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OT: Movies/TV Shows

Completely different salary bracket and industry......but Leonard Cohen found himself in his 70s with nothing in the bank because his agent siphoned all the dough.

So he's like, "I suppose I can record a few more songs and sell out arenas for a year"

Best thing to happen to his career, tbh
 
LeafOfFaith said:
I'm telling you, it is pretty nice to be one of these one-time superactors. You literally can print money whenever you want it.

I have a direct line into the deals of one former lethally mad bravehearted maverick of a superactor, and this guy gets something like $1M-$2M per day for a small part in a nothing movie you'll never hear of where he only works a few days and takes off. And this is a person who was exiled from the business, no less.
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Say hi to mad max
 
CH1 said:
I love when actors say "what I crazy year I had. I starred in 3 films!!!

so you were on set for 18 weeks and spent another 6 weeks doing junkets/talk shows and festivals.

tough life
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Yup. It's maybe a little less silly than that though. One client has to learn her lines on her own and rehearse with assistants for a solid month before each one she does. Then you gotta travel and live out of a hotel room for a month and ping pong back and forth to set at various times for 12 hours straight. Sometimes they want you from 4 pm to 4 am. Then the press stuff generally for a week before release. There's a fair amount of pressure and assholes to contend with, and good old internet if you ever want to hear from the average shmo how ugly, fat, old, or untalented you are.

But they get paid a fortune. They have unlimited moneymaking opportunities. They get free stuff and special treatment everywhere they go. And they have a ton of people working for them, most on commission, and so they don't waste precious time on crap like reading a contract, they just get told where to sign and live their lives while poor lawyers and agents work 24/7. They get a lot of free time to live their lives, basically whenever they want to be off. Not to mention the ability to seduce anyone they want with a simple hello. If you've got your head screwed on straight to properly take advantage of all the good stuff and not get sucked into all the bad stuff, it's a great life.
 
It's the thing us normal people will never deal with or understand. Like, if you made even 5m from a movie or whatever, why would you ever want to do something hard ever again? I know agents and studios and whatever siphon off a lot, so it takes a while to get to that, but seriously, it's hard to imagine living like that.

But then again, every now and then there's some random place on my airbnb searches that is like 3000$ a night or something. And I guess at that rate, you can burn through stuff a lot quicker than in the places I stay at.
 
Typical arrangement is 10% to agent, 10% to manager, 10% to business manager, 5% to lawyer, and then from the remainder, say 45% to tax.

Some don't have managers, or pay lawyers hourly (or bum their agency's lawyers to review their deals for free - and get a terrible result), pay business managers a flat monthly. But yeah, they still part with a good portion of it. Lucky it's so much to begin with.

But keep in mind - this describes the life of the top, top 1% of the industry. For every one Brad Pitt, there are 10,000 struggling actors that are sleeping on couches and waitressing.
 
It's a little sad. You see someone bartending at a party, waitressing, working events, etc., over here, and you can be pretty sure they are trying to become an actor, singer, etc. You can just tell from the look. Most never go on to do anything.

In fact, at street hockey this past weekend, this one guy I didn't really know before was talking about how he was "clowning" in Vegas for years. At first I thought that was a euphemism, but it turned out he was actually working as a clown in Vegas shows. Now he's talking about screenplays he's writing, and bit parts he's gotten in shows where if you blink you'd miss him. He was saying he just had such a part in Wandavision, which I haven't seen so can't confirm.
 
LeafOfFaith said:
I'm telling you, it is pretty nice to be one of these one-time superactors. You literally can print money whenever you want it.

I have a direct line into the deals of one former lethally mad bravehearted maverick of a superactor, and this guy gets something like $1M-$2M per day for a small part in a nothing movie you'll never hear of where he only works a few days and takes off. And this is a person who was exiled from the business, no less.
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I remember when A Bridge Too Far came out in 1977, one of the last "all star cast" war movies. They paid Robert Redford $2 million for a cameo that lasted maybe 10 minutes and his dialogue could have been committed to memory in about the same amount of rehearsal time. $2 million in 1977 was BIG money. Adjusted for inflation we're talking about $9.2 million 2022 dollars.
 
LeafOfFaith said:
Typical arrangement is 10% to agent, 10% to manager, 10% to business manager, 5% to lawyer, and then from the remainder, say 45% to tax.

Some don't have managers, or pay lawyers hourly (or bum their agency's lawyers to review their deals for free - and get a terrible result), pay business managers a flat monthly. But yeah, they still part with a good portion of it. Lucky it's so much to begin with.

But keep in mind - this describes the life of the top, top 1% of the industry. For every one Brad Pitt, there are 10,000 struggling actors that are sleeping on couches and waitressing.
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True, I remember seeing a show where Jay Leno talked about his humble beginnings as a stand-up. He lived in Boston and would get off work at his shitty day job on Friday afternoon, drive to NYC and try and get a 5 minute, unpaid stand-up gig at a shitty club in Hell's Kitchen. After the club closed for the night he would sleep in the back alley behind the club. It worked out for him in the end but he's the one you hear about because he made it. Hundreds more are still sleeping in alleys and will continue up until the point where they realize that it's just not gonna happen for them.
 
LeafOfFaith said:
Yup. It's maybe a little less silly than that though. One client has to learn her lines on her own and rehearse with assistants for a solid month before each one she does. Then you gotta travel and live out of a hotel room for a month and ping pong back and forth to set at various times for 12 hours straight. Sometimes they want you from 4 pm to 4 am. Then the press stuff generally for a week before release. There's a fair amount of pressure and assholes to contend with, and good old internet if you ever want to hear from the average shmo how ugly, fat, old, or untalented you are.

But they get paid a fortune. They have unlimited moneymaking opportunities. They get free stuff and special treatment everywhere they go. And they have a ton of people working for them, most on commission, and so they don't waste precious time on crap like reading a contract, they just get told where to sign and live their lives while poor lawyers and agents work 24/7. They get a lot of free time to live their lives, basically whenever they want to be off. Not to mention the ability to seduce anyone they want with a simple hello. If you've got your head screwed on straight to properly take advantage of all the good stuff and not get sucked into all the bad stuff, it's a great life.
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I watch a lot of television from the UK on my IPTV box and for some reason Kevin Bacon is doing commercials for a British telecom company hawking cell phones.
 
SundinsTooth said:
Excited for the behind the scenes content upcoming to Disney+. Always a big sucker for the details behind these big event shows/movies.

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I watched the various Avengers Assembled docs, and they were fun. Cool to see the filming tricks used, and the thought process behind some of the points, along with showing some of the small stuff that you never notice when you first watched the series or movie.
 
WeHaveMoreCupsThanYou said:
True, I remember seeing a show where Jay Leno talked about his humble beginnings as a stand-up. He lived in Boston and would get off work at his shitty day job on Friday afternoon, drive to NYC and try and get a 5 minute, unpaid stand-up gig at a shitty club in Hell's Kitchen. After the club closed for the night he would sleep in the back alley behind the club. It worked out for him in the end but he's the one you hear about because he made it. Hundreds more are still sleeping in alleys and will continue up until the point where they realize that it's just not gonna happen for them.
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True enough, but the other thing to think about when it comes to these superactors is that they usually make it big really young and then go on for decades. It's not like they often bounce around for 10-20 years and then make it. It's fast for them, so they probably can't even relate to the journey that almost all other wannabes go on for years on end only to hit a dead end.

Cruise, Pitt, Hoffman, Hemsworth, Downey, DiCaprio - basically all the big ones you can think of, became famous really early on, and so whatever struggle they had might've been for just a few years as teens or in their early 20s which is a time when everyone in every field is busy struggling through university or some trade and making no money. Even a guy like Clooney who hit his stride later was famous in industry circles for having been in like a dozen failed pilots and other guest starring roles (Facts of Life, Roseanne), where he himself says he was making a lot of money while still being a relative unknown.
 
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