The Green Pile - Money And The Movies, Part One
Monkey points? Video residuals? Allow me to explain...
Ever wondered how much producer-star Tom Cruise will pocket for the second part of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning? I bet he hasn’t. In fact, considering Cruise banked $75 million for the fist Mission: Impossible movie in 1996, he probably doesn’t care. That’s right: 75 million dollars! In 1996! In Hollywood, nothing is impossible.
Movie star wages got silly long before Cruise chose to accept his mission. In the 1930s, at the very height of the Depression, Clark Gable could demand $400,000 a picture. Forty years later, Steve McQueen came to an arrangement with Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox that guaranteed him $14 million to star in The Towering Inferno. And around the time Tom was inking his M:I deal, Mel Gibson was having it written into his contract that he be paid $20,000,001 for Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) so he could claim to be a bigger star than John Travolta who’d received a mere $20,000,000 for 1996’s Phenomenon.
Still, the leap from 20 to 75 million dollars is a different kind of stupid, and one worthy of investigation because, rather appropriately for an industry based on illusion, the figures aren’t quite what they seem. Seventy-five is a complex combination of acting and producing fees, gross percentage points, plus video rental and merchandising royalties. Levied against this, however, are an equally complex set of deductions. As Paul Peerson, one-time head of the child actors charity A Minor Concern, explains: “The government is in for half your fee. Add an agent for the usual 10 per cent, then a manager for 15, and you’re over 70% of the gross before you’ve even seen a nickel.”
Gross points? Agent’s fees? Perhaps we should take this one step at a time…
It’s now very rare for an actor not to cream off some of a picture’s take (the entire cast of Pearl Harbor deferred their salaries in return for a piece of the back end). However, while ‘points deals’ have made actors a ton of money - Sir Alec Guinness’s 1977 Star Wars arrangement meant he never had to worry about his winter heating payments - many performers have been burnt by their failure to distinguish between ‘gross’ (where you receive a percentage of every penny the film takes at the ticket booth) and ‘net’ (you only get a cut of the film’s take once it turns a profit).
Why? Well, Hollywood is a town in which the accountants are every bit as creative as the filmmakers. Example: Paramount was able to prove to those actors eagerly awaiting net point residuals for Forrest Gump (1994) [worldwide gross: $680 million] that the film actually lost money.
Little wonder net options are referred to as ‘monkey points’ in movie circles.