Law 357 - Entertainment Unions and Guilds (Prof. Handel)

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Prerequisite: Law 305. Entertainment Law

“Hollywood’s a Union Town,” goes the chant, and it’s true. An entertainment lawyer can’t be effective without a solid understanding of the Hollywood guilds and unions, yet that information is hard to come by unless you take this class. Union issues arise frequently in practice, and the Hollywood unions have the ability to shut down the entertainment industry. Witness the 2007-2008 Writers Guild strike and 2008-2009 Screen Actors Guild stalemate.

In addition, a broader understanding of the role of the Hollywood guilds and unions is critical to comprehending the state and direction of the entertainment industry as a whole. That’s particularly true as a result of new media such as the Internet and mobile devices, which promise to complicate Hollywood labor relations for years to come.

Thus, the focus of this course is two-fold: (1) issues that arise under the industry-wide collective bargaining agreements with the various Hollywood guilds; and (2) the 2007-2009 Hollywood labor turmoil and beyond. The spotlight will be on the above-the-line guilds: the Writers Guild of America (WGA), Directors Guild of America (DGA), Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). The class will also allude to IATSE, the union that represents most below-the-line workers.

The topics the course will examine include the persons and types of work covered by the guild contracts, on-screen and advertising credits, creative control, residual compensation, dispute resolution procedures, strikes and stalemates, and new media.