Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1054784
T he SAG Awards ® started with five actors sitting in a union meeting room and asking one another, "How do we make an award show for film and television that fits in a two- hour time slot when every other awards show is at least three hours?" In January 2019, the Screen Actors Guild Awards will mark its 25th year of celebrating — in just two hours — excellence in the art and craft of acting. Anniversaries invite reminiscing, so let's recall that this prestigious and distinctive event began in a scene familiar to all actors … FADE IN: INT. UNIVERSAL SHERATON ROOF GARDEN – EVENING – ESTABLISHING. FIVE ACTORS stare dumbstruck at one another. The SAG Board of Directors (pre-merger with AFTRA) had established the Screen Actors Guild Awards Committee in December 1993. It was in response to an entreaty from an outside producer eager to make a pitch to a network for a show about actors, and it would be designed by five actors: Daryl Anderson, Toey Caldwell, Kathy Connell, Paul Napier and Yale Summers. Having advocated for the union's own celebration of excellence, the five friends were named as the initial committee members. Now they were tasked with making their idea a reality, and they found themselves starting with a blank page that would become the event that aired live from Stage 12 at Universal Studios on Saturday, Feb. 25, 1995. Connell is still with the event, but now as SAG Awards executive producer. "We put the whole show together in just 15 months," she remembers. "It wasn't until afterwards that we realized how much we didn't know." That first committee succeeded beyond expectations — despite the members' inexperience. Present at that inaugural SAG Awards were some of the world's most accomplished actors, including early supporters of the union's Awards like Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, John Travolta, Jessica Lange, Tim Robbins, Edward James Olmos, Helen Hunt and hundreds more. Angela Lansbury — then starring in the second season of Murder, She Wrote — gave the memorable opening speech, and the first-ever Actor ® statuette was presented to Martin Landau for his supporting performance in Ed Wood. The governing philosophy of the SAG Awards has remained unchanged ever since then: The show must pay for itself; no dues could be spent on the Awards. The voting would be open to all active, paid-up members of the union. The SAG Awards would benefit the union's philanthropic arm, and through what is now the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, actors, broadcasters and recording artists/ singers in need. To this end, the SAG Awards committee always includes someone who represents the Foundation. That is JoBeth Williams for this silver anniversary show, who in addition to being chair of the SAG Awards committee since 2009, three years after she joined the committee, also is president of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation Board. Anderson is now vice chair of the committee he helped establish, as well as being the show's producer for SAG-AFTRA. Jason George, Elizabeth McLaughlin and Woody Schultz are the other three current committee members. "I was fairly terrified a month before that first show, when we started to send out invitations and didn't get RSVPs immediately," Connell says, marveling at her own naiveté. "Now I know a lot more about what we think of as the actors' party in the actors' house. And I'm more proud than ever of the team that makes it possible." Fade out…and curtain up on January 27. In the BEGINNING … EMILY SHUR/TIME WARNER CO. The SAG Board of Directors (pre-merger with AFTRA) established the Screen Actors Guild Awards ® Committee in December 1993. Pictured here are the five founding members planning the 1995 inaugural SAG Awards: from left, Toey Caldwell, Paul Napier, Kathy Connell, Daryl Anderson and Yale Summers. Guiding the 25th anniversary celebration is the current Screen Actors Guild Awards Committee above: from left, Woody Schultz, Elizabeth McLaughlin, Jason George, Kathy Connell, Committee Chair JoBeth Williams, and Committee Vice Chair Daryl Anderson. During the inaugural SAG Awards, cast members from NYPD Blue receive the first-ever honors for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series. 94 SAG-AFTRA | Fall 2018 | sagaftra.org