Thomas Veil said:
The problem with that is, long before Enron started cooking the books, the film industry was expert at it. They have this ongoing claim that they're running in the red. No matter how fabulously their latest blockbuster is doing, it still hasn't made enough money to pay the star the 3% of the net that he contracted for. Jack Nicholson, I believe, had to sue WB to get his share of "Batman" because they kept claiming it hadn't made any money. Riiiiiiight....
I do agree that the major studios have very, very ingenious contracts and stipulations on who gets what when, but you can't judge them by how well a single movie is doing. The majority of movies never turn a profit. So the few movies that do turn a profit have to cover the losses of the ones that tanked. Look at Chornicles of Riddick. It tanked hardcore and probably put Universal in the hole for, ballpark, $70 million. D'oh. It's going to take a lot of winners to cover that debt.
And while it's not directly related to finances, Hollywood also treats its writers like dirt. The director, not the writer, is considered the "author" of the film. It is his vision that ends up shaping the movie. If books worked that way, the editor would turn someone's novel over to five or six other authors, who'd change it so much that the original author wouldn't even recognize it...and the editor would be dictating the process all the way. Any decent author would throw a fit at such behavior...but Hollywood has movie and TV writers under their thumb, and if they want to work in the industry, they've got to accept these unprofessional, degrading circumstances.
Generally speaking writers probably do get the biggest shaft in the film world. But the book/movie analogy doesn't really fly. They are different mediums that require different things. What works on the page, or works in the writer's head, has a good chance of not working during shooting (and vice-versa, what looks bad on the page may look great on film). A screenplay is a framework. A begining. Not a finished product. And a movie, by its very nature, must be a collaborative effort. And the person that controls the hundreds (thousands?) of people working on the film is the director. Do directors' get too much credit for good films? Probably. Do director's get too much blame for bad films? Probably. But that's life. If you,as a writer, want your written word the be the final,the only, version then don't write screen plays. The writer gives control to the director and the director (unless he's a complete control freak) gives control to the editor. It's not uncommon for the final cut of a film to be different from the director's original vision of the film. There are so many creative people involved in the making of a film that you can't "lock" the story and say "this is how it is, never deviate from this."
As wicked as the studios are there are wicked individuals in every part of the business. There is a lot of talent, a lot of ideas, and a lot of ambition in Hollywood, but only a small amount of money to go around, relatively speaking. Studios or not it quickly turns into screw your neighbor. Of course the same is true for any business where there is a ton of money on the line. But Hollywood's dirty laundry is typically much more colorful than that of some Fortune 500 company.
And, in regards to TV writers, they have the power in their medium. Directors shuffle thru constantly.
Abstract,
No. My point was that "I'll pirate a movie 'cause it won't hurt the super rich actors" justification is hollow. I think people are ignorant to many of the realities of the business so I was trying to offer some education.
Lethal
