American Cartel – Ultra Low Budget

Agave Productions, LLC

Location: San Antonio, TX

Start Date: August 24, 2008

Devil’s Thumb – Low Budget Modified

Ranch Studios

Location: Austin, TX

Start Date: August 4, 2008

Friday Night Lights – TV Series

NBC Studios, Inc

Location: Austin, TX

Start Date: July 2008

Casting: Beth Sepko

Guys – Low Budget

Guys the Movie, LLC

Location: Austin, TX

Start Date: To be determined

More Moments the Go – Ultra Low Budget

Blank Action Productions

Location: Austin, TX.

Start: July 8, 2008

Portion 71 – Ultra Low Budget

Manny Hernandez

Location: Dallas, TX

Start Date: To be determined

Power Sun, A – Ultra Low Budget

Field Up Productions

Location: Dallas, TX

Start Date: To be determined

Unbridled–Low Budget

Unbridled the Movie, LLC

Location: Brackettville & Jacksboro, TX

Start Date: To be determined

Diane Holloway’s column in today’s Austin American Statesman touches on this issue, though she isn’t discussing the negotiations or a possible actor’s strike as such.

The writers’ strike crippled the current season and contributed to a precipitous viewer plunge. According to trade publications, shows returning after the three-month absence lost as much as 30 percent of their pre-strike audience. And ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox this season expect to see a 17 percent decline of their combined audience.

This has been an ongoing trend for a while. Last year’s dropoff, the networks explained, happened because Daylight Savings Time came earlier than usual. Nobody actually bought that. The strike will be blamed this year, perhaps more effectively.

It’s still unclear exactly where network viewers have gone, but DVDs, recorded programs, cable and Internet viewing have contributed to that great sucking sound that once was network TV’s dominance.

And to add a bit of evidence to just how dramatically (no pun intended) things are changing in television distribution, there is this:

“Friday Night Lights,” whose death knell sounded for two seasons, got picked up for a third season in April, after NBC struck a deal with DirectTV to share production costs and give the Austin-based show an exclusive run on satellite first.

It’s great news for Texas film production that FNL is still alive and will again shoot in Austin. The fact that the show is alive because DirectTV stepped in to share production costs and thus gets an exclusive first run on the show says something about how actors and their guilds have to look at the current and future distribution landscape.

The producers will probably look at the information above and say “we can’t afford the current compensations structures..our network audience is smaller…we need to roll back actor’s rates.”

But overall, has the size of the audience for filmed, taped, or digitally captured entertainment diminished? Or has it actually increased with the population and just spread out beyond the confines of broadcast television?

Twenty years or so back when the producers and actors were negotiating a deal that included compensation to actors for cable usage, the producers loudly claimed that the industry couldn’t possibly support the same scale of payments to actors that they were receiving on network tv.

‘Don’t kill this infant technology’ was their battle cry. So, the actors relented and settled for deals on cable that, to this day, are insufficient. And now can anyone (leaving content aside) distinguish cable programming from network TV? Yet the compensation to actors, particularly the residual structure, is stuck in the ‘don’t kill the infant technology’ days.

With this history in mind, and with the obvious shift away from income streams such as network TV rerun residuals to DVD distribution of TV product, SAG is in the position of once again accepting a bad deal for actors that will get worse over time, holding out for a better deal through negotiations, or possibly striking to get the producers to move off their current stance.

Over the next few days, it will become more apparent how the current negotiations with AFTRA will impact the current state of affairs. Per Daily Variety:

AFTRA and the majors have launched a second week of primetime negotiations for a deal that’s expected to do little toward easing the town’s strike fears — since SAG still won’t have a new feature-primetime contract once AFTRA makes its deal.

The Screen Actors Guild hasn’t yet responded to an invitation from the majors to resume negotiations May 28. It also hasn’t yet decided whether to ask its 120,000 members for a strike authorization, which requires 75% approval.

And with SAG’s current deal expiring on June 30, the lingering uncertainty has put the brakes on any feature greenlights.

SAG’s scheduled a town hall meeting to update members on the negotiations next Monday in Los Angeles.

Stay tuned. Read the entire Daily Variety article.

Here is the Villa Muse release:

Villa Muse Studios Town Hall Meeting
Wednesday, Feb. 27th

Greetings,

We are sending you this message to raise awareness and support of VILLA MUSE
STUDIOS as we approach the March 6th City Council meeting – where a decision
will be made regarding VILLA MUSE’s future in Austin. As you know, VILLA
MUSE is working with the City of Austin and others to clear the path to
break ground later this year.

This Wednesday, 6:00pm at the Scottish Rite Auditorium (18th and Lavaca), we
will be hosting a public meeting to share our vision of VILLA MUSE STUDIOS.
VILLA MUSE STUDIOS will be an innovative multimedia and entertainment
production and post-production facility for music, film, television,
videogames, animation, advertising and magnetic media restoration.

We will share with you a short presentation about VILLA MUSE. Afterward, we
will host a Q&A. All the info you need about the meeting is in the attached
image. Also, if you’d like to hear a few words from Cactus Pryor about
VILLA MUSE, please click this link:

http://villamuse.com/blog/townhall/

Please forward this email to as many people as you can. Thank you for your
continued support and we look forward to seeing you Wednesday.

The VILLA MUSE Team