I would like to take this moment to give some perspective on the current SAG negotiations. The media always seems to “eat up” the controversy and in-fighting at SAG. So knock it off! “We all have to stand together or divided we fall!” After attending the Los Angeles Town Hall meeting on May 19th, I feel that we have the smartest and best of people working on our behalf and our guild is finally unified! Let’s remain unified and secure our future…
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My name is Anthony DeSantis. It is right that I should stand behind what I send out over the internet. You can IMDB me for reference but suffice to say that I qualify as no man’s “High-Profile” actor. I am, by definition, a middle class actor. I make most of my money from commercials. I’ve never made enough in just over ten years in LA to make a living doing TV and film alone but I have made my Plan 1 benefits every year since 1997 primarily due to commercial work. I’ve never made over $100,000 in one year as an actor. I’m right in the middle class sweet spot. (Full disclosure–I’ve been on the Hollywood Board of the Screen Actors Guild for 5 years and have run with Membership First each of those years. For those of you who don’t know, Membership First has swept the elections save for one or two people here and there for each of those five years. That means that people have believed for those years in what Membership First stood for and what we’ve been doing for longer than the US Department of Homeland Security has been in existence.)
Twenty years ago an actor received his first job on television. His “one line” wasn’t even a complete sentence; it was a hyphenate, just “Seventy-twenty-one.”
The casting director asked him if he would accept what was pretty much the minimum for the show, $600 for the day. Although 20 years ago SAG minimum was just around $350 at the time, it was fairly standard to pay far above that, even to an inexperienced day player at the time.