Select Committee on the Preservation of California’s Entertainment Industry

Monday, September 17, 2007 - Burbank, California

Anne-Marie Johnson - Screen Actors Guild National Board of Directors

Good afternoon and thank you Chairman Krekorian and committee members for your support and the opportunity to speak today. My name is Anne-Marie Johnson; I am an actor and am proud to represent 120,000 members of Screen Actors Guild, 60,000 of who live in California.

I have made a living for the past 20 years as a professional actor. I have worked in every format, including the burgeoning new media platforms. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, I graduated from UCLA, my father was one of LAPD’s finest—and I love living in California. But over the past few years, my career has taken me away from my home in Los Angeles... More often than not lately, I’m hired to work on productions outside California. I did the entire run of “In the Heat of the Night” in Georgia,” House of Payne" in Georgia, “Robot Jox” in Rome, Italy, “Chicken Soup for the Soul” in Vancouver, BC and “Asteroids” in Denver. And the list goes on. I even did a PBS talk show in Minnesota.

I’d rather spend my earnings in my community. I’d like to go to my hair salon, local market, Nordstrom’s, Macys, my dentist and my physician. Sure, I pay my mortgage here while I’m on the road. But the rest of my spending is done where I’m working.

And I’m one of the lucky ones. I am hired to travel with the production. Most actors, stunt performers, background actors, technicians, and craftspeople are simply left home. Their jobs leave and people in other places get the work instead.

While I like to think I have some clout, unless I’m starring in a series, I don’t have the pull to persuade the network to keep a project here. The vast majority of actors don’t have that level of influence. Our employers make business decisions, based on economics... They go where they can get the best value for their dollars—and California is far from the best deal.

Screen Actors Guild and many of the unions, guilds and associations here today, including our employers, have struggled in Sacramento for the last decade to get some meaningful relief for California’s 300,000 plus entertainment industry workers. While we applaud your help this last session, here we are in the same place again. No incentives and our jobs are still leaving the state. While pundits and the L.A. Times are busy labeling us as”moguls,” nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s time for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to realize that this industry will not sit idle as our jobs continue to disappear. Every day workers are picking up stakes and moving their families to brighter futures elsewhere. With them goes state tax revenue and salaries that would have been spent on goods and services in our state. So our message to those in Sacramento who don’t get it is: Don’t worry about an incentive costing the state too much money, start worrying about the lost of revenue from our industry costing the state too much money. We can either contribute to the state’s socials services via our taxes, or we can use the state's services to support us. It’s a pretty simple equation.

So as I said earlier, I love California. I am hopeful that California will finally love me back and protect my job.