Why Did the Screen Actors Guild Awards Show Name Change?

On February 25, 1995, NBC telecast the inaugural presentation of what would become an annual ritual, the conferral of awards by the Screen Actors Guild, with the honorees from both the film and television screens chosen by the group’s 77,615 members. “For the first time, the people who are in the trenches and make their living as performers will have a chance to express their appreciation for the outstanding work of their colleagues,” exulted SAG president Barry Gordon.

SAG was late in jumping onto the awards bandwagon. The Screen Writers Guild had been giving out trophies since 1949, when among the winners were John Huston and B. Traven for best written American Western for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The Directors Guild of America also began presenting annual awards in 1949, when Joseph L. Mankiewicz won for A Letter to Three Wives.

“We are the most modest and self-effacing guild,” explained Patrick Stewart with a straight face. In truth, however, SAG members wore their union label with pride. More than a required visa for the closed shop of big-time film and television work, it was a prized marker of professional identity.

When Tom Hanks won the best actor award for Forrest Gump that night, he posed not only with the statuette — a naked guy with no mouth or genitals holding up the Greek masks of tragedy and comedy — but with his SAG card.

From wry self-effacement, the Screen Actors Guild has suddenly opted for self-erasure. On November 14, the guild announced that its flagship awards ceremony, scheduled for streaming on Netflix on March 1, 2026, would henceforth be known as “The Actors Awards presented by SAG-AFTRA.” The demotion from network to Netflix may be a necessary concession to technology and the marketplace, but the decision to rebrand, or rather un-brand, the SAG awards is a judgment call, and a bad one. Why lower the protective shield of the guild and diminish its luster when scabs like “Tilly Norwood” are seeking to undermine worker solidarity?

Upon announcing the name change, SAG-AFTRA explained the rationale. Since the trophy has always been called The Actor, “evolving the show’s name to align with the award itself made obvious sense,” it said.  Moreover, “the refreshed name will also help introduce (the show) to new global audiences,” who presumably would need the initials translated. The PR dialogue insists — repeatedly — that otherwise everything “remains the same” — really, “exactly the same.” Basically, it’s no big deal and why make a fuss?

Everybody did. In 1933, Hollywood’s screenwriters, directors, and actors each came together (albeit separately) to form a united front against the front office. Each job description chose to call their organization a guild rather than a union to emphasize the skilled craftsmanship needed to make the grade. Guild also sounded less, well, blue collar.

On October 8, 1933, more than 800 actors — stars and bit players alike — attended the first large scale organizational meeting at the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Eddie Cantor, the popular and politically savvy star of stage, screen, and radio, presided over the meeting and was chosen as first president.  He called for a “100 percent actor organization” that would be “of, by, and for actors alone.” The guild would have one mission — the protection of actors. “Some Academy members say we are going screwy forming a Guild organization,” he said. “But we are not screwy. We just want to be 100 percent represented in an organization not subsidized by anyone.”

Cantor was referring to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, formed in 1927 and seen as a company union whose main purpose was less to honor excellence in the motion picture arts than to keep a tight rein on artists who wanted a bigger slice of the pie.  503 actors resigned from the actors’ branch of the Academy and signed up on the spot for the new Screen Actors’ Guild (which soon ditched the apostrophe). Cantor was ready to play hardball. “Don’t work — and let them make their own pictures,” he said to raucous applause.

By then, the studio heads had backed off the draconian pay cuts, but a new pickpocket had arrived from Washington: a Code for the Motion Picture Industry put forward under the authority of the National Recovery Act, the enabling legislation for FDR’s New Deal. (The NRA Code is not to be confused with the Production Code Administration, the self-regulatory censorship agency established by the industry itself in 1934.) The dread possibility of salary caps was on the table — and in 1933 soaking the rich stars was popular public policy.  

What really burned the actors was that the NRA Code allowed producers to give bonuses to themselves but threatened them with fines if they were too generous to the talent. “We deplore the attempt to saddle the sins of these financial buccaneers on the creative talent of the business,” SAG telegraphed FDR. Yes, Mae West was paid more than “the President, his cabinet, and the whole Senate and Congress combined,” but she had singlehandedly kept Paramount Pictures afloat and its employees off the breadlines. The NRA backed off and in 1935 was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The other existential threat to SAG in the 1930s came not from the moguls or the feds but the mob.  Having infiltrated the trade unions — notably the powerful International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, whose pension fund doubled as an ATM for IATSE president George E. Browne and on-site enforcer Willie Bioff — the coffers of the guild beckoned as the next alluring slush fund. In 1939, the Chicago-schooled hoodlums tried to muscle in on SAG, claiming jurisdiction over all theatrical workers — not just stage hands but anyone working on a set, including the actors.

SAG refused to be intimidated and went public with the real-life gangster melodrama. “It is a fight against the insolent attempt of George Browne and Willie Bioff to gobble organized actors into their personally owned and operated IATSE,” the guild declared in an ad in THR. The actors likened the racketeers to the Nazis, evoking Neville Chamberlain at Munich (“we will not meet with you under the umbrellas of appeasement”) and the annexation of Austria (“like Mr. Hitler, Mr. Browne — not content with being the fuhrer of the Stagehands International — now says he will Anschluss the actors.”)

Leading the resistance was MGM star and SAG president Robert Montgomery. “Without question, Bob Montgomery is the hero of this story,” recalled song and dance man George Murphy, who himself served as SAG president from 1944-1946. “He inspired the rest of us to stand up to the gangsters threatening our industry.” In 1941, in part with evidence collected by SAG, Browne and Bioff were convicted of extortion and sentenced, respectively, to eight and ten years in prison.

Perhaps because the marquee stars in SAG had a sense that only a lucky break had kept them from being a face in the crowd, the guild kept a protective eye out for the names not listed in the credits.  Extras, usually treated on set like living props, were especially in need of protection. “The extra always has been an occasional worker — to be used when there was work for him, the same as any migrant field worker,” scoffed a producer in a widely quoted remark that infuriated the rank and file. SAG insisted on fair payment ($7.50 to $15.00 per day in 1934) and promotion to “day player” status ($25) if the extra spoke a line of dialogue or did a bit.

SAG took other proactive measures. In 1939, disturbed by reports that the staff of Central Casting, the agency founded in 1926 to channel extras into studio crowd scenes, was taking payoffs, favoring relatives, and extorting sexual favors from extras and day players, SAG hired former FBI agents to investigate the agency. Three tough customers — Joan Crawford, James Cagney, and John Garfield — were placed in charge of monitoring the investigation.

Throughout the politically charged 1930s, when the membership of the Screen Writers Guild could seem as concerned about the Spanish Civil War as the rules for allocating screenwriting credit, SAG mainly avoided partisan activism. In classic trade union fashion, the guild kept its eye on bread-and-butter issues — overtime, lunch breaks, sick days. The non-thespian causes SAG supported were unassailable–donations to the Red Cross or benefits for the March of Dimes crusade against polio. Individual actors might lend their name to a Popular Front group or appear at a political fundraiser, but SAG qua SAG steered clear of controversy.

During WWII, SAG saw its ranks depleted as Hollywood actors auditioned for new roles in uniform. By the end of 1942, the guild estimated that more than half its membership was serving in the armed forces.  It patriotically rejected any hint of celebrity privilege. When Brigadier Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, head of the Selective Service System, suggested that draft deferments be granted to certain “essential personnel” in the motion picture industry, SAG voted unanimously to remove actors from consideration. “The Screen Actors Guild took no part in requesting that the motion picture industry be classified specially for the draft,” read its resolution. “It believes actors and everyone else in the motion picture industry should be subject to the same rules for the draft as the rest of the country.” SAG emphasized that “no actor is irreplaceable, regardless of his value as a marquee draw and studio business property.”

In the postwar era, SAG hoped to continue to avoid politics, but politics had other ideas. In October 1947, the guild was dragged into the spotlight by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Two former SAG Presidents, George Murphy and Robert Montgomery, and the current president, Ronald Reagan, were subpoenaed and testified as friendly witnesses (meaning they agreed that HUAC had a right to investigate Hollywood but vehemently denied that the industry was a hotbed of communism). All three made excellent impressions and went on to estimable careers in politics: Murphy as US senator from California (1965-71), Montgomery as a media advisor to Dwight Eisenhower (he persuaded Ike to advertise on the new medium of television in his first presidential campaign in 1952), and Reagan, whom you know about.

Nonetheless, SAG’s performance during the blacklist era marks the darkest chapter in its history. It did not establish the blacklist — that was the work of the Motion Picture Association of America, whose infamous Waldorf Statement issued on November 25, 1947, committed the studios to firing known communists and denying employment to anyone who refused to say they weren’t — but it facilitated and normalized the operation of the blacklist. In 1948, SAG’s membership voted to approve an anti-communist loyalty oath for guild officers and in 1953 mandated the same for guild membership. Acting in his capacity as SAG president, Reagan served on the board of the Motion Picture Industry Council, a kind of clearing house “to permit those accused of subversive affiliations to explain their connections.”

Looking back, historians of Hollywood have rendered a harsh judgment on what David F. Prindle, in his 1988 study The Politics of Glamour: Ideology and Democracy in the Screen Actors Guild, calls “the guild’s cooperation with HUAC, and its acquiescence in the graylists and blacklists.” Yet, as Prindle notes, the guild was dealt a bad hand with no good cards to play. In 1951, when the actor Larry Parks, star of The Jolson Story (1946) and Jolson Sings Again (1949), recanted his past communism in testimony before HUAC, SAG “gave him a clean slate,” but he was too toxic to be rehabilitated. In the end, it was the studios, not the guild, that did the hiring — and firing.

SAG’s other postwar crisis was a matter of dollars and cents. When the studios began selling their pre-1948 back catalogs to television, the owners of the films made a fortune, the actors made nothing (just ask the Three Stooges). Increasingly — and indeed down to the present day — SAG has devoted its energies to gaining for its membership a slice  of the revenue streams opened up by new technologies, what guild negotiators call “just compensation.”

Jurisdictional squabbles with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which represented over-the-air performers on broadcast media, complicated matters.  An actor working on two screens — live TV in New York and film in Hollywood — had to belong to two unions and pay two sets of dues. The double dipping was resolved in 2012, when the two unions merged, with SAG retaining billing for the annual awards ceremony, but the ads and stationery saying “SAG-AFTRA ONE UNION.”

Though it was like getting blood from a stone, SAG eventually secured residual payments for network shows and films broadcast on television, usually on a sliding scale depending on whether the show were re-broadcast in prime time or circulated in syndication. Not until 1974 however did SAG broker a landmark deal that secured payments “in perpetuity” for re-run film and tv performances. No longer, as SAG executive secretary Chester L. Midgen remarked, would actors be doing “benefit performances for the stations and advertisers.” Any capitulation from the owners came after hard bargaining and, on three occasions, strikes: in 1960 (over television), 2000 (commercials), and 2023 (streaming).

Alas, the cash windfall in network television residuals (just ask the cast of Friends) has not flowed from other residual streams. The financial rewards accrued from streaming and downloading have been parsimonious. On social media, actors take a perverse delight in posting pictures of residual payments for amounts lower than the postage needed to mail the check.

Today, SAG confronts challenges as urgent as any in its history from a new breed of financial buccaneers and mercenary intelligences human and artificial. To remove the guild label from its awards ceremony is a decision that, as Eddie Cantor might put it, seems screwy.