LOS ANGELES — J. Nicholas Counter III, a lawyer who changed the face of labor relations in Hollywood during his long tenure as chief negotiator for hundreds of film and television companies, died on Friday after collapsing earlier at his home in the Bell Canyon community in Ventura County, California.þþMr. Counter was 69. The cause has not been determined, said Jesse Hiestand, a spokesman for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.þþMr. Counter spent 27 years as president of the alliance, retiring in March. The industry group negotiates contracts with an array of unions, from creative guilds like the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America to the blue-collar Teamsters and the craft-oriented locals of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.þþWorking mostly behind the scenes, Mr. Counter, who was known as Nick, concluded more than 300 labor agreements. Tall, gray-haired and affable, though his temper occasionally flared, he became a public presence only rarely. And that usually happened when things went wrong, as with a pair of bitterly fought Hollywood writers’ strikes, in 1988 and 2007.þþWhen 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America East and the Writers Guild of America West walked out over payments for new media and other issues in November 2007, Mr. Counter told reporters to expect a long strike. Much of Hollywood was shut down for three months, before the companies and the guilds reached an accord that only set the stage for the next battle — with the Screen Actors Guild.þþActors worked for nearly a year without a contract during a fractious negotiation that ended after Mr. Counter turned over leadership of the alliance to his protégée, Carol Lombardini.þþYet Mr. Counter was best known inside Hollywood for having corralled the alliance’s diverse and often contentious film and television companies into a bargaining unit that was sufficiently disciplined to strike deal after deal with only a handful of breakdowns over nearly three decades.þþ“I never knew him to break his word,” said Gilbert Cates, the secretary-treasurer of the Directors Guild, who had squared off with Mr. Counter in a number of contract talks. “It was really important, because he was giving his word for a lot of people who weren’t necessarily in unison.”þþBefore Mr. Counter joined the newly formed alliance in 1982, companies like 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures had drifted away from an earlier bargaining group to conduct negotiations on their own. þþJames Nicholas Counter was born in Phoenix on March 21, 1940, and grew up in Colorado, where his father, a steel-mill hand, worked his way into management.þþAfter graduating from the University of Colorado and receiving a law degree from Stanford, he practiced law in Los Angeles and represented the alliance’s predecessor.þþMr. Counter insisted that the film and television companies keep a united front, not so much to prevail over the unions as to avoid the chaos that had plagued earlier negotiations. He often said that labor talks should not have winners and losers. “Negotiations just end with your ability to make a deal,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1987.þþHe is survived by his wife, Jackie; a son, Nicholas; a daughter, Samantha Kurtzman-Counter; and a grandson.þþMr. Counter was particularly proud of his service as a trustee of 14 union health and pension funds, and of the Motion Picture and Television Fund, an industry-oriented philanthropy. The well-being of those funds, which have been strained by rising costs and the prolonged economic downturn, are likely to be an issue in a next round of negotiations by the alliance. þ
Source: NY Times
