Asner and Harper joined other high-profile actors, including Ed Harris and Martin Sheen, in filing a lawsuit yesterday seeking an injunction to stop SAG from calling for a vote on the proposed merger.
The suit alleges that the SAG board breached its fiduciary duties to conduct an actuarial impact study detailing the effects of the proposed merger on health and pension benefits of SAG members.
SAG's board overwhelmingly approved a plan to merge with the smaller actors union, arguing that doing so would give them more leverage in negotiations and end years of turf wars between the two labor groups.
A minority of board members, among them Asner and Harris, have maintained that the proposed combination would weaken health and pension benefits for SAG's 125,000 members.
TATTBITS
* Billy Wright was right to save
his comic books. The prized collection has sold for about $3.5 million. Unfortunately, Billy died in 1994. Happy relatives found the 345 well-preserved comics he bought as a child, while they were cleaning out his wife's Virginia home following her death last February.
* In an effort to seize the future a
few years back, some of the country's largest cable companies made a deal with Canoe Ventures (partially owned by Comcast) to make it possible for viewers to request more information from their TV advertisers by pressing a button on the cable
remote.
Alas, the new technology didn't catch on with advertisers and most of the venture is being shut down.
There just might be a lesson to be learned here.
* Organizers of
the Academy
Awards have agreed to drop mentions of the Kodak Theatre from Sunday's broadcast because Kodak has sought to end its expensive naming-rights deal now that it has filed for bankruptcy.
