Hollywood Stars
Ransom, a movie that opens Nov. 8, cost $61 million to make.
Nearly a third of that, $20 million, went to its star, Mel Gibson. Gibson
worked for three months, earning almost $0.3 million a day. For six weeks on
the set of the next Batman movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been paid
$25 million, or $833,333 a day--plus, if the film succeeds, he will get another
$10 million or so from merchandising revenue. Nobuyuki Idei, the new president
of Sony--whose major films last year featured expensive stars and either
flopped or broke even--has declared that his first priority for Hollywood is to
liberate it from the tyranny of stars . Why do stars get paid so much
money? Are they driving Hollywood out of business?
The
upward creep of stars' salaries, and producers' complaints that
it was wrecking the movies, have both been going on since the film industry
began. In 1910, aspiring film mogul Carl Laemmle wooed actress Florence
Lawrence away from Biograph (where D.W. Griffith was a director) with higher
wages and a promise to make her a star. Until then, there were no movie stars.
Feature films carried no acting credits, and producers forbade movie magazines
to print cast lists. The reason was precisely the fear that actors and
actresses known to the public by name would exploit that recognition to demand
higher wages. They did, especially during the late 1910s and the 1920s, when a
leading lady like Mary Pickford could command the then-astronomical sum of
$10,000 a week, plus an annual bonus of $340,000.
During the studio era of the 1930s and '40s, talent
costs were kept artificially low by a code negotiated between producers
and actors at the depth of the Depression as part of FDR's National Recovery
Act. (The NRA was later ruled unconstitutional, but the Hollywood Code
survived). The code gave the five major and three minor studios draconian power
over stars. These included a seven-year exclusive right to their services, the
right to cancel their contracts every six months (the stars had no such right
in return), the right to dock them for turning down a role in any movie of the
studio's choice, the right to predetermine salary increases, and so on.
In 1948,
an antitrust suit brought by the federal government forced the studios
to give up ownership of movie theaters. Without a guaranteed outlet for their
product, the studios no longer could afford to keep stars on permanent
retainer. At that point, stars seized control of their own careers, and
the talent agent became a major Hollywood player. The agents' triumph
was not complete, however, until the late 1980s and early 1990s, after all the
studios had been bought by larger, mostly international corporations, and
colorless corporate executives replaced the larger-than-life moguls of the
studio era. Michael Ovitz and a few other agents were able to use their
clients' star power to demand a package deal--star plus screenplay or some
other element of production--which the studio was forced to accept, in toto.
Ovitz's Creative Artists Agency became the single most powerful institution in
Hollywood.
Ovitz left agentry last year to become No. 2 to
Michael Eisner at Disney, and Ovitz's No. 2, Ron Meyer, also has left CAA,
leading some Hollywood savants to declare the agency era over. Meanwhile,
though, the triumph of the agent and the package deal is, perhaps, the main
reason that stars' salaries are as high as they are. But it is also true that
the demand for stars' services is also at an all-time high. Even television
programming this season is dominated by movie stars (Ted Danson, Mary
Steenburgen, Michael J. Fox, Rosie O'Donnell). Several television executives
told Variety recently that they would not produce any new shows unless
they could sign top film stars to them.
Hollywood
stars are benefiting from the larger economic trend of growing inequality. Not
only is the gap between executives and janitors growing; so is the gap among
executives. In the case of stars, the main reason is marketing : Studios
have found no better way to bring in audiences than through the lure of popular
stars, who often command followings in specific age groups and can therefore
help target a film to teen-agers, middle-aged women, etc. And securing viewers
is an increasingly difficult task. Audiences are shrinking, partly as a result
of competition from videocassettes, cable and pay TV, the Internet, and other
forms of new technology. Films stay in theaters for less time than ever before;
therefore, more films have to be made; and therefore, more money has to be
spent distinguishing one film from another. The cost of marketing a movie is up
47 percent since 1991, according to the Motion Picture Association of America,
to an average of $18 million. Advertising movies before they open is
crucial but tricky, since each film is essentially a brand-new product with no
identity in the marketplace other than its stars'. Word-of-mouth takes too long
to kick in and hurts more films than it helps, and no one knows the names of
directors anymore (except, perhaps, for Steven Spielberg's). As a result, the
value of stars' fame has increased.
Adding to the demand for stars with recognizable names is
the foreign market . Sales overseas now account for half or more of a
film's gross. Waterworld , for example, was considered a flop in the
United States because it only grossed $88 million on a $175 million budget.
Worldwide, though, it grossed $260 million. The
Cable Guy, for
which star Jim Carrey was paid $20 million out of a $60 million budget, is also
expected to turn a profit abroad. But selling a blockbuster overseas requires
the services of A-list talent; foreign audiences are even less willing than
American ones to accept second-tier stars.
Hollywood
executives are attempting to reduce stars' influence . This spring,
Disney announced that it would cut its production by half. Several studios
followed suit. Studios will also try to substitute for expensive star vehicles
more animated films and explosive special-effects movies such as Twister
and Independence Day --the biggest box-office successes last year, with
grosses of more than $200 million apiece.
Meanwhile, following the lead of Clint
Eastwood, Robert Redford, Ron Howard, and Jodie Foster, more and more actors
are using their cachet to become directors and producers, often of smaller,
artier movies that might not otherwise attract either funding or an audience.
Mel Gibson won an Academy Award for directing last year's Braveheart , as
did three actors (Christine Lahti, Griffin Dunne, and Jeff Goldblum) for
directing short films. This year, the actors-turned-directors (or producers or
writers) included Tom Hanks ( That Thing You Do!) , Steve Buscemi
( Trees Lounge ), and Al Pacino ( Looking for
Richard ).
It is not the first time
that actors have tried to seize the reins of production--that was in 1919, when
Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks joined forces with
William S. Hart and D.W. Griffith to form United Artists , a distribution
company meant to compete with the larger film companies, which were churning
out formula films and treating most actors and actresses as hired hands. United
Artists, however, was plagued by inept management and a lack of resources, and
never became a power player. This time, actors and actresses have Hollywood
over a barrel, and they may just succeed in becoming the next generation of
auteurs.
