Screen Actors Guild Talent Brings Life to ‘Quarterlife’

Los Angeles (September 14, 2007)—Screen Actors Guild is proud to announce the use of Guild talent in the highly anticipated webisodic production quarterlife, set to debut November 11 on MySpaceTV.com.

Produced under a SAG contract and created by Emmy-winning producers Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, quarterlife is one of the best recent examples of a network-quality series made for the Internet. The production also publicly heralds Screen Actors Guild’s commitment to one-on-one outreach to producers and high-profile SAG members who are actively producing new media content.

Herskovitz and Zwick, the team behind the TV shows thirtysomething, My So-Called Life and other Guild-signatory hit productions, created quarterlife to tell the story of six creative people in their 20s.

“This is another sign that the Internet is maturing into a productive distribution channel for professionally produced content,” said Doug Allen, the Guild’s national executive director.

“There’s a growing audience expectation for higher quality programming on any platform. That’s what Screen Actors Guild members provide,” said Ray Rodriguez, the Guild’s deputy national executive director for contracts.

Rodriguez and Allen agreed that sites like MySpace and YouTube will continue to be channels that not only attract audiences, but keep them coming back for more, in part because of programming like quarterlife.

The quarterlife concept originally began as a television pilot signed by the Guild in 2004, but the show ultimately wasn’t picked up for television. The project was then reconceived three years later. The producers rewrote the story and hired a new cast.

The new project was signed January 19 to the SAG Internet Online Agreement by Business Representative Pierre Debs. In all, 13 Guild members are working or have worked as principal performers on the webisodes.

“They shot the first of the series in the spring, which they then divided into six episodes,” said Debs. “They are currently shooting five more hours of the series, which will account for the remaining 30 episodes.”

The 36 eight-minute segments of quarterlife will also air on a newly created social networking site, quarterlife.com. The budget for quarterlife was in excess of $400,000 per hour, according to published reports.

Allen said Internet consumers should expect more high-quality content like quarterlife to come.

“This is all part of our effort to provide opportunities for major producers to utilize our members in new media production,” Allen said. “We have signed more than 200 Internet projects to Screen Actors Guild contracts in the last two years alone.”