Events

• 1947 – The Screen Actors Guild implements an anti-Communist loyalty oath.
• 2003 – Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s tenure as the governor of California began.[8]

Screen Actors Guild

The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) was an American labor union which represented over 100,000 film and television principal and background performers worldwide. On 30 March 2012, the union leadership announced that the SAG membership voted to merge with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) to create SAG-AFTRA.

According to SAG’s Mission Statement, the Guild sought to: negotiate and enforce collective bargaining agreements that establish equitable levels of compensation, benefits, and working conditions for its performers; collect compensation for exploitation of recorded performances by its members, and provide protection against unauthorised use of those performances; and preserve and expand work opportunities for its members.

The Guild was founded in 1933 in an effort to eliminate what was described as exploitation of Hollywood actors who were being forced into oppressive multi-year contracts with the major movie studios. Opposition to these contracts included that they did not include restrictions on work hours or minimum rest periods, and often had clauses that automatically renewed at the studios’ discretion. These contracts were notorious for allowing the studios to dictate the public and private lives of the performers who signed them, and most did not have provisions to allow the performer to end the deal.

The Screen Actors Guild was associated with the Associated Actors and Artistes of America (AAAA), which is the primary association of performer’s unions in the United States. AAAA is affiliated with the AFL-CIO. SAG claimed exclusive jurisdiction over motion picture performances, and shared jurisdiction of radio, television, Internet, and other new media with its sister union AFTRA, with which it shared 44,000 dual members. Internationally, the SAG was affiliated with the International Federation of Actors.

In addition to its main offices in Hollywood, SAG also maintained local branches in several major US cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Honolulu, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, New York City, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Since 1995, the guild annually awarded the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which are considered an indicator of success at the Academy Awards. This award is continued, still using the same name, by SAG-AFTRA.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger (born 30 July 1947) is an Austrian-American actor, film producer, businessman, retired professional bodybuilder and politician who served as the 38th governor of California between 2003 and 2011. As of 2022, he is the most recent Republican governor of California. Time magazine named Schwarzenegger one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and 2007.

Schwarzenegger began lifting weights at the age of 15 and went on to win the Mr. Universe title at age 20 and subsequently won the Mr. Olympia title seven times. He is widely regarded as either the greatest or one of the two greatest bodybuilders of all time along with Ronnie Coleman, and has written many books and articles about bodybuilding. The Arnold Sports Festival, considered the second-most important bodybuilding event after Mr. Olympia, is named after him. He appeared in the bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron (1977). Schwarzenegger retired from bodybuilding and gained worldwide fame as a Hollywood action star, with his breakthrough in the sword and sorcery epic Conan the Barbarian (1982), a box-office hit with a sequel in 1984. After playing the title character in the science fiction film The Terminator (1984), he starred in the sequels Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Terminator Genisys (2015), and Terminator: Dark Fate (2019). His other successful action films included Commando (1985), The Running Man (1987), Predator (1987), Red Heat (1988), Total Recall (1990), and True Lies (1994), in addition to comedy films such as Twins (1988), Kindergarten Cop (1990), Junior (1994), and Jingle All the Way (1996). He is the founder of the film production company Oak Productions.

As a Republican candidate, Schwarzenegger was first elected on 07 October 2003, in a special recall election to replace then-Governor Gray Davis. He received 48.6% of the vote, 17 points ahead of Democrat runner-up Cruz Bustamante. He was sworn in on 17 November to serve the remainder of Davis’ term, and was re-elected in the 2006 California gubernatorial election with an increased vote share of 55.9% to serve a full term as governor. In 2011, he reached his term limit as governor and returned to acting.

Schwarzenegger was nicknamed the “Austrian Oak” in his bodybuilding days, “Arnie” or “Schwarzy” during his acting career, and “the Governator” (a portmanteau of “Governor” and “Terminator”) during his political career. He married Maria Shriver, a niece of President John F. Kennedy, in 1986. They separated in 2011 after he admitted to having fathered a child with their housemaid in 1997; their divorce was finalised in 2021.