Non SAG Actor minimum wages?

[jls4]

If you haven't been there already, I suggest you take a look at SAGIndie. You can find their contracts there. They make it relatively easy for productions to use SAG actors on low budget ventures, even allowing completely deferred payments on their Short Films Agreement. It also so allows for mixing SAG and non-union actors.

Thanks Blaine. Yeah I've been out there. Seems like the SAG Ultra-low budget is really the best contract for indies. Go highter than $200K and you have lots more hurdles to jump through, go less and you don't have much of a production.

I'm actually starting to "give in" to SAG. All in all, I don't like th hurdles you have to jump through and I don't like the fact that I don't have direct access to my actors (this statement would take a thread to explain), but from a producer's perspective it's really not that bad of a deal. In fact, I think it hurts the actors much more than the producers. But I'll have to do more study to backup that last statement. This is a convo I'll have to make with some of the actors I work with sooner or later, because SAG penalizes you for working with non-SAG actors at a certain level.