On Monday April 7, PERG held its General Membership Meeting at NAB, at the Cine Central area in North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. About one hundred guests packed into the cordoned-off reception area provided by NAB for the event. The guests were about a 50/50 mix of rental company principals and representatives from vendor companies.
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| PERG’s General Membership Meeting at NAB |
As always, guests enjoy seeing one another face to face and having an opportunity to have a glass or wine together while discussing the state of the business, products at the show, and catching up on each other’s lives.
After networking, the meeting was called to order. Sally Spaderna (Koerner Camera, Portland) welcomed everyone and thanked PERG’s annual sponsors Applied Entertainment & Sports, ARRI, Astera, Litegear, Panavision, and Taylor & Taylor Associates, and the event sponsors Fujifilm and Calzone & Anvil Case Company.
Sally introduced “hello from absent friends” -- video clips that PERG solicited from members who were not present at the event this year. Speaking to the camera with their rental facility in the background John Cini (High Output, Boston), Michael Koener (Koerner Camera, Portland), Mark Wofford (PC&E, Atlanta), Samantha Harter (HD House, Miami) extended their best wishes. Each had a different message, but the common theme was wishing they could be with their friends from PERG.
Harry Box, PERG Manager, took the mic next with two announcements. The first was introducing ESTA’s new Program Manager for Membership and Events. Xenia Lappo is someone many members already know. She worked at ARRI and at Ratpack in LA. Harry remarked that, with her background in marketing, Xenia will be a huge asset in running and expanding ESTA’s events and membership program.
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| Xenia Lappo, ESTA Project Manager for Membership and Events |
The second announcement was that we are celebrating a birthday. Rental Guard is ten years old. At our NAB meeting in 2015, PERG launched what has become the international industry depository for theft information, including theft reports, watch list, and member-only features for protecting rental companies from fraud like Question Customer Alerts, and New Customer Reference Inquiry. Since 2015 RENTAL GUARD has grown to have 1018 users from 46 different countries. 517 of those are people working at rental companies. Other users include insurance, law enforcement, production companies, equipment servicing companies, used equipment dealers, schools, owner operators, and vendors.
Beyond the value to the rental community of being able to use RENTAL GUARD, Harry demonstrated two additional ways that it benefits the community. The first is that PERG can aggregate the data to show trends in the industry, as demonstrated by a pie graph showing an increase in “rented not returned” incidents in the past couple years.
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| An example of aggregated data used to see trends in theft activity. The graph shows an increase in “Rented not returned” when compared to the same period three years ago. |
The second is that the data from RENTAL GUARD is invaluable to law enforcement, as demonstrated recently when the infamous fraudster, Ryan Roman, was arrested in Burbank, and PERG was able to supply a wealth of information about his past crimes—information that will help the prosecutor make the charges against Roman stick.
Harry announced that RENTAL GUARD version 3.0 is currently in development and will be released later this year. The new version enables PERG to own the coding of the RENTAL GUARD, which will drastically reduce the cost of hosting the site and help ensures RENTAL GUARD’s future. HISCOX Insurance has stepped up as the first insurance underwriter to sponsor this important transition for RENTAL GUARD. We hope other insurance underwriters will soon join them to support this essential and important free industry resource.
Next, Anna Mayo (MP&E, Dallas) took the mic to speak about ESTA’s new member benefit – Plaid Identity Verification. Sophisticated automated identification verification can help rental companies detect a “customer” who is a risk. Such services have been out of reach for many companies. The Plaid service is made affordable to ESTA members by a special arrangement with Plaid that leverages our collective buying power as a trade association. Eleven PERG companies have signed up for the service so far.
To sign up for your own Plaid dashboard, please email us at plaid@esta.org.
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| Anna Mayo (MP&E, Dallas), member of the PERG Council explains how Plaid identify verification uses a live photo of the customer, a photo of their ID, and basic contact information that the user inputs to determine if the person is who they say they are. |
Anna Mayo described some of the kinds of scenarios where Plaid could provide a rental company with data that would be hard and time consuming for a rental company to find by itself.
Next, Scott Taylor (Taylor & Taylor Associates) took the stage. Scott has been part of a PERG Working Group that is looking at liability implications for rental companies when they are part of the chain of commerce for renting third-party equipment (such as crew-owned gear) to productions. With input from both the AICP and PERG attorneys, the working group drafted an addendum to the AICP/PERG Terms & Conditions aimed holding crew owned equipment to the same standards as rental company equipment, both in terms of representations and warranties regarding the equipment’s completeness and state of repair, and in terms of liability coverage. The addendum, which must be signed by the crew member as well as the rental company and the production company, states that the crew member indemnifies the other parties if a fault in their equipment leads to a lawsuit. Scott pointed out that there have been cases involving very large losses where this kind of provision would have protected the rental company and production company when the crew-owned gear was the cause of losses.
Scott also announced that in an upcoming PERG Coffee Break, a panel of legal and insurance experts will discuss the question of liability and steps rental companies can take to protect themselves. Watch for invitations to that event coming soon to your email box.
Following Scott’s remarks, the audience we treated to an update on PERG’s EWI Program from Bianca Halpern (Becine, Los Angeles).
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| Bianca Halpern (Becine, Los Angeles) announces six new EWI grants available for PERG members who are hiring in the next six month. |
Over the past two years, by participating in the program, PERG members have given 16 new rental employees training and exceptional insights into the rental business. The rental companies received EWI grants, which completely offset the expenses of the first six months of the new worker’s employment. The training aims to cultivate an understanding and passion the rental industry’s unique role supporting productions and spark careers in rental. EWI Program Coordinator, Alison Cupples, has actively supplemented the training by organizing EWI Coffee Breaks (virtual meetings with industry experts) on a wide variety of topics (See PERG Coffee Breaks on YouTube, in this Newsletter, of view playlist HERE). Alison cut together a collection of selfie videos featuring some of the current trainees in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, and Albuquerque. The young trainees sent videos about what they were working on that day, and expressing their appreciation for the program.
Bianca announced that PERG is now accepting applications from rental companies that may be hiring in the next six months. NETFLIX has agreed to sponsor the EWI program again this year, supporting six new grants. The program pays the wages and benefits of your new employee for their first six months of employment and monitors and supports the rental company’s employee training. EWI companies take turns providing Coffee Breaks that all the EWI trainees attend, in which specific training topics are addressed.
The penultimate speaker, and the highlight of the PERG Meeting, was Sally Spaderna, the current Chair of the PERG Council. Her message focused on the extreme challenges faced by rental companies in 2025. To preserve the level of service that productions have historically enjoyed and come to expect, the rental community will need not just perseverance, but a new level of unity and cooperation among the companies providing these services. The text of Sally’s speech is provided in full. See “Message from the PERG Chair” in this newsletter.
To close out the evening, Paul Royalty (Litegear/Chauvet Cinema Group) spoke on behalf off Behind the Scenes, a charity that provides a wide array of services to entertainment technology professionals who work “behind the camera, behind the curtain,” (to which we add “behind the rental counter”) in the entertainment industry. These include grants for serious illness or injury, counseling grants for therapy or rehab, and new this year, disaster relief grands from small immediate needs. These grants have been life altering for recipients in moments of extreme need. And they are available not just to crew members, but the rental employees as well. PERG members are encouraged to make their employees aware of these grants.
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