Research Division Report #3 

Understanding the Employment National Endowment

for the Arts 

of Actors 

September 1977 

A Condensation of a Report by Philip H. Ennis and John Bonin, Wesleyan University, February 1977 
PREFACE
 

While testifying before Congress in 1975, the Chairman of the
 

National Endowment for the Arts was asked for a report on the
 

unemployment of artists. In response to this request, the
 

Research Division produced, Report No. i, "Employment and Unemployment of Artists: 1970-1975". This report was based in
 

part upon earlier work by the Bureau of the Census and the
 

Bureau of Labor Statistics which had collected data on the
 

employment and unemployment of artists as part of their studies
 

of the U. S. population.
 

Little of the information in Research Division Report No. 1 had
 

been published before, and the data on employment and unemployment of artists stimulated considerable discussion. Part of the
 

discussion questioned the adequacy of the data, since a special
 

characteristic of the artist labor force, particularly in the
 

performing arts occupations, is that employment periods are
 

often short. In these artistic occupations, artists frequently
 

take jobs in other occupations during the intervals of artistic
 

unemployment and may also hold second jobs to supplement their
 

income. To help improve understanding of this area, Actors’
 

Equity Association offered to the National Endowment for the
 

Arts the opportunity to examine its personnel data files. Mr.
 

Donald Grody, Executive Secretary of Actors’ Equity,pointed
 

out that this data source was far more detailed for the professional actor than the data series of the Bureau of the Census
 

and Bureau of Labor Statistics.
 

The National Endowment for the Arts accepted the opportunity
 

presented by Actors’ Equity Association and arranged to make an
 

exploratory examination of this data file with the objective of
 

assessing its utility for further research. This project was
 

undertaken by Dr. Philip H. Ennis, Professor of Sociology, and
 

Dr. John Bonin, Associate Professor of Economics, Wesleyan
 

University. In addition, the investigators arranged for assistance from two consultants, Dr. Muriel Cantor, Professor of
 

Sociology, American University, who has been making a study of
 

personnel data in the files of the Screen Actors’ Guild, and
 

Mr. Alan Hewitt, an actor familiar with the Equity data files
 

as a result of conducting studies leading to Equity reports.
 

Mr. Donald Grody assisted in many ways including the organization of a series of intensive meetings between the investigators
 
and members of the Equity staff (primarily: Trudy Kausman,
 

Contract Department; Carolee Wynne, Membership Department; and
 

Thomas Mallon, Fund Manager of the Equity League Pension and
 

Welfare Trust Fund).
 

The intensive study conducted during 1976 and 1977 lead to a
 

report that contains conclusions about the research utility of
 

the Actors’ Equity Association personnel data files and recommendations for possible new research projects. Throughout this
 

effort the investigators have maintained a strict policy of
 

guaranteeing the security and privacy of individual actors’
 

records.
 

This report, submitted to the National Endowment for the Arts
 

in February 1977, is condensed here for publication and general
 

distribution. The original report is available to interested
 

persons who may, for example, wish to see a longer Introduction
 

section, footnotes and appendices that have been shortened or
 

omitted from this condensation. The original report may be
 

seen in the Library of the Arts Endowment and is available for
 

interlibrary loan. It is titled: "The Statistical Data Sets
 

of Actors’ Equity Association: A Description and Analysis
 

With Recommendations for Research into the State of the American
 

Theater" by Philip H. Ennis and John Bonin, Wesleyan University,
 

February 1977. Arrangements to see or borrow copies of the
 

complete report may be made by contacting the Librarian, National
 

Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D. C. 20506, (202) 634-7640.
 

Research Division
 

National Endowment for the Arts
 

June 1977
 

ii
 
CONTENTS
 

PREFACE ........................ i
 

INTRODUCTION ...................... 1
 

DESCRIPTION OF ACTORS’ EQUITY ASSOCIATION
 

INTERNAL DATA SETS .................. 3
 

ANALYSIS OF ACTORS’ EQUITY’ S DATA SETS .........ii
 

RECOMMENDATIONS FORRESEARCH ..............21
 

APPENDIX: TYPES OF EQUITY CONTRACTS ..........30
 

iii
 
INTRODUCTION
 

We began our empirical research into problems of employment in
 

the contemporary American theatre by meeting in the New York
 

offices of Actors’ Equity Association for two days in late
 

June, 1976. Professor Muriel Cantor assisted us, and Equity’s
 

Executive Secretary Donald Grody organized a series of intensive meetings with some members of the Equity staff. Alan
 

Hewitt - a professional actor, a member of Actors’ Equity, and
 

a consultant to the research staff -provided extensive materials and accompanied the research team throughout these meetings.
 

Since that visit, there have been further communications between
 

the research staff and Equity personnel.
 

Our report on this research is divided into three parts. The
 

first part describes the data Actors’ Equity collects in the
 

course of its routine work and, the second part evaluates the
 

data by asking certain analytical questions concerning the state
 

of the theatre and the economic conditions of its personnel.
 

In the third part, we recommend several research steps to be
 

taken next.
 

The broader context for our thinking in the following technical
 

discussions and in the research recommendations is first of all,
 

the complex relationship between employment, unemployment, and
 

earnings in the arts. Here, our target of concern is the need
 

to understand sources of employment as well as unemployment,
 

for several factors which affect one may not affect the other
 

at a given moment. Further, we feel attention should be devoted
 

to the problems of measuring employment and unemployment, and
 

to the relationships between the two sets of measures.
 

If measures of employment and unemployment are to be clarified,
 

and if related public policies are to be informed ones, data of
 

sufficient range and reliability must be readily available. The
 

same can be said with regard to earnings. However, the distribution of earnings among theatrical personnel as well as its aggregate amount are results of practices and policies not identical
 

with those which influence employment and unemployment. Fortunately, these are problems that can be described more fully from
 

data sources discussed below.
 

1
 
Related to the immediate questions of employment, unemployment,
 

and earnings are deeper ones concerning how the variety of career
 

patterns of individual actors intertwine with the changing array
 

of acting jobs available in the theatre. The strategic problem
 

for analysis is how the flow of actors is linked, moment to
 

moment, to available acting jobs which, in turn, are set within
 

a mixed economy and spread throughout a large nation with varying cultural densities.
 

In the following discussion, we also have in mind a second set
 

of questions. These are related to the fact that professional
 

theatre in the United States, both commercial and non-commercial, is marked by pervasive uncertainty. While the mix of
 

natural talent, training, fortitude, and luck necessary to provide individual success within the theatre is difficult to analyze, there are important and, in our judgment, researchable
 

questions here: How much and in what ways are supply and demand for actors peculiarly determined? Has the length of commercial "runs" been changing? How fast have al__l the various
 

costs in play production risen?
 

Any comprehensive study of how the uncertainties of commercial
 

theatre production (under all the various Equity contracts) are
 

differently shared by all the personnel involved would require
 

an updating and extension of data like that collected by Thomas
 

G. Moore in The Economics of the American Theatre (1968). In
 

addition, the ways actors cope with the uncertainties of their
 

profession and the ways producers cope with their needs have to
 

be examined jointly in the natural settings, which means including the non-commercial theatre as well. To understand the total
 

employment of actors, we must, at some point take note of all
 

situations, free market and subsidized, in which actors can and
 

do work.
 

Finally, in our treatment of Equity’s data sets we have in mind
 

a third consideration. Along with the employment of actors and
 

the uncertainty of the theatre is the important relationship
 

between the theatre and the other arts. We need estimates of
 

the extent and direction of these relationships, especially
 

with regard to the exchange of personnel. Knowing more about
 

these exchanges might, in turn, help us to understand other
 

fundamental processes of American cultural life such as the
 

complex struggles among the arts--and also among sections of
 

the country--for money and audiences.
 
In examining Equity’s data resources, these three general considerations will form the basis of the recommendations for
 

research. In addition, and with considerable tentativeness,
 

some recommendations will deal with the housekeeping routines
 

by which Equity and its sister performing arts associations
 

organize their data collection procedures.
 

ACTORS’ EQUITY: A DESCRIPTION OF ITS INTERNAL DATA SETS
 

Actors’ Equity Association has been one of the major affiliates
 

of organized labor’s representation of the performers (and
 

some associated personnel) in live theatre for more than half
 

a century. The formal charter from the AFL to performing
 

artists was given in 1919 to the Associated Actors and Artists
 

of America (the four A’s) and today includes, along with
 

Equity: Screen Actors Guild (SAG), American Federation of
 

Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), American Guild of Musical
 

Artists (AGMA), American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA),
 

Asociacion Puertorriquenas de Artistas y Tecnicos del Espectaculo, Hebrew Actors’ Union, Inc., Italian Actors Union, and
 

Screen Extras Guild, Inc. Canadian Actors’ Equity Association, headquartered in Toronto, amicably ended formal affiliation with American Equity in 1976, but maintains many reciprocal relations.
 

The professional affairs of Equity’s approximately 20,000
 

members, nationally headquartered in New York City, are coordinated from its main office in New York, from regional
 

offices in Chicago and Los Angeles, and from a small office
 

in San Francisco. Equity’s elected representatives negotiate
 

minimum pay scales and conditions of work with several different types of contracts which Equity maintains with theatrical
 

producers. In addition, Equity monitors the fulfillment of
 

other contractual obligations made between individual Equity
 

members and certain corporate entities producing theatre.
 

Closely related but legally separate, Equity League Pension
 

and Welfare Trust Fund (P&W) was established in 1960 to
 

administer the monies collected from producers and subsequently paid to individual Equity members in pensions.
 

This fund also administers the claims made by Equity members
 

for health benefits to which they are entitled.
 
In the course of these activities, much information is regularly
 

gathered, organized, and stored for varying periods of time.
 

We note four data sets which are most pertinent. They will be
 

summarized briefly and followed by four other data sources
 

which result from different routine activities of the Association
 

and are of potential interest to the social science research
 

community and to attentive audiences concerned with public
 

policy in the arts.
 

(1) As a membership organization, Equity’s Membership 

Department records its periodic transactions with
 

each Equity member.
 

(2)	 Equity’s Contract Department monitors the individual actor’s agreement with a producer through setting the required bond to be deposited with Equity
 

for each production. The total amount of the bond
 

is determined by the sum of amounts specified for
 

each of the special clauses in the contracts of
 

each individual Equity player in the production.
 

(3)	 The Equity League Pension and Welfare Trust Fund,
 

established in 1960, receives from the producers
 

weekly reports of Equity members’ earnings along
 

with appropriate funds.
 

(4)	 The fourth data set, which summarizes and condenses the first three, is the employment statistics report periodically assembled by Alan Hewitt
 

and used, in part, by the Equity staff in their
 

assessment of policies to be pursued by the
 

Association.
 

(5)	 The "Welfare"part of Pension and Welfare processes
 

the Surgical, Medical, and Hospital claims which
 

Equity members submit as part of their contractual
 

benefits.
 

(6)	 Since 1958, Actors’ Equity has formalized a set
 

of procedures, known as Rule A, governing the
 

three-way relations between members of the
 

Association, theatrical producers, and theatrical agents. Equity also keeps records as to
 

4
 
the names of franchised agents and the names of
 

Equity members with whom they have exclusive
 

management contracts.
 

(7)	 Equity holds membership meetings at least four
 

times a year and the Council of the Association
 

meets once a week. The minutes of these two
 

sets of meetings have been gathered for almost
 

all the years of the Association’s existence and
 

are stored in the New York Equity office.
 

(8)	 Equity publishes Equity News, a near-monthly newspaper describing the Association’s activities.
 

About 60 years of Equity publications are stored
 

in the New York office and in several New York
 

public libraries.
 

These data sets have a complicated relationship to one another.
 

Our study is mainly concerned with the first four data sets.
 

The Membership Files
 

The files of the Membership Department of Actors’ Equity is a
 

data set consisting of 42 fields stored, as of May 1973, on
 

computer tape and now on an IBM System 3 Mod 12 computer.
 

These files contain information on each Equity member drawn from
 

four different sources. First, from the Equity membership application form are taken the actor’s professional name, two sets
 

of addresses, two sets of telephone numbers, sex, date of birth,
 

social security number, initiation date and fee, and parent
 

union.
 

Second, from P&W the member’s annual earnings under Equity’s
 

jurisdiction is entered into the membership files. This
 

information, supplemented by "manual information" from Equity’s
 

Contract Department, is sued to determine the member’s dues
 

category. Several other administrative data fields concerned
 

with dues payments are based on the earnings statement.
 

The third source of information comes from direct communication between the individual member and the Membership Department. From the replies to routine dues billing, notices of
 

balloting in Association elections, and other Equity mailings,
 

5
 
the member’s personal information is updated and his membershi~
 

classification - basically if he can or cannot vote - is entered
 

into the files along with his preference as to confidentiality
 

and as to notification for auditions.
 

The fourth information source for the Equity membership files
 

comes from the periodic matching of its lists with the membership lists of the other 4 A’s unions, particularly SAG and
 

AFTRA, but also on occasion those of AGVA, AGMA, and other
 

sister unions. The main purpose of matching these membership
 

lists (twice a year) is to reassess the dues payments of
 

members in the several unions. Changes in assessments and
 

changes in the status of parent union are entered into the
 

Equity files.
 

The Contract Department
 

Equity’s Contract Department has the major responsibility to
 

insure conformity of theatrical producers with the general
 

terms of their contracts with Equity. In addition, the
 

Contract Department supervises the contractual arrangements
 

made between a theatrical producer and each individual actor
 

and actress in the particular production. Both these monitorings are done through the bond deposited with Equity by each
 

theatrical producer. The amount of the bond is initially determined, for all the various types of contracts, by the total
 

of two weeks’ salary plus fringe benefits for each Equity
 

member employed in the production. An additional flat fee of
 

$50 is also added.
 

It is at this point, however, that the complexity in assessing
 

the bond’s value begins. Over the years there has been an
 

increasing specialization of contracts negotiated by Equity
 

with various kinds of producers. Currently there are nineteen
 

types of contracts. Equity’s own employment summaries, however,
 

combine these into eleven major types.
 

Each type of contract establishes minimum salaries for the
 

different categories of actors, actresses, and stage managers
 

and specifies the supplemental monies due each Equity member
 

as a result of specialized tasks, e.g., Dance Captain, 2nd
 

6
 
Assistant Stage Manager, if member of the Chorus, extraordinary risk, specialty number, and so forth. The resulting
 

complexity of establishing the proper amount of bond for such
 

a diversity of contracts is impressive. Also impressive is
 

Equity’s ability to assure that proper payment is made to
 

the actor each week.
 

Yet another process further complicates the Contract Department’s accounting problems. Parallel with the increasing
 

differentiation of types of contracts has been the increasing
 

individualization of contracts made between each performer
 

and the producer. Some performers will bargain for a salary
 

higher than the Equity minimum scale or for a salary guarantee
 

longer than the two-week guarantee, or for both. The setting
 

of each bond for a specific theatrical enterprise is a procedure requiring a close reading of each performer’s individual contract, and the Contract Department has evolved, over
 

a number of years, a set of coding and recording procedures
 

which have effectively domesticated the almost Byzantine
 

contractual structures that constitute the legal and economic
 

basis of current theatrical practice.
 

Further, these procedures are not as formally codified, as say,
 

those of P&W but they are readily understood by the personnel
 

in the several Equity departments which handle the data. The
 

entire record of the Contract Department’s work since 1950 is
 

contained in ordinary bound notebooks with hand entered, pencil
 

and inked notations, all stored in the New York Equity offices.
 

Similar records exist in the two regional offices. The New York
 

office duplicates, but not entirely, the regional records.
 

Pension and Welfare Data
 

P&W is financed by producer contributions. Although the fund
 

is operationally and legally distinct from Actors’ Equity
 

Association, according to Thomas Mallon, the Fund Manager,
 

approximately 95% of the fund’s participants are Equity
 

cardholders. The other 5% are people presently retired or
 

no longer active in the theatre. P&W records contain an
 

account of the earnings subject to pension benefits for all
 

of the individuals who have worked under Equity jurisdiction
 

since 1960.
 
Along with collecting payments for pension fund, P&W routinely
 

collects and processes information on the employment and earnings of actors. First, the Contract Department provides data
 

from the initial bonding procedure which allows P&W to create
 

"memo books" similar to the contract book discussed above.
 

Then, during the rehearsal and performance, the producing company provides weekly reports on all actors employed, listing
 

by name and social security number each actor’s earnings for
 

the week subject to pension payments, including percentage of
 

gross ticket receipts when appropriate. These weekly reports
 

are used to calculate the production company’s total payment
 

to the pension fund, which accompanies the reports.
 

One important fact should be mentioned here. An individual
 

actor’s earnings subject to pension carry a weekly ceiling
 

of $1,500 to $2,000 depending on the type of contract Equity
 

has with the producer. Consequently, actual overtime and
 

percentage of gross are reported only for actors making below-


ceiling earnings. Since the production company’s pension payment is calculated as a percentage of the sum of all reported
 

earnings (the percentage depends on the production type), the
 

production company does not report above-ceiling earnings for
 

any individual actor.
 

This weekly data is stored with references to production type
 

or show, in file books beginning in 1964 and on computer tape
 

from 1972 to the present. Aggregate data on annual employment
 

and earnings for individual actors is readily available at P&W
 

from 1961 to the present. P&W has computer printouts made each
 

year which list, for each individual actor, total work-weeks
 

and earnings subject to pension (both under the Equity card) in
 

all previous years back to 1961. This printout also contains
 

a more detailed description of the current year’s employment
 

and earnings for the individual actor. Each week of employment is listed with such information as weekly earnings subject
 

to pension, production type, and name of show.
 

The more aggregate data on earnings in previous years is divided into five categories. These categories correspond to
 

five different accrual schedules determining the percentage of
 

covered earnings accrued toward a normal pension. Total pension
 

credits are also listed and divided into these five categories.
 

The accrual schedules have changed over time (the most recent
 

change occurred January i, 1974). The majority of production
 

types are currently under one category, known as Schedule A.
 

8
 
All P&W records contain the actor’s social security number so
 

that cross references within the P&W data and linkages with
 

external sources are possible. Also, the detailed printout
 

data for the current year, referred to above, is available at
 

some cost from computer tapes back to 1972. The more aggregate data is readily available from the current year’s computer printout back to 1961. Clearly the P&W data is an
 

important source of information on employment and earnings
 

for the individual actor. Further processing can yield meaningful estimates on the districution of earnings among actors
 

and the duration of employment within any year under the
 

Equity card.
 

Employment Statistics Compiled by Alan Hewitt
 

Alan Hewitt prepared annual employment reports on the professional theatre from Equity data sources. In constructing a
 

data base for these reports, Hewitt regularly collects and
 

aggregates weekly statistics on work-weeks under the Equity
 

card. A work-week is defined as one actor working one week.
 

In any given week, the number of work-weeks recorded corresponds exactly to the number of actors employed. However,
 

once the data is aggregated over time, the number of actors
 

employed cannot be determined.
 

Most of the data reported by Hewitt is aggregated into annual
 

totals of work-weeks under the Equity card. Tables from his
 

personal data collection record quarterly totals of work-weeks
 

under the Equity card. For purposes of data consolidation,
 

Hewitt assumes that the theatre season runs from the beginning
 

of June until the end of May. Since the unit of account is
 

the week, Hewitt has found it necessary to include 53 weeks
 

in the 1966 - 1967 season and the 1971 - 1972 season. In the
 

most aggregate form, annual totals of work-weeks per season
 

(combined U. S. and Canada) are recorded for the periods
 

1945 - 1953 and 1961 - present. For these same periods,
 

Hewitt reports work-weeks for the high, low, and median week
 

in each year. Consequently, some crude notion of the variability of actors’ employment during this time is available
 

since we know the high, low, and median number of actors
 

employed. A similar quarterly division of total work-weeks
 

is available from Hewitt’s personal sources for the period
 

1968 - present.
 
Unfortunately, Hewitt’s quarterly division does not correspond
 

to the time periods used to define government fiscal quarters.
 

Hewitt’s aggregations run December through February, March
 

through May, June through August, and September through November.
 

However, the data. in the Hewitt summaries can be reconstructed
 

to fit government quarters from his private records.
 

For this same period, 1968 - present, Hewitt has divided his
 

employment data into three major categories: employment type,
 

regional and production type (Hewitt’s term here is "employment
 

area."). Consequently, both quarterly data and the more aggregate annual data on work-weeks within each category is available.
 

Each category also included the total number of work-weeks in
 

the time period. Hence, the addition of all subdivisions within
 

each category yields the same sum, the total number of workweeks in the period.
 

Four subdivisions exist for the category of employment type.
 

These are: principal, chorus, stage manager, and extra. For
 

purposes of comparing employment date 1968 - present with that
 

in the earlier period 1948 - 1953, this subdivision is important.
 

Chorus Equity merged with Actors’ Equity in 1955 so Equity data
 

in the period 1948 - 1953 excludes employment data for chorus
 

members.
 

The category of regional employment is subdivided according to
 

the three present (and one former) regional Equity offices
 

administering the contracts: New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles
 

(and Toronto up to June 1976). Again, for purposes of data
 

comparability across time periods, this subdivision is important. Toronto employment data includes ballet and opera
 

contracts which would normally be administered by AGMA in the
 

U.S. However, by special arrangement with AGMA, these contracts fall under the jurisdiction of Equity in Canada.(Canadian
 

figures provide individual totals for theatre, opera, and
 

ballet as well as a grand total.)
 

The third major category, production type, is subdivide~ into:
 

Broadway productions, road productions, dinner theatre, stock,
 

L.O.R.T. (resident theatre), Off-Broadway, other local, young
 

audiences, cafe and club, industrial shows, guest artists,
 

special contracts, and extras. Depending upon the time period
 

i0
 
under consideration, some of the subdivisions must be incorporated into a residual class. No one data source has entries
 

for all subdivisions during 1968 - present. For example,
 

Hewitt has compiled a chart of annual work-weeks 1969 - present
 

subdivided into Broadway production, road production, stock
 

dinner theatre, L.O.R.T., Off-Broadway, children’s theatre,
 

industrial shows, and guest artists. The residual class for
 

this chart would include care and club, special, extras, and
 

other locals which comprise Hollywood and Bay areas, off-Loop,
 

and studio productions. On the other hand, Hewitt’s quarterly
 

tables 1968 - 1975 omit several of these subdivisions while
 

the quarterly tables for 1975 - 1976 include a new one, Showcase
 

(NYC). In the category production type, before data from
 

different time periods can be used in annual or quarterly
 

terms, some standardized classification of subdivisions including a residual class must be determined. This residual class
 

must be defined to include all subdivisions for which data is
 

unavailable in any time period under consideration. Hewitt’s
 

data records might be useful in solving such a problem.
 

Hewitt’s annual reports contain a wealth of other information
 

on employment and earnings. For the 1973 - 1974 and 1974 ­

1975 seasons, charts which subdivide regionally each production type and employment type are reported (similar data is
 

available for each year since 1967). For example, work-weeks
 

in New York for principals in 1974 - 1975 are recorded. Or
 

work-weeks in dinner theatre in Chicago for 1974 - 1975 can
 

be found. As part of each annual report, Hewitt also includes data on membership divided into two categories, total
 

members and paid-up memberships. The annual totals of Equity
 

memberships during 1948 - 1953 and 1961 - present are available in these terms. However, the U. S.-Canada and Chorus-


Actor distinctions discussed earlier cannot be separated in
 

this membership data.
 

ANALYSIS OF EQUITY’S DATA SETS
 

How can these four data sets help answer the questions that
 

initiated this inquiry? Even though these sets are closely
 

interconnected, and some efforts should be made to integrate
 

them, we will treat them here as being independent - by
 

presenting the following matrix. It confronts each of the
 

ii
 
main problem areas - unemployment/employment, risk allocation,
 

and theatre and the other arts - with the four main data sets.
 

FIGURE i
 

Problem Area
 

1 2 3 

Employment/ Risk Theatre & The 

Data Set Unemployment Allocation Other Arts 

i. Membership ii 21 31 

D_£partment 

2. Contract 12 22 32 

D_~partment 

3. Pension & 13 23 33 

Welfare 

4. Hewitt’s 

Summaries on 14 24 34 

~nt 

In looking first at the problem of employment and unemployment
 

among actors, basic consideration is the definition of the
 

professional actor. Depending upon how the universe of actors
 

is operationally defined, the percentage employed as actors
 

will vary. The two main alternatives for such an operational
 

definition are: the total memberships of all professional
 

theatrical associations; and the self-designation by an
 

individual that his or her main occupation is that of actor,
 

supported by some asserted evidence that the person has been
 

employed in that occupation, in a survey of known reliability
 

and validity.
 

12
 
There are difficulties, of course, in either of these definitions. One goal of the research program proposed in the final
 

section of our report is to find a means of reconciling estimates made from both types.
 

We begin with the professional theatrical association method
 

of defining the universe of actors. The four data sets
 

(Figure i, cells 11-14) contribute to a complete and accurate
 

accounting of employment and unemployment in the theatre in
 

only a limited way. Even if they were fully integrated, which
 

they are not, the resulting data pool would not produce the
 

measures needed.
 

The reasons are several. As to information from the membership files (cell ii), there is an unknown number of paid-up
 

members who are not working as actors at present because they
 

hold other full-time or part-time jobs. Also, there is a
 

more or less known number of Equity card holders who may or
 

may not be working as actors because they are in those various
 

categories of membership indicating less than full employment
 

under Equity jurisdiction. The difficulty with all these
 

membership categories is that it is impossible, from the membership file alone, to state how much of what kind of employment in the theatre they represent in any given year.
 

Finally, and this is probably the largest group numerically,
 

there are those Equity card holders whose theatrical employment is under the jurisdiction of one or more of the 4 A’s
 

unions other than Equity. How large is this group? An Equity
 

sponsored survey of its members conducted in 1972 reported
 

that 55~ of the Equity membership also belonged to SAG, that
 

49% belonged to AFTRA, and that 10% belonged to AGVA. Further,
 

almost three quarters, 73%, of the respondents to that same
 

survey reported that they had sought work in a performing
 

union other than Equity. However, only about 8% of the respondents actually worked at that time under AFTRA’s jurisdiction,
 

12% under SAG’s, and i% each under AGVA’s or AGMA’s card.
 

without an amalgamation of all the 4 A’s membership lists as
 

an initial step, it will be impossible to get a complete
 

accounting of the number of professional actors. The current
 

practice of semiannually cross-checking the Equity membership
 

list with those of the other 4 A’s associations is a positive
 

beginning for estimating the extent of over-lapping membership.
 

13
 
The Contract Department data (Cell 12) is in its present form
 

not suitable for the primary tracking of theatrical employment
 

because of its manner of tabulation. The "contract books" are
 

oriented to an accurate assessment of the producer’s bond.
 

While they do record the duration of actual employment, their
 

form of entry defies retrieval within reasonable costs. When
 

each theatrical enterprise has produced weekly employment
 

reports to P&W (Cell 13) this is the single best source of
 

both the extent of employment and the amount of ~arnings.
 

Hewitt’s summaries (Cell 14) based mainly on the contract and
 

the membership department’s data, provide valuable, if partial,
 

estimates of employment. More of this below.
 

Among the difficulties of defining the universe of actors by
 

membership records is their inability to provide specific information about an important category which exists in the
 

survey alternative, as, for example, in the Decennial Census
 

and the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. In addition to
 

the survey categories of "employed" and "experienced unemployed", there are other categories, including an important
 

one called "not in the labor force, but worked 1960-1970".
 

Here is a census table for the entire work force taken from
 

the 1970 Decennial Census and cited in Research Division
 

Report #i, National Endowment for the Arts, April, 1976
 

(Table 12, p. 28).
 

Table i
 

Percent Employment of All Members of the Workforce - 1970
 

Men Women
 

Employed 81 60 

Experienced Unemployed 3 

Not on Labor Force but 

Worked 1960-1970 16 37 

i0~% i0~/o 

N = (58.8 million) (48.1 million) 

14
 
 

 

The table shows that for the 106.9 million individuals who
 

are or have been in the work force from 1960 to 1970, men
 

have an 84~ (81 plus 3) current participation in the work
 

force while women have substantially less, 63% (60 plus 3).
 

Among the 16% of the men who were not in the labor force in
 

1970, probably a large proportion were retired. Since the
 

age distribution of men and women is similar, some other
 

factors must account for the fact that the percentage of
 

experienced women no longer in the work force is more than
 

twice that of men. These figures serve as the baseline
 

for comparable data on artists in general and actors in
 

particular in Table 2.
 

Table 2
 

Percent Employment of the Artist Workforce - 1970
 

All Artists
 

(Except Actors) Actors 

Men Women Men Women 

Employed 85 87 50 33 

Experience Unemployed 5 23 18 

Not in Labor F

Last Worked 

1960-1970 

orce, 

12 8 27 49 

100Yo 100Yo i0~/o i0~/o 

(618,000) (256,900) (11,300) (11,800) 

The category "All Artists" may be too inclusive to be useful.
 

Still several things stand out quite clearly in the data.
 

First, among all artists except actors, men and women have
 

high and similar rates of employment compared to both the
 

total working population and especially to actors. Second,
 

compared to the total working population and to other artists,
 

actors show a dramatically low rate of employment, a high rate
 

of unemployment, and a high rate of withdrawal from the work
 

15
 
 

 

force. Further, although there are an approximately equal
 

total number of men and women in the acting profession (11,300
 

men and 11,800 women) compared to the more than two to one
 

ratio of men to women in all the other arts, almost half the
 

actresses compared to a quarter of the actors were not participating in the labor force in 1970
 

To clarify the relationship between Equity data, as collected
 

and recorded in Hewitt’s reports, and the Census-BLS data, we
 

have constructed a table presenting concepts of employment
 

and total labor force for actors only. (The Census-BLS rows
 

are taken from the category "actors" in Tables 4 through 9
 

of the Endowment’s Research Division Report #i.)
 

Table 3
 

Employment of Actors 1970-1975
 

(in thousands of individuals)
 

Labor Force 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974
 1975


Number of Paid-up
 

Equity members 14.6 15.0 15.5 16.0 16.5 17.0
 

Census-BLS
 

Total number of
 

"experienced"
 

actors in work
 

force 14.1 19.0 18.0 16.0 19.0 20.0
 

Employment
 

Number of Equity
 

members working
 

in high work week
 

for the year 4.5 4.2 4.2 4.5 4.5 4.5
 

Census-BLS employment
 

(as difference between total labor
 

force and unemployment) 9.4 i0.0 i0.0 9.0 9.0 13.0
 

16
 
The table exhibits two major problems of data reconciliation
 

between the sources. First, the Census-BLS concept of total
 

experienced labor force does not include all of Equity’s total
 

membership. Second, there is substantial employment of actors
 

outside of the Equity jurisdiction, much of it probably under
 

cards from SAG, AFTRA, AGVA, and other sister unions. Note
 

that the Equity paid-up measurement has grown at a steady rate
 

of about 3% per year during 1970-75 while the Census-BLS measure of the labor force has fluctuated greatly from an annual
 

increase of 3~ to a decrease of 12~ in one year. For the
 

entire period, Equity paid-up membership increased by 15%
 

while the Census-BLS experiences labor force measure increased
 

by 34.6%. Until 1975, employment under the Equity card in the
 

highest week reported was about one-half of total employment
 

measured by the Census-BLS. If the median work week were
 

chosen from Equity data, the order of magnitude would be about
 

one-third of the Census-BLS employment measure until 1975.
 

Clearly, a substantial amount of many actors’ professional
 

employment occurs outside the Equity card.
 

The variability of the Census-BLS measure of the total experienced labor force contrasted with the steady growth rate in
 

Equity paid-up membership suggests inadequacies in the Census-


BLS measure. Indeed, Table 12 of the Endowment’s report cited
 

above gives further information about the scope of this problem
 

for 1970, the Census year. The total experienced civilian labor
 

force of actors consists of those employed in the Census week
 

(the last week of March), 9.4 thousand, plus "the experienced
 

unemployed", 4.7 thousand. In addition, another 8.96 thousand
 

actors are recorded as "not in the labor force, last worked
 

from 1960 - 1970". Would these actors hold union cards and
 

keep their membership paid up? If so, the total Census-BLS
 

figure most comparable to Equity’s total paid-up membership in
 

1970 would be 23.1 thousand paid-up actors. This is not simply
 

a definitional problem. If the larger number constructed
 

above is used, only 41% were employed. We need to reconcile
 

the two sources.
 

A further problem of data comparability arises because the
 

Census-BLS data includes dancers as a separate category. The
 

number and employment of dancers holding Equity or other union
 

cards would be included in the union data. Interestingly, the
 

category "dancer" is the only other occupational category for
 

17
 
which the listing "not in labor force, last worked 1960-1970"
 

increases the total pool as substantially as it does for
 

actors. The number of actors in this category as a percent
 

of the Census-BLS total experienced work force is 63.6%. The
 

comparable figure for dancers is 74.2%. No other occupational
 

category reported has a comparable statistic greater than 30%.
 

Clearly, the definition of the labor force against which employment statistics will be compared is an important issue from the
 

viewpoint of public policy. Union data from Equity and other
 

sister unions can aid in making this definition more precise.
 

The membership department of Equity has data on members who
 

have taken out retirement cards and who would, therefore, be
 

excluded from the actors’ labor force as defined in the Census-


BLS data. P&W has data on weeks worked each year under the
 

Equity card. Some criteria in terms of duration of employment
 

in previous years could be set to help determine a meaningful
 

estimate for the actors’ labor force. If sister unions collect
 

data similar to that of P&W, social security numbers can be
 

used to match employment records under all union cards.
 

The data on an actor’s earnings which is available from the
 

two Equity sources, membership and P&W, includes biases worth
 

mentioning if it is to be used to build statistics on the
 

total earnings of an individual actor. Membership records
 

earnings subject to Equity dues are divided by dues category.
 

The ceiling category for dues is $30,000 per year. Consequently, earnings above this amount are not further subdivided.
 

At the same time, the membership department initially uses
 

contractual earnings so that overtime income and percentage
 

of gross are recorded only when reported by the individual
 

member, or when determined from P&W data. On the other hand,
 

P&W records earnings are subject to pension only. The ceiling, for pension purposes, is $1500-$2000 per week. Consequently, income data under the Equity card compiled from these
 

two sources is likely to be very accurate for many subdivisions
 

but provide no subdivision in the uppermosttail of the distribution. The earnings of "stars" can only be estimated from
 

examining individual contractual agreements along with any
 

information on gross receipts. However, to the extent that
 

policy questions require analysis of the lower earnings’ categories, the Equity data seems sufficient to characterize
 

income under the Equity card. Any serious biases can be eliminated by cross-references between membership and P&W data.
 

18
 
It is clear, then, that several research questions on employment and earnings under the Equity card can be addressed
 

using currently collected data. For instance, seasonality
 

of total employment can be studied from Hewitt’s quarterly
 

data. Consequently, any bias introduced by the Census week
 

can be discussed. At the same time, the growth of employment under the Equity card can be analyzed from Hewitt’s
 

data. These growth rates can be compared with growth rates
 

from other industries and national averages. Although these
 

growth rates conceal the distribution of employment among
 

actors, they provide some insight into the change in overall
 

employment opportunities under the Equity card. Comparisons
 

with other industries and national averages give some indication of the health of the theatre. The relationship of growth
 

of employment to growth of Equity membership provides some
 

insight into the unemployment problem.
 

Profiles of the earnings and employment of individual actors
 

can be constructed using weeks worked per year and earnings
 

subject to pension under the Equity card from P&W data. An
 

initial screening of membership records of the parent union
 

would provide some idea of the importance of multiple professional employment opportunities. Our impression is that
 

while a large proportion of Equity members hold other union
 

cards, the converse is not true. Therefore, we would expect
 

total membership in all actors’ unions to exceed Equity membership. Indeed, important larger problems such as constructing a career profile of an actor which would show the total
 

annual earnings as a professional actor and the duration of
 

professional employment per year require the compilation and
 

coordination of data from Equity and its sister unions.
 

Since data similar to that in Equity’s P&W fund exists within
 

the other unions, broader questions on employment and earnings
 

for individual actors can be evaluated. Because employment
 

’under any single card is not likely to be the sole indicator
 

of employment as an actor, the issue as to whether or not an
 

actor is employed in any year becomes complex. Some criteria,
 

perhaps similar to that used by the BLS, will have to be
 

applied to distinguish part-time work from full-time work.
 

Consequently, the duration of employment under all cards in
 

any year is an important statistic. Again, the definition of
 

19
 
this segment of the labor force may hinge on length of employment in the recent past. It should be noted that a similar
 

accounting problem is faced by any union in a trade where
 

short-term work contracts are standard (e.g., longshoremen).
 

Furthermore, data on earnings for an actor must be broadened
 

to include not just income earned under a union card but
 

other income or support supplements. Clearly, income of
 

individual actors will be difficult to calculate. Nevertheless, an essential step in building this total is the calculation of earnings under the union cards from data similar to
 

that available at Equity.
 

We now come to the second general set of problems, those dealing with risks in the theatre both for the theatrical production as an entity and for the individual actor. In our
 

previous discussion we considered the data sets only in terms
 

of the individual actor as the analytical unit. However, the
 

Contract Department’s books (Figure i, Cell 22) and the P&W
 

data (Cell 23) can provide information about the universe of
 

theatrical productions which have contracted for Equity personnel since 1950 or 1960 (depending on the data set used).
 

It is possible to present data from a given time period on
 

the full range of theatrical enterprises offered to the
 

American public. The type of contract, the amount of bond,
 

the size and nature of the cast for each production are
 

readily available from the Contract Department. The duration
 

of rehearsals and the lengths of the runs are available from
 

P&W. These are raw materials required for the analysis of
 

theatrical risk taking.
 

Other materials are necessary, to be sure. The amounts of
 

capital invested in the different types of commercial theatre
 

have to be identified, along with the kinds of secondary (and
 

further) rights allocation such as record albums and film
 

production. Similarly, for the non-commercial theatre, the
 

extent and kind of funding these organizations receive has
 

to be identified.
 

Another important area of study in this regard is the shifting and ambiguous boundary between the commercial and the
 

non-profit theatre. The development of the Off-Broadway,
 

Showcase, Workshop, and the new Mini-contract all exemplify
 
the ways creativity and risk uneasily mix. Finally, the outcome of each type of theatrical enterprise has to be assessed.
 

There are objective measures such as length of run, return on
 

investment, prizes awarded, and subsequent~derivatives of the
 

enterprise. More subjective is the assessment of quality and
 

impact of the production through an evaluation of critical
 

responses to it.
 

Parallel to the individual theatrical production as the unit
 

of risk or the theatrical company in non-commercial theatre,
 

is the uncertainty of the career of the individual actor. The
 

P&W data (Cell 23) and the membership files (Cell 21) can provide the vital data base for time series analyses of how actors
 

begin their work, and how they move through the various types
 

of theatre and through various periods of employment. When
 

taken together these form the empirical base of the career.
 

We turn, finally, to an assessment of how Equity’s data sets
 

can provide answers to the third set of questions on the theatre
 

in relation to the other arts. Here the diagnosis is quite
 

simple: the data is not very helpful. The membership files
 

and the P&W disaggregated data do provide the basis for an
 

analysis of how actors move from geographical place to place
 

and from one type of theatrical employment to another. An
 

analysis over time of these records in conjunction with the
 

comparable data from SAC and AFTRA would reveal the shifts of
 

theatrical personnel from live theatre to movies and television.
 

But we need to know much more to respond to the complexities
 

of the question.
 

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR RESEARCH
 

We will describe three sets of research projects, each dealing with one of the basic problem areas discussed in the
 

introduction of the report. The first has to do with the
 

assessment of employment, unemployment, and earnings among
 

actors~ It is widely believed that those working as actors,
 

actresses, stage managers, directors, choreographers, and
 

other types of creative theatre personnel sufferhigher
 

rates of unemployment than the majority of others in the
 

work force. Yet there is at present no reliable or accepted
 

21
 
measure of unemployment. The first and central recommendation
 

of this report is research which will provide the federal
 

government, state and local governments, and scholarly research agencies with current and accurate measurements of
 

employment in the American theatre.
 

The projects needed to establish this data are outlined here.
 

Their order is from easy to hard, from relatively cheap to
 

relatively expensive, from resources now in place to resources
 

which need to be assembled. The central idea is a step by
 

step plan for deep and continuing data resources beginning
 

with the question of employment. The institutional location,
 

financial basis, and social organization of the research proposed here is left quite open.
 

EMPLOYMENT, UNEMPLOYMENT~ A~D EARNINC~S
 

The first project should be to assemble the extant data on
 

employment among American theatrical personnel. This involves
 

several different steps outlined here quite tentatively because
 

the interests and scheduling of the various constituencies cannot be stated in advance. At the outset, the leadership of
 

the 4 A’s associations should agree on a data exchange and
 

consolidation program. The relevant technical personnel of
 

the associations along with the social science researchers
 

involved should meet to create a single amalgamated data set
 

consisting of the disaggregated records of members’ weekly
 

employment, amount of earnings, welfare and pension benefits,
 

and whatever other useful information is available from the
 

several data sets. The aim should be to create a consolidated
 

and continuing record of all data relevant to employment and
 

earnings under the jurisdiction of the separate 4 A’s associations. The main data sets with which this amalgamation should
 

begin are Equity’s membership files, its P&W records, and comparable data from the other 4 A’s associations. These data
 

sets should have maximum interchangeability within and between
 

each of the 4 A’s associations. Apparently the first moves in
 

this direction have begun among the 4 A°s unions.
 

Actors’ employment and earnings data from P&W could be consolidated from the theatrical producers who originate the weekly
 

reports to Equity, AFTRA, and SAG. The expense and complexity
 

22
 
of data consolidation from all the producers might be far
 

greater than from the 4 A’s unions because the producers
 

are more scattered and their information more disaggregated.
 

The 4 A’s files are more concentrated by far. But such a
 

project would be possible and, in fact, has some attractive
 

aspects. If the producers were to become the sole source or
 

even a participating source of routine theatrical employment
 

and earnings data, the costs of so doing would clearly invite
 

the collection of routine data about the producers’ input
 

costs from all sources as well as a variety of data concerning such matters as investment and capital returns.
 

The next step in this project should be an exploration of the
 

data sets relating to other creative theatrical personnel,
 

ranging from directors and choreographers to the set, costume,
 

lighting, and make-up designers. These data sets should be
 

examined for their possible integration into the larger pool
 

of actors’ data so that the extent and direction of overlapping and alternating career lines among theatrical personnel
 

can be documented and traced even though the absolute numbers
 

of such moves may be slight.
 

This amalgamation of existing data sets is a technically demanding and politically sensitive task. One of the major
 

problems of such an enterprise would be the question of the
 

structure of the data consolidation organization. How independent should it be? How connected should it be to the
 

4 A’s associations, to the diverse array of theatrical producers and their extant organizations, to the social science
 

research agencies, or to various governmental bodies (e.g.,
 

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of the Census, the Arts
 

Endowment itself)?
 

The extent of employment, unemployment, and earnings of
 

actors cannot be fully measured by the routine records of
 

their professional associations alone. At least three other
 

kinds of data are necessary: paid employment other than
 

theatrical work; unemployment compensation payments; and
 

various modes of direct and indirect support such as family
 

and the use of savings. Only a survey approach can provide
 

such data.
 

23
 
Our next recommendation, therefore, is to create a sample
 

survey of theatrical personnel from the universe of the amalgamated data sets constructed from all the theatrical associations that are included in the fruits of the recommendations
 

above. There are a number of questions that have to be resolved about such a survey. We simply raise them here. How
 

large should the sample of theatre personnel be? How should
 

the sample be stratified in terms of geographical region,
 

parent union, age, sex, length of theatrical experience,
 

earnings, and so forth? How intensive or extensive should
 

the survey be with respect to information beyond matters of
 

employment and unemployment? Here we have in mind: the
 

manner of recruitment and training in theatre skills; information about the alternations of life style and activities
 

in periods of theatrical work and in periods of unemployment;
 

the range of attitudes and beliefs with respect to the theatre,
 

and to the arts in general, and to other areas of interest.
 

Another question regarding the survey has to do with its
 

regularity. It could be thought of as the first of a baseline series with a periodicity of anywhere from five to
 

twenty years. It could also be a large-scale model of a
 

projected smaller series of regular data collections which
 

could be managed from any number of research settings.
 

The main content of the survey, it is important to reassert,
 

should be the most complete information possible about the
 

places and duration of employment, both in and out of the
 

theatre, the compensation derived therefrom, the variety
 

of ways the individual is supported when not employed in
 

the theatre, and the infogmation necessary to assemble and
 

portray the varieties of theatrical careers.
 

As noted above, the number of actors defined by association
 

membership differs from the number of actors identified by
 

the Census and the BLS. Until and unless these two ways of
 

counting the population of actors are reconciled, it will be
 

difficult to base public policies concerned with the theatre
 

arts on a firm empirical base. Also, as we have argued, there
 

is a clear need for a continuing assessment of employment and
 

unemployment in the theatre. For these reasons, we recommend
 

the development of a means of "triangulating" the two types
 

of measures of employment among the theatrical population.
 

Within acceptable margins of error, the two bases of estimating
 

the number of professional actors and their ratio of employment
 

24
 
and unemployment must agree with each other. We propose
 

matching the sample survey based on the amalgamated theatrical association membership lists with another, a work force
 

survey of the Census, BLS, or Current Population Survey
 

type. Such a work force survey could be part of the normal
 

activities of these agencies or it could be a special effort
 

aimed at theatrical personnel only or even at the full range
 

of artistic personnel in the nation. In any case, the key
 

task of the work force survey would be to provide the basis
 

of reconciliation between estimates of the number of professional actors (and their employment) based on associational
 

records and those based on labor force surveys.
 

W~en this data reconciliation has been accomplished, we propose a continuing survey located either in an already established government survey setting, such as the BLS or Current
 

Population Survey, or in an independent or university based
 

research facility. In either case the continuing measurement
 

of theatrical employment, unemployment, and earnings whether
 

by a series of discrete surveys or by a panel design (i.e.,
 

repeated interviews over time with the same sample of respondents) is an important research goal. The continuing
 

survey could be expanded, step by step, into a national
 

survey of the personnel in all the arts. Such a program
 

should be flexible enough to allow specific sub-samples to
 

be added to the basic sampling frame. For example, the
 

boundary between professional theatre and amateur theatre
 

is an important and little studied zone. The two-way transfer of people and theatrical resources at this boundary
 

enriches or impoverishes American artistic life in an unknown
 

fashion. Similarly the age factor in the theatre is little
 

understood and would be a way of identifying the movements
 

into the theatre by the young and out of it by the old.
 

Uncertainty in the Arts
 

Current research tools available to guide policy planning in
 

the arts cannot reach directly in the languages of individual
 

motivations nor can they capture the subtle mixtures of rewards which sustain those motivations. The complex changing
 

arrangements which organize the theatre and its personnel
 

cannot be readily domesticated at present. Of the many models
 

which seek to describe and exDlain how these things work, we
 

recommend two.
 

25
 
Decision-making under uncertainty is one such rubric which may
 

be of signal importance. The substantial research already
 

done in this area and the recent development of analytical
 

models to examine the relationships between professional
 

sport and public policyl are useful guides to any comprehensive
 

study of the role of uncertainty in the arts. Initially,
 

research could focus on the welfare of an actor as a decision-


making unit. An important issue to address is the effect of
 

differential degrees of the contractual risk on an actor’s
 

willingness to supply labor. How does an actor compensate
 

for increased risk of employment and income? Also, research
 

has been done on the effect of uncertainty on work incentives
 

in other institutional settings.2 The methodology used in
 

that research seems appropriate for similar studies in the
 

arts. Once developed, a decision model will provide hypotheses about the behavioral response of an actor to changes
 

in the distribution of his expected risks. At the same time,
 

an actor’s response to changes in employment opportunities
 

other than acting could be studied and attempts to analyze
 

changes in the overall welfare factors could be undertaken.
 

Further analytical study could treat the development of the
 

actor’s work contract with particular emphasis on differential
 

risk-sharing between actor and producer. The attitudes toward
 

risk-bearing attributed to each party will influence the eventual agreement on risk-sharing struck in the contractual bar­

 ̄ gain. There is some precedence for study of this problem of
 

contract formation in another field.3 Similar analysis can be
 

1 Roger Noll, ed. GOVERNMENT AND THE SPORTS BUSINESS (Washington,
 

D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1974).
 

2 See, for example, J. Bonin, "Work Incentives and Uncertainty
 

On A Collective Farm", JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE ECONOMICS (forthcoming) ; and M.K. Block and J.M. Heineke, "The Allocation of
 

Effort Under Uncertainty: The Case of Risk-Averse Behavior,"
 

JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, 81 (March/April, 1973): 376-385.
 

3 Cf.J. Stiglitz, "Incentives and Risk Sharing in Sharecropping,"
 

REVIEW OF ECONOMIC STUDIES, 41 (April, 1974): 219-255.
 

26
 
applied to examine the changes in the actor’s minimum terms
 

of employment as determined by Equity bargaining. By deducing
 

the effect of external changes on the actor’s willingness to
 

bear risk, testable hypotheses can be developed. For example,
 

how does the ability of an actor to spread risks and "hedge
 

his bets" by belonging to more than one union affect his behavior? It is here, of course, that the special institutional
 

nature of non-commercial theatre must be taken into account
 

along with the exchange of theatrical personnel and of artistic
 

property between the various types of commercial and noncommercial theatres. By tracing changes in the external
 

environment and in Equity’s responses to these changes, the
 

dynamics of contract formation can be analyzed.
 

Any analytical model of the actor’s decision making has to
 

take account of the actor’s agent, and Equity collects information on franchised agents, i.e., agents who are permitted to
 

negotiate Equity contracts. Clearly, this intermediate person
 

in the bargaining process between the actor and the producer
 

is extremely important in the arts. The agent not only negotiates a client’s salary but also actively seeks employment
 

opportunities for his client. In the arts, risks and financial
 

incentives affect the agent’s behavior since he is generally
 

paid a percentage of his client’s salary. Therefore, the
 

analytical study of decision making under uncertainty in the
 

arts should include the agent in his role of an intermediary
 

between the actor and the producer.
 

No such model as we are discussing would be complete without
 

the perspective of theatrical producers for the producer also
 

is a decision-making unit faced with considerable uncertainty.
 

Will the play be a hit or a flop? In this environment, the
 

producer’s decisions must be combined with the actor’s decisions to fully understand the eventual outcome of policy
 

changes. The general and difficult question is how the different mixes of input costs affect the decisions to produce
 

one type or another type of theatrical production and the
 

amount of each type. The control and substitution of those
 

input costs are important variables. Also, the size and
 

availability of the pool of actors and other creative, technical, and craft personnel are important factors. Clearly,
 

it seems necessary to review other data sources, mainly from
 

27
 
the production side, in the same fashion that this report has
 

examined Equity’s operations.
 

The second model would combine the study of the career patterns
 

of individual actors with the study of how acting jobs are
 

created. It would provide a way to see how the institutional
 

complex of American theatre moves actors through a series of
 

jobs. From the point of view of the actor, the series is
 

called his career. The totality of jobs is also a dynamic
 

record of the theatre’s social structure. Little systematic
 

work of an empirical sort has been done in this area.
 

Harrison White’s Chains of Opportunity: System Models of
 

Mobility in Orqanization (1970) might help point the way to
 

building a useful, analytical model, but finally such a model
 

should await the completion of the earlier recommendations.
 

Theatre and the Other Arts
 

In this third problem area, two projects are recommended. Many
 

artists, especially young ones, are gifted in several ways and
 

energetically pursue achievement in more than one art form.
 

One of our proposals here addresses the questions: How often
 

do we find multi-talented artists? What social, geographical,
 

and institutional conditions encourage or hinder either the
 

simultaneous or successive participation in more than one art
 

form? What are the characteristics of artists who do or do
 

not extend their work into different artistic media? The data
 

which can provide some empirical basis for resolving these
 

questions will result from our recommendations on employment
 

above. Understanding the movement and exchange of theatrical
 

personnel from live theatre to movies to television is a
 

necessary beginning to understanding the relations between
 

theatre and other arts. These movements can be traced from
 

the consolidated membership lists of the 4 A’s associations
 

and from P&W records of employment and earnings. It will
 

be possible to trace an actor’s career as he moves across
 

several media--live theatre, movies, television--and as he
 

moves across the varieties of production forms--Broadway,
 

stock, residential theatre, and so on. Furthermore, when
 

the proposed sample survey based on the theatrical associational lists is assembled, the inquiry can widen its scope
 

28
 
to trace the full range of artistic activities the actor has
 

engaged in, the nature of his training, and specific influences,
 

such as those of family, peers, and teachers, which moved him
 

towards or away from the various artistic forms.
 

The final study we recommend is to identify the social and
 

economic processes that shape the exchanges and competitions
 

between theatre and the other arts. The theatre exchanges
 

personnel, artistic properties, and a series of more intangible styles, techniques, and values with others. The theatre
 

also competes for those resources. Clearly this is an extremely broad and complex problem. The research proposed here can
 

reach only a small part, although a strategic one.
 

The exchanges and competitions among the arts have a spatial
 

dimension in the United States that, inadvertently, provide
 

a natural laboratory for their study. We refer to the state
 

arts councils in the fifty states. These agencies distribute
 

federal, state, and private funds for the support of the arts.
 

Their routine records have been augmented by a recent intensive study of their operations sponsored by the Arts Endowment.
 

Some of the data from that study is available and is likely to
 

be valuable material on which a study of the relationship of
 

theatre and the other arts can draw. In addition, the amalgamated membership lists of the 4 A’s associations can provide
 

additional information on the geographical distribution of
 

theatrical work in the United States.
 

More specifically, the need here is for an exploratory project
 

designed to evaluate the problems of assembling an adequate
 

data base for a study of the exchanges and competitions of
 

theatre personnel and institutions with the other arts within
 

the spatial framework of the fifty states.
 

Two final comments about these recommendations. First, none of
 

them is a fully developed proposal, but rather each is a more
 

or less specific guide. The additional work required to put
 

these proposals in operation varies considerably from one to
 

the other. Second, the problems and bases of these projects
 

are interrelated. Decisions to implement any one project should
 

be made with the problems of all in mind. The proposed research
 

need not be implemented all at the same time, but in such an
 

order as to allow maximum utility for all the problems discussed.
 

29
 
APPENDIX: TYPES OF EQUITY CONTRACTS
 

i) Production - Broadway, National Tours, and Bus and
 

Truck Tours.
 

2) Special Production - Theatres with limited seating
 

capacity in the Broadway area. (Occasionally used elsewhere)
 

3) Stock, Resident Dramatic - Summer and/or Winter Stock
 

where resident companies are engaged for a series of consecutive
 

productions and a minimum number of resident actors are employed.
 

4) Stock, Non-Resident Dramatic - For a Stock company
 

which maintains no resident company but jobs in new casts for
 

a series of consecutive productions.
 

5) Stock, Indoor Musical - Which may or may not maintain
 

a resident company presenting a series of consecutive musical
 

productions.
 

6) Stock, Outdoor Musical - Covers three outdoor theatres
 

presenting a series of musical productions.
 

7) Dinner Theatres - Where a series of consecutive productions are presented in conjunction with dinner service with
 

the price of admission covering both.
 

8) L.O.R.T. - Non-profit repertory and non-repertory
 

resident theatres with rehearsal and playing periods longer
 

than those in Stock.
 

9) Industrial - Productions presented to audiences and
 

clients in industry.
 

i0) Young Audiences - Productions created or adapted for
 

children up through and including junior high school level.
 

ii) Off-Broadway - Theatres with not more than 499 seats
 

in geographically limited areas in New York City.
 

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12) Mini-Contract - Reduced scale contract, similar to
 

Off-Broadway, but for use in theatres of less than 200 seats.
 

13) Hollywood Area Theatres and Bay Area Theatres (HAT/BAT)
 

- An Off-Broadway type contract in Hollywood and San Francisco
 

areas.
 

14) Chicago Off-Loop Theatres (COLT) - An Off-Broadway
 

type contract in the Chicago area.
 

15) Letter-Form Agreement - Specially created contract
 

to satisfy unusual situations.
 

16) Showcase - A non-salaried arrangement for limited run
 

showcases in New York area in theatres seating less than I00.
 

17) Outdoor Drama Festival - Covering outdoor pageants
 

like the "Lost Colony" in Virginia.
 

18) Cafe Contract - Production presented in cafes where
 

food or beverages may be sold.
 

19) Guest Artist Agreement - For use in universities and
 

community theatres where one or more Equity members perform
 

with students.
 

20) Actor - Teacher Contract - For use in educational
 

institutions where one or more Equity members teach and
 

perform with students.
 

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