Jamie Fishback

The SAG Stories

// February 27th, 2009 // Acting

Currently, I’m a non-union actor, and one of the goals that I’ve set for myself is to become eSAG (SAG eligible) in the first quarter of 2009. I’ve been in the process of trying to find out how to get into SAG. The two ways that I knew of before asking around were: 1. get 3 SAG background vouchers, or 2. get taft-hartley into an existing project (very hard to do).

Actually, with where our time is in this industry, I have heard, and found out myself, that it is really hard to do one as well. All the SAG actors want to work, so they’re taking what ever they can get, including background. Which means there is no extra SAG background work for non-union people to do. Bummer

One of the great things that I have found, is that there are several ways of getting your SAG card without too much help from other people

This is from an email from Shanna Micko on her experience on getting her SAG card:

A couple weeks ago, we decided to register our project with SAG because a number of our actors are SAG and we wanted to become legit, so my producing partner called over there and talked to someone who deals with internet agreements. I don’t know all the details because he set it all up, but from what I can tell, the woman there was very helpful in getting us set up. We went down to fill out the paperwork that day and we became SAG signatory. Toward the end of our meeting, the woman mentioned we could Taft Hartley principal actors if need-be. I’m pretty much the only principal on the show that’s not SAG, so we filled out the Taft-Hartley paperwork the next day and sent it in. And that was that. Pretty awesome! I never even dreamed I could get in on my own project!

And from Justin

My parents are real estate agents. They own a website for people to search properties etc. I approached them with this idea: produce a web video for your website, hire me as a SAG actor, and I’ll do it cheap. So they put me in front of a green screen (which they changed to a white background), I read about a page of copy welcoming people to the website, they posted the video, and now I’m sag. I got the letter from them inviting me into the union.

Now, here’s what my parents had to do.

They called SAG and said, “I really like this person and I want to hire him. He’ll only do it if it’s SAG. I want to produce a video for my website, what’s the absolute cheapest way to do it?” SAG told them that they could either become a signatory company (no fees to join, but a lot of paperwork) or hire a signatory company to produce it (a bit more expensive, but can be done cheap if you know a small time production house that will simply shoot you and give the footage). My parents chose to become a SAG company. They had to pay Health and Retirement which was about $145 and then my rate was about $1100. They posted it on the website (makes it legitimate) and I got my letter. Easy!

Now, this could be done with any family member who has any business, LLC, DBA, Corporation, anything. Or friend of family. Web video is cheap to produce and easy to post. You can offer to help with the costs of production or hook people up. Can be done on a camcorder. Not a big deal. And do it near somebody’s birthday or something and offer a cash gift. Crazy coincidence if it also happened to be close to the same amount paid you.

Doing it yourself seems to be the best way of going about it. Another way, that I think might be a little sketch, is paying a CD to bring you in at the top of the list for any SAG background work they might have. I haven’t found or heard if there are rules against this, but still seems messed to have to pay to play. And then on top of that you have to pay SAGs overwhelming price to become a part of their guild.*

I hope this research has helped you. If you got your SAG card in a different way, please leave a comment on how, and I’ll make sure to add it into the post.

* Reminder: SAG is not a union, it is a guild, unions specifically provide jobs to their members, guilds do not.