Almost every single person who lives in Los Angeles has at some point in his life rolled his eyes, shaken his head and sighed, "Actors ..." Today, a few of us are doing something quite different. It's more of a look of inspired surprise, with an intake of breath and an impressed "...Actors!" (head-nodding implied). With the possibility of another Hollywood strike looming over the city, AFTRA (that other actors' union) went and cut a deal with the AMPTP, leaving us all rather impressed and hopeful that SAG will do similarly and we can avoid an actors' strike altogether. You can't imagine the city-wide We Support You car honking that goes on with these strike -- not to mention, you know, the job and revenue loss.

Continuing the downward spiral reported in Thursday's Contract Talks SAG Further, both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety report that talks between the SAG and AMPTP have shut down. AMPTP will now begin negotiations with AFTRA, pushing SAG negotiations to the back burner. AFTRA had been waiting over two weeks for AMPTP to deal with SAG, and will get their chance now that talks with SAG have hit a snag. According to AMPTP, SAG refuses to go along with deals AMPTP made with the WGA, the DGA and the aforementioned AFTRA. If this is beginning to sound like Alphabet Soup On Crack to you, you're not alone. Writing these acronyms makes me feel like I'm on LSD. Now I'm passing my letter-filled hallucinations to you.

Just when you were finally getting used to scripted TV being back on the air and had settled into the blissful comfort of not having your weekend jaunts to the movie theater disrupted too much, news came in today that the talks between the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers and the Screen Actors Guild are not going well. According to The Hollywood Reporter, any chance of SAG and the AMPTP agreeing to a contract by Friday, which had been the fervent hope of industry insiders and casual entertainment consumers alike, are over.

The Hollywood Reporter says the Screen Actors Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers sat down today for the first time for a series of talks designed at holding off another strike. I wish both sides the best of luck in settling this. If there is a strike however, I sure hope it doesn't beget anything near the disaster last year's Golden Globes inflicted on us. That debacle alone should have convinced the studios to pay up. Without writers, the actors have nothing to say onscreen, but is the inverse true?

When SAG struck in 2000, some believed it caused the current glut of reality TV shows currently making American viewers even dumber. I can envision this time the studios using a more terrifying method I'll call the Sky Captain Method. In Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Laurence Olivier gave a better performance dead than most of his living work in the 70's. Technology has also made Fred Astaire dance with a vacuum cleaner against his will, so who's to say the producers won't use it to give our dearly departed actors work in the same movies SAG actors won't do if they're striking? I'm sure there's some kind of union loophole prohibiting this, but only if SAG has good intellectual property lawyers. The verdict's out on that one. Like colorizing, the method that turned B&W movies into coloring books (and Ol' Blue Eyes into Ol' Brown Eyes in Suddenly), Ted Turner can own this functionality too.

Bette Davis claimed American International Pictures censored her F-worded last line of dialogue in Bunny O'Hare, so I bet her ghost will be happy she's cast in the new Judd Apatow movie, along with Bogie and James Cagney as McShootin'. Boris Karloff will show up in Saw 5 and his fellow horror actor Vincent Price will be in every PG-13 rated rip-off of Japanese horror movies the studios can turn out. If the movies are a hit, SAG will give in; if teenagers start asking why the actors are in black and white and the movie is in color, the producers will cave. Hopefully, both can reach a settlement without feeling the other side was coerced into a settlement. But if not, look out for Al Jolson in Madea Goes To Jail.