DGA defends new-media deal

14,000 members will receive missive today

By DAVE MCNARY

In a slap at SAG and its stalled contract talks, the DGA's issued a staunch defense of its new-media deal with the majors and its exemption for low-budget productions.

The missive, titled "Giving New Media Room to Grow" and penned by DGA president Michael Apted as a message to members in the guild's monthly magazine, will hit 14,000 member mailboxes today. It comes with SAG and the congloms in the eighth week of a stalemate that's been prolonged partly due to SAG's insistence that it can't accept the terms of the deals signed by the DGA, WGA and AFTRA.

Apted said the exemption -- which applies to productions with budgets under $15,000 a minute, $300,000 per program or $500,000 per series -- was crucial to allowing producers make "experimental" programs for the Internet with non-union members.

"We must be flexible to allow that experimentation to flourish," he added.

Apted noted that the DGA exemption includes the provision that if an AMPTP company hires someone who has previously been employed in a DGA category, the production is then automatically covered by the DGA agreement. And though he didn't mention the Screen Actors Guild by name in the pagelong message, the implication's clear that the DGA believes SAG's being inflexible by demanding jurisdiction over all made-for-Internet productions.

"Critics of this approach argue that union jurisdiction must be absolute," he said. "If some productions are allowed to be non-union, they claim, producers will take advantage of the loopholes, and eventually, all productions will be non-union. But before there can be a union job, there has to be a job. And despite all the grandiose talk about the coming bonanza, new media hasn't yet started raining money."

Apted said in the letter that giving Hollywood unions jurisdiction over all new-media production without exception would make it economically unfeasible for AMPTP companies to make low-budget shows for the Internet -- which would mean that such production would gravitate either to non-signatories such as Google or toward non-union studios subsidiaries.

SAG national exec director Doug Allen issued a blistering response toApted.

"I think what really stands logic on its head is the idea that the way to organize union work is to encourage signatories to produce non-union under our contracts," Allen said. "It is not appropriate to wait until new media reigns supreme to assert jurisdiction."