's apparently a reference to administration fees that producers pay – on top of residuals – in order to support the residuals department. It's unclear why Brown's colleague described them as a thing of the past, since such fees (at a 1 percent level) are in fact mandated by UBCP's 2009-2012 agreement.
As for why Alive actors saw their "service charges" leap from 5 percent to 25 percent, Brown now ascribes this to a procedural change, telling THR that residuals for the 1993 film had been processed manually until a new database system was implemented in 2008. The 5 percent level was erroneous, she said, and should have been 25 percent all along.
Missing from Brown's explanation was why the Alive residuals had been processed manually for a decade and a half, whether other projects had been processed in this way as well, how the 5 percent figure had come about, why the union hadn't notified the actors of the mistake and how or whether the union decided not to retroactively correct its error by recouping the undercharges from future residuals.
"They easily grabbed thousands of dollars from the recent Alive residuals we received," said Christian Meoli, a veteran SAG member who first brought the situation to THR's attention. "That's just one movie," he added. "Can you imagine how much they take from actors annually like this?"
When asked whether the 25 percent figure – or the eleven-fold differential between members and non-members – was fair or reasonable, UBCP's Brown suggested that it was appropriate, because "there are lots of U.S. actors coming up and taking Canadian jobs." The British Columbia Film Commission's statistics suggest otherwise, however: over 75 percent of film and TV production expenditures in the province in 2010 came from foreign productions.
Indeed, Alive was a Paramount film, and Due South a CBS series. Both were produced under ACTRA contracts prior to SAG's 2002 imposition of Global Rule 1, which requires SAG members to work under a SAG contract even on foreign productions.
In a conversation with this reporter, Brown proposed to put UBCP president Alvin Sanders on the line to discuss the matter further. The offer was unexpected, since Brown, in her voicemail message to actor Ele Keats, had said that Sanders "thought it would be better if I called back and gave you the position, because he not might be as diplomatic" as Brown. In any case, Brown returned a couple of minutes later and said that Sanders was not willing to speak about the issue after all.
Ironically, Sanders himself is a U.S. import: he was born in California, and moved to Vancouver when he was 32, according to his IMDb biography.
Thank you Hollywood Reporter

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The Devil and Demian Bichir

By ALEX KUCZYNSKI

You can learn a lot about a man by the way he disembowels an avocado.

Demian Bichir, the Mexican film star, stood in my kitchen at lunchtime testing the pile of avocados on the counter. He wanted to make guacamole the way he used to as a busboy at Rosa Mexicano in the 1980s, during his first sustained lap as an actor in the United States. Instead of a contrived lunch date at a restaurant, digital recorders whirring, he decided to come over to my apartment with a bottle of Patrón tequila and his hands ready for cooking.

I had prepared the molcajete, the traditional Mexican version of a mortar and pestle, and gathered the onions, cilantro, tomatoes, jalapeños, avocados and habaneros. (“Habaneros?” he said. “If you want to kill somebody.”) I stashed the tequila in the freezer.

“This one doesn’t feel right,” he said, touching an avocado’s papery skin. “But this guy, and this guy” — he reached for another and, squinting, palmed the fruit as gently as if it were a bird’s egg ready to hatch — “and this guy are perfect.” Within a second, a six-inch Wüsthof cook’s knife had sliced the avocado in half and Bichir, looking into my eyes, brought down the knife into the palm of his hand with a thwap.

Oh, God. Do we call an ambulance?

No. Locking the pit onto the blade of the knife, he worked it free in a deft corkscrew motion, accompanying his Kabuki with sound effects. “Poom, poom, poom. Whish.” He cross-hatched each side — “pap, pap, pap” — and spooned out the perfect square chunks into the molcajete.

Delicacy, precision, startling force: these are qualities that defined Bichir’s performance in “A Better Life,” a remarkable film that has cemented his reputation as a formidable talent in Hollywood. A household name in Mexico for two decades, he has become familiar to American audiences in recent years as Fidel Castro in Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” and as the brutally handsome, morally Manichean mayor of Tijuana and husband to Mary-Louise Parker in Showtime’s totally twisted, insanely entertaining Emmy-winning series “Weeds.”

The son of a Mexican theater director and an actress, Bichir is one of three acting brothers — Odiseo, Demian and Bruno— so famous for their prolific output that in 2003 the Mexican MTV Movie Awards created the category “Best Bichir in a Movie.” (Demian won.) He grew up in the barrios of Mexico City, poor but surrounded by books. “My parents met in the theater, and they grew up loving theater, and when my brothers and I decided to become actors, we had all we needed in our library at home,” he said.


Everett Collection
Bichir as an undocumented gardener in Chris Weitz’s new film, “A Better Life.”
In “A Better Life,” Bichir is Carlos Galindo, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who scrapes out an existence as a gardener, peering in at an American dream of swimming pools, housekeepers and big cars in the Hollywood Hills. When Carlos’s sister lends him enough money to buy a truck, which would catapult him from day laborer to gardening boss, he hesitates: she hasn’t told her husband she has taken the money out of their savings account. And there is so much more at stake. Carlos has no driver’s license, so being pulled over means instant arrest, deportation and separation from his son, whom he has raised as a single father.

He buys the truck; the next day, in an act of insidious betrayal, it is stolen. One of the tougher scenes to watch is one in which Carlos stands on a busy street, his work clothes briny with sweat, his eyes fruitlessly searching the traffic for his truck — the dream that will rescue him and his child from their gang-controlled East L.A. barrio, that will allow them to live in a house with more than one bed and one sofa. His eyes alight on a police officer, yet he can’t ask for help. In Bichir’s face, we see that Carlos knows his situation is utterly futile, and he and his child are vulnerable. The sense of despair and desperation is all-encompassing.


Bichir calls it one of the most important works of his career, “and for an actor,” he added, “the character of Carlos Galindo has the same dimension and depth as Lear or Hamlet — it’s that powerful.” When he first met with Chris Weitz — whose grandmother Lupita Tovar was perhaps Mexico’s most famous actress — the director told Bichir that he was not going to make an overtly political film, but that he would set out to present a simple, powerful story that happened to have as one of its themes the Mexican immigrant experience.

“I didn’t see any gimmicks, any Hollywood tricks,” Bichir said. “I need to be moved and for something to speak to me truthfully.”

While the movie is political, certainly, Weitz (director of “About a Boy,” “The Golden Compass” and “The Twilight Saga: New Moon”) chose to tell the story of Carlos Galindo as a piece of social realism, rather than as political propaganda. However, as Weitz told me, “the moment you train a camera on someone, especially a film camera, you say they are worthy of being paid attention to, and it elicits sympathy. In that regard, the film is political by default.” But he chose not to push that button too hard and risk “turning Carlos into a symbol rather than a closely observed character,” he said. In that sense, “A Better Life” is a story about the delicate relationship between a father and son, about loss of culture, about isolation, about the spiritual lives of two nations.

Bichir moved to New York when he was 22. “My mother said, ‘What? You can’t move there! They shoot people at 2 o’clock in the afternoon! Oh my God!’ ” He auditioned at Lee Strasberg and was told he was already an actor and he should save the $5,000 tuition. “And that’s when I stopped acting,” he said. “I wanted to give my actor a break. I wanted to live and to learn English. I wanted to be anything, a cabdriver, a busboy, anything to keep me away from acting for a while.”

Thus, his stretch as a busboy at Rosa Mexicano, where his job included making guacamole in front of each customer’s table. “I think I still hold the record for making 39 guacamoles in one lunch,” he said. Then on to Los Angeles, where he spent four years going on auditions and trying to land a role. “Nothing happened,” he said. “It was hard, really hard.” When he was offered a role in “Hasta Morir,” he took it, returning to Mexico, where he won an Ariel, the Mexican equivalent of an Oscar.

In Mexico, he worked all the time. “And then one day, I was about 41, and I pictured my life,” he said. “Soon, I would be living in a house with a big swimming pool, drinking a bloody mary and thinking, what if I had tried a little harder? Been a little more adventurous? Tried a little longer?” Divorced, with no attachments, he moved back to L.A. “Something had fundamentally changed in me, in my hard drive.”

While serving on the jury at the Ibiza Film Festival, he got a call at 5 in the morning from Steven Soderbergh, who asked him to play Castro in his biopic about Che Guevara. “And that was when it all began,” he said. “That was when everything changed.”

I first met Bichir before a screening of “A Better Life” in New York. Slender, animated, almost impish, his green eyes alight, he reminded me of a self-effacing Fred Astaire. “I’m writing a serious piece about you,” I said. “Because I’m — such—_ a serious actor?” Each word dropped with a beat of expert comic timing, as if to say: I. Am. Not. A. Serious. Actor. Lady. Get. A. Life.

As the film began, I couldn’t place the man I had just met on the screen. The wiry, bright-eyed comic in the lobby was replaced by a heavyset man whose face had been eaten away by weariness and fear, his eyes dull, the barest flicker of light left in them to suggest his soul was still alive way down inside.

Bichir is somewhat of a Method actor: he immersed himself in a life like Galindo’s by driving a gardener’s truck — which he bought off the street from some paisanos — wearing the same unwashed clothes for days, sleeping four hours a night. One of the film’s producers told me that two Mexicans spotted Bichir in L.A., in his gardener’s truck and shook their heads, saying, “Look, man! That’s Demian Bichir. He’s sure fallen on hard times.”

Yet he has such a light, comic gift, it was hard to watch him make guacamole and think that this was the same man who so brilliantly captured Castro’s threatening physicality, the curlicued accent, the voice veering from thunderous to almost ethereal, the powder-keg personality. Difficult to imagine this funny guy dancing salsa in my kitchen to Akwid’s “California” (a song from the soundtrack to “A Better Life”) as the gangster mayor who orders murders and makes a point to his pregnant girlfriend by basically raping her over his desk.

“It is extraordinary, Demian’s vitality in contrast to the performance he gives,” Weitz said. “All of the energy goes underground.” Benicio del Toro, who worked with Bichir on “Che,” describes him as one of the strongest actors he’s worked with. For the part of Castro, del Toro said, Soderbergh “needed someone who was strong but not someone who looked like he was acting strong. And that is kind of hard to find. Pacino can be strong without acting strong. Hoffman, too. Bichir has that quality, that gravitas.”

“We all have that capacity, to be two things,” Bichir said. “And after all I was named for both the devil and the angel. Demonio y angel. Dem-y-an.” (His parents took his name from the Herman Hesse novel “Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth.”)

Oliver Stone was drawn to the demonic side, and cast Bichir as a huckster in his next movie, “Savages,” based on a Don Winslow novel about pot growers and Mexican drug cartels. “He can play heavy,” Stone said, adding that “all he needs is one big role as a narcotraficante and if he hits that note just right he will have a worldwide reputation in a second.”


Everett Collection
Bichir in his role as a drug dealer and mayor of Tijuana in “Weeds.”
Mary-Louise Parker, who played his lover and then wife on “Weeds,” also believes he plays good guys, like Carlos Galindo, with an almost sacred perfection. “I might use a word that sounds pretentious, but his performance was almost holy,” she said. “It was beyond being just about depth. He made the film into a Greek tragedy. And he is one of the few actors I know who could make that part humane.” And this from a woman who broke her toe during their first, unexpectedly vigorous love scene. “He is pretty delicious,” she added.

Bichir is dating but admits he is “really bad at long-term commitments.” He did become a father in May; the child is the product of a brief — “and beautiful, please, beautiful, beautiful” — romance in Spain last year. “I try to be as clear as I can be,” he said. “I don’t hide or play stupid games. I try to let everyone know that eventually I will probably be leaving.” In this case, a couple of months after his leave-taking, he got an e-mail informing him he would be a father. Bichir attended the baby’s birth, and she has his surname. “I decided to be there and not run away from the situation. I am her father, and I will love her forever,” he said.

At 48, Bichir feels as if he has experienced a kind of rebirth. “It is a before-and-after moment, for sure,” he said. After the meal and almost an entire bottle of tequila, we were looking out at the city. It was late afternoon. His roles as Castro, as Carlos Galindo and as Miguel Hidalgo in a Mexican production out this year about the country’s founder, are the work he is proudest of. “It would be sad,” he said, “if my best work had been 20 years ago and now I only had memories.”

He also makes great guacamole.

Thanks NY Times

Have a great day ☼

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Demian Bichir’s Performance in "A Better Life" Oscar Worthy

Opens in Limited Release Friday, June 24th

Bel Hernandez
bhernandez@latinheat.com

Demain Bichir’s performance in director Chris Weitz newest film A Better Life is being touted as an Oscar worthy performance and has Hollywood insiders, who can make that happen, talking. Opening in a limited release this Friday, June 24th, A Better Life, the powerful drama about an a family looking to embrace the American dream, only to see it ripped from their grasp, will leave you re-thinking, or at least thinking about, the illegal immigrant debate.

This story is not the usual Hollywood immigrant story about drug mules, sinister coyotes, or the big bad border patrol, it is about survival - of family and dreams. Carlos (Bichir) is gentleminded, hardworking single father trying to make ends meet who takes a leap of faith by purchasing a truck which would allow him, not only to be his own boss but to make more money and make a better life for his son Luis, (Jose Julian). However, fate steps in with a change of plans.

After the financial success of his second directing gig, Twilight Oscar nominee Weitz (for About a Boy) could have done any film, but he chose A Better Life. He called it the “best thing that I’d read in 20 years”.

Weitz , whose grandmother is actress Lupita Tovar (Dracula (1931)), was intent on making this film and was responsible for bringing in the team that made the film happen: Writer Eric Eason (Manito; first time producer, actress Jami Gertz (Still Standing) and former agent Stacey Lubliner, as producers through their production company, Lime Orchard Productions; in addition to producers Christian McLaughlin and famed television and film producer Paul Junger Witt (Dead Poet’s Society, Insomnia).

If distributor Summit Entertainment marketing is successful, and with substantial marketing dollars for the film’s national rollout, the film can potentially find its audience. As for the awards A Better Life is being talked about as a likely contender for a Spirit Award nom next year. However, talk of Oscar consideration will only materialize if there should be a re-release later in the year. Time has a way with helping powerful performances fade away, especially without marketing campaigns to keep it front and center.

A Better Life opens June 24th in a limited release.

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Actors Join L.A. Labor Protesters...

Actors joined thousands of other workers marching over the weekend to preserve collective bargaining rights.

March 26 was dubbed "Solidarity Saturday" in Los Angeles, as thousands of area union workers marched the streets of downtown L.A. and rallied in Pershing Square to protest efforts to weaken public-employee unions. Among those marchers were members of the Screen Actors Guild.

MOVE Hollywood, a SAG committee whose mission includes promoting union solidarity, helped organize the members. Originally called Members on the Move, the committee was formed during the SAG commercials strike of 2000 to organize the picketing and rallies and provide other support. Later its mission broadened; MOVE now stands for "members organizing volunteer efforts."
"Besides our volunteer programs, a very big part of what we do is organize labor unions in support of our members and our sisters and brothers in other labor unions," said Ellen Crawford, a SAG member and the chair of MOVE Hollywood.
As bills that many consider to be anti-labor make their way through state legislatures around the country, union members have taken notice and taken to the streets. Though most of the legislation prompting protests in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana targets public-sector unions, many at the L.A. rally believe that the current political atmosphere represents a threat to all union workers, including performers.
"We're workers. Most people don't think of performers as workers," Crawford said. "A lot of people think all SAG members are like George Clooney, but most of us are middle-class workers. I make my living as an actor and I'm middle-class. I realize it's very different from being a miner or a factory worker or even some of our service unions like IATSE, but we share something in that we all need a safe workplace and we all need a living wage."
Crawford thought it significant that the rally occurred on the day after the 100th anniversary of New York's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 mostly female employees died—some jumping from the building's windows—due to unsafe workplace conditions. "That tragedy spurred on safety standards," said Crawford. "No matter what your profession is, you cannot let an entire century of worker protection be thrown out the window like the women of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. We cannot allow that to happen."
SAG Hollywood board member Patrick Fabian also attended the rally. He was concerned about efforts by some state governments to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights.
"I'm here supporting workers' rights throughout all of America," Fabian said. "I've got three union cards—my Equity card, my SAG card, and my AFTRA card—and when anybody's threatening to take away the collective bargaining rights of the union, I think it's threatening to take away the middle class that makes this country great. I'm here to support all the unions and their right to exist and their right to bargain for their workers."
But it wasn't just solidarity with public employees that brought Fabian downtown on Saturday. He believes that unions provide him with protection as an artist. "I think your highest quality, most talented workers in the industry are union workers," he said. "You need protection in a business that is freelance and artistic. It's the only thing that can actually give you a living wage. We can't all be Tom Cruise; we can't all be the superstars. A middle-class existence is hard enough as an artist, and a union helps ensure that."

Thank you Hollywood Reporter

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Events: "THE MAKING OF A SUPERSTAR"...A DOCUMENTARY

MESSAGE FROM HOST

We are making this documentary to track the progress of actors attending "Book the Job with Hypnosis"...A Workshop for Actors. This class is making a difference. Actors are experiencing immediate shifts in consciousness that reflect in their outward behavior at auditions. They feel more confident, focused and powerful...and you can't fake that. Come join us - participate and be interviewed. Someone, or everyone there is going to break out any minute now! Let us document your rise to SUPERSTARDOM!!!

Are you still nervous at auditions? Are you nailing the audition but not booking the job? Are you booking, but not consistently?

Wherever you are, you know where you want to be: a full-time working actor with a six-figure income and beyond. But conscious desire is not always enough to get what you want.

Hypnosis can help you reach that comfort zone to gain self-confidence and expand your ability to allow a greater level of success in your career. Through guided visualization, you'll experience the entire process from your audition notification to booking the job.

When we visualize success in the state of hypnosis, the Subconscious Mind will accept this experience as fact and we begin to feel more excited, successful and powerful!

Success starts in the mind, so take control of your thoughts and create the career you want! Join Certified Hypnotherapist RoseAnn Kelley for a group hypnotherapy workshop designed just for actors like you!

Cost: $35.00

***First time attendees $11.11***
Cash at the door

***Doors open at 10:45 am***
Free parking

Host:
Yeniffer Behrens and RoseAnn Kelley, C.Ht.310-728-5230
When:
Wednesday, March 02 from 10:45 AM
to 12:30 PM
Where:
True Form Films Production Office at Jeremiah Comey Film Acting Studio
12215 Ventura Blvd., Suite 111 Studio City, CA 91604

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