And not because he is a mafioso toting interchangeably a Smith & Wesson, a tommy gun, a wrench, or a shovel. Gangsters can be good bosses too. I mean, a boss like Vito Corleone is a chief executive of mythological proportions: someone with his own strict moral and professional code; he'd destroy his enemies, yet he treats his loyal employees like family, and, in return, they are ready to take a bullet for him.
No, Gyp Rosetti is the worst boss ever, because he is so fucking impulsively unpredictable. With Gyp, you just never know what the fuck is going to short-circuit his neuro-system, how he is going to react to a word, a jest, a facial expression. One moment he seems to be okay and a second later he explodes into a bloody violent feat on account of somebody's hat or stance.
Of course, the compulsive violence is a typical response in men who are surrounded by domineering, dismissive women at home. The notorious Red Ripper Andrei Chikatilo, convicted of 52 murders of women and children, was famously abused and treated like dirt by his wife. Gyp Rosetti, when at his home in Brooklyn, is vilified not by one, but four pesky women: his wife, mother-in-law, and two daughters. Not that his household circumstances absolve him, but at least it makes the craziness explainable.
It's a miracle that members of Gyp's crew talk and do anything around him at all; that they are not completely paralyzed by fear. Somebody says something, Gyp does a double take, and everyone just fucking freezes, trying very hard not to look him in the eyes. That stare that Bobby Cannavale mastered – the one of a cobra doing her hypnotizing trick on its pray before the attack, I've seen that look before, frozen on the face of one very cruel CEO.
It would be easier if Gyp Rosetti was simply an authoritarian ruler, giving strict orders and expecting absolute obedience without any talkback. But he is tricky, sadistic. He actually puts his employees on the spot, asking them questions, wrenching their opinions out of them, looking for a reason to explode.
You cannot possibly find a sensible way of acting around people like that. Unquestioning compliance, dutifulness, and composure can rile them up just as quickly as independent opinion, defiance, and anxiety. Gillian Darmody (Gretchen Mol) tries her darnedest: "You are always welcome here, Mr. Rosetti. Make yourself at home, Mr. Rosetti." And still it's uncertain that she is safe. I keep thinking that Gyp's sexuality is a better guarantee for her than her sly ways. The Sicilian boy has a soft spot for the white meat with porcelain skin and red hair (don't we all?), so he cuts her a bit of slack. But how long will that last?
If you think that the Gyp Rosetti-type exists only on your TV screen, you are wrong. There are plenty of them out there, exercising their unpredictable despotism in the boardrooms, corner offices, production floors, living rooms. While most of them don't shoot people in the face or beat them to death, they do plenty of damage by inflicting destruction on people's self-esteem, psychological balance, emotional well-being.
What kind of advice can one give to people who work for Gyp Rosetti's clones? "Run away as fast as you can" comes to mind first. But what if you can't? Many of Gyp's "subordinates" were recent immigrants who at the time couldn't find any work at all, had no means to feed their families. By the same token, if you live in a town, where everything is owned by the same family with a brutal patriarch (sounds like an early last century novel, but still as valid today as ever), you are stuck with him as your boss. It's not like the national job market offers too many opportunities nowadays. If that's your predicament, you'd better rely on your survival instintcts and intuition: you are under constant pressure to make split-second decisions on how to act and what to say. And you'd better pray that you make the right ones…
This commonplace entertainment for the masses is actually very heterogeneous in its nature. Cinema is a chimera: part visual crafts, part performance art, part continuous technological advancements.
Since pre-historic times artists tried to capture the movements of their subjects. The best painters can make you feel as if the sea foam is forming right there on the canvas. But it's just your imagination. And so, since 3200 B.C., innovators applied mechanics, optics, and chemistry to images in order to imitate the magic of natural motion.
The fathers of cinema, the Lumiere brothers, viewed it as nothing more than a natural transition from still photography. Their perforated film and the cinematograph gave birth to a huge industrial machine that to this day generates products in multiple copies deliverable to millions of consumers.
The newly found ability to record real life and chronicle historical events has revolutionized the planet's infosphere, continuously providing us with documents of great achievements and horrendous atrocities. However, entrepreneurs of moving images have immediately recognized an opportunity to use the new medium as a portal for escaping the reality for a short while and introduced the performance arts into the mix. Why not film actors in dramatic or comedic situations? Why not utilize the camera's mobility – take them off the stage and place them into natural settings; bring the actions into a garden, on the street, on the beach?
(Aside: Movie theaters still provide the most affordable route of escape. They get you out of work and home surroundings, hide you in the darkness, bring you into the places you may never visit, and show you lives of people you will never meet. Yet, you don't need to go very far or pay too much money for the adventure. That's why the experience of going to the movies persists no matter how advance home and handheld entertainment media get.)
Before long, the makers of moving pictures realized that the technology at their hands could also be used as a dramatic tool. To this day, phrases like "cut for emotion" signify how the mechanical process of editing (cutting and gluing of the film) has a potential of creating unforgettable, heart-stopping moments, which elicit deep emotions in the viewing audience.
Thus, imagery, performance, and technology were merged together by people standing behind the camera and shouting commands at everyone. Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible) was immortalized as one of the first innovative film directors precisely because of his great talent of telling powerful stories by combining panoramic shots that make you feel threatened with close-ups that fill your soul with sadness. In fact, European theorists call him the "Father of Montage."
It goes without saying – filmmaking is a director's art (for many, the word "craft" is more appropriate). The director's job is to take a story and make it alive on the screen. To achieve this miracle, he or she, akin Dr. Frankenstein, need to combine different elements and put them through multiple processing steps. It's an intricate creative process, but it is also a tedious organizational endeavor, not much different from a job of a manufacturing general manager.
Each main element of filmmaking has multiple subdivisions. Performance arts: story development, screenwriting, casting, performance directing, acting, stunts, music, sound, wardrobe design, makeup. Image-making: lighting, cinematography, visual effects, production design, set decoration, art direction. Technology: special effects, props, production management, animation, editing, etc. Each of these larger functions are further divided into subgroups, sectors, tasks… It doesn't matter whether all these duties are performed by 10 people or by a crew of 2,435 (The Avengers – the longest credit roll I've ever witnessed) – it's up to the director to make sure that all the parts work together and everything congeals into the final product.
Nowadays, the advancement of digital applications blurs the lines between the visual and technological aspects of filmmaking. The development of computer-generated images (CGI) has become its prominent property. We even have famous directors (James Cameron, George Lucas), who are involved first-hand in scientific innovations of moving-image technology.
Thanks to CGI, creators can conjure any situation born out of their imagination. Now, intergalactic spaceships and aliens look real; characters can turn into monsters right in front of your eyes; they fly through the sky and jump out of airplanes. Frequently people go to the movies just to see the spectacle at its maximum potential – in 3D, on IMAX screen, with surround sound. Who cares what the movie is about? I cannot wait for the time, when at the entrance instead of glasses you'll be handed a helmet. Then right from your seat you will be transported onto some planet, where hoofed creatures with striped tails and dragonfly eyes will take you by the hand… What plot?
That said, with a humongous moviemaking machine remaining unseen (and largely unknown), at the end of the day, cinema is all about the actors on the screen. They are the bait that lures the majority of moviegoers into spending their money. Yeah, the trailer looks good, and maybe the effects will blow your mind (literally), and the story will knock you out cold, but people cannot be sure of it until the movie is over.
On the other hand, everyone knows in advance that Anthony Hopkins can transform himself into anybody, Harrison Ford at 70 is still enticing, Kristen Wiig is batshit funny, Megan Fox looks fucking awesome in high-cut shorts, and Daniel Craig makes the most outrages 007 shenanigans believable. Even picky (some say snooty) cenophiles like me, who are concerned with the subtext, depth, dialogue and directorial mastery, will excuse sub par filmmaking for the sake of watching an actor creating magic on the screen (the late Heath Ledger would be a good example for me).
Besides my personal endless fascination with the cinema, there is a legitimate reason for going into the extended discussion of its components in the context of the financial enumeration. The proportions of elements used in manufacturing movies not only yield distinctly different types of products, they also drive its financial aspects.
On a general level, a movie's Income Statement is fairly straightforward. We've got tickets, DVDs, TV rights, etc. revenues on one side, and the cost of ingredients required for making the product on the other. The total amount spent on a project is customarily called a "budget," regardless of whether it was set in advance or just accumulated to be a certain sum. This is a very important industry indicator, which is frequently made public.
The budget elements may have multi-million price tags or cost nothing at all, and anything in between. Any "name" (i.e. famous) ingredient will cost a lot of money. Any unknown, trying to break in, component can be obtained for free. This is literally true about everything that goes into the pressure cooker of filmmaking. I would have to write another book just to go over every single line of the various movie budgets, but let me provide a few guidelines.
It is safe to say that, as of right now, abundant CGI and megastars are the most expensive ingredients in the movie-making cupboard. The high-tech companies specializing in movie magic charge by the man-hour. And it's not like the rates are outrageous (the computer nerds make similarly decent salaries everywhere), but the processes are extremely time-consuming. So, if "the vision" calls for a team of 200 people working for 12 weeks, a moderate average of $150 per hour will set you back by nearly $14.5 million. For a team of 1000 people, multiply that by five, and so on.
Actors in high demand (Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Robert Downy Jr., Tom Hanks, Jude Law, etc.) have compensation structure that includes a salary base plus commissions. The latter can be defined as gross participation, backend, box office bonuses, or residuals. If the up front salary is $15 million but the movie returns several times over the invested budget, the total take could be around $50-$70 million.
My favorite, even though outdated, example of the stars' budgetary impact is the 1992 mega hit and critics' favorite A Few Good Men. The three top-billing actors, Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, and Demi Moore (in that order) had the respective base salaries of $12 million, $5 million, and $3 million. The total of $20 million took up 50% of the $40 million budget.
The movie's director, Rob Reiner, whose company Castle Rock Entertainment also produced the film for Columbia Pictures, took the base salary of $4 million, plus a share of residuals. Just like with the actors, this is a common structure for directors. The bases vary, of course. Steven Spielberg's base for directing War Horse was $20 million; Martin Scorcese's base salary for Hugo - $10 million; Guy Ritchie's for the Sherlock Holmes sequel – $7.5 million (25% up from what he got for the original).
The directors, who, like Rob Reiner, produce their movies, tend to take smaller salaries in order to maximize their back-end returns. It works especially well if you've got a real blockbuster on your hands. One of the biggest earners in Hollywood, the incredible James Cameron (Lightstorm Entertainment is his production company), so far personally earned $350 million on his uber-hit creation, Avatar. But it's all good, since the movie has collected 12 times of its original $237 million budget ($2.8 billion) in worldwide box-office sales.
Mr. Cameron is an auteur – he writes, directs, produces, and frequently edits his movies. His $115 million Titanic's earnings, for example, break down like this: $600,000 for the screenplay, $8 million for directing, the rest – production residuals.
These numbers reflect the monetary treatment of creative talent in Hollywood with an uncanny precision. Comparatively speaking, the writers don't really make that much money. Especially the ones who write original screenplays based on their own ideas (aka specs) as opposed to the ones who take studio assignments. Of course, the writers who have the knack for consistently delivering tent poles (i.e. movies that support studios' lavish existence) can get themselves into seven digits, but even the record-high screenwriting salaries do not exceed $4 million.
The rest of the filmmaking functions (supporting cast, extras, cinematographers, line producers, designers, editors, etc., etc.) are performed by skilled professionals whose minimum wage rates are protected by their respective unions and the maximum depends on their track record and their individual level of demand. If someone's rate is $200 per day and he manages to contract himself for two 10-week engagements in a course of one year, the resulting earnings will be $20K.You are doing better with $800 per day rate and a higher demand.
If you become a sought after specialist with a proven delivery of high quality work, your compensation most likely will be switched to a flat weekly rate, or maybe even per-engagement compensation. It is rumored that Rodrigo Prieto, the cinematographer whose impressive portfolio includes such visual gems as 25th Hour, Brokeback Mountain, Babel and Lust, Caution, has received $250,000 for the 10-week shooting of Argo. Relatively speaking, this is quite impressive. However, he shoots on average two movies a year – you do the math.
From the executive producers' point of you, Mr. Prieto is a pretty fat budget line, but the "look" he creates is a big contribution into that "Oscar buzz" they vie for. And it's true about everything – locations, sets, costumes, cars, stunts, quality of light, even the food catered to the cast and crew. You want a good soundtrack with famous, recognizable songs, then you have to pay large licensing fees to both the owners of the music and the publishers who released the particular recording. You want Alexandre Desplat to write the original score… Well, that's a man in extremely high demand! He's been scoring on average 5-6 movies a year for over 20 years now; 11 (!!!) last year alone. So, his per-film prices are definitely in seven figures.
On the other side of the spectrum are the beginners, who will and do work for free just to get their names out there. Not just writers/directors/producers, but also actors, composers, camera and sound specialists, editors, techies – there are plenty of aspiring people, who are not even members of any unions yet.
Ok, here how the movie mixology works. An aspiring filmmaker writes, directs, shoots, and edits a movie with her school friends and family members covering all the basic functions, including second-camera work, light set-up, boom holding, etc. There is a minimal cast of non-union actors, who are grateful to receive $100 per day pay. The action takes place in one apartment generously provided by a friend and the shooting is done in three days. She uses her own HD camera, but hires a freelance sound engineer with his equipment at a rate of $80 per hour. And here you have a microbudget (a few thousand dollars) film that can be sent out to festivals and garner some screenings.
You can have three friends writing a screenplay, one of them directs the movie, another one stars in it – none of them get paid. Practically everyone on the production crew is a first-timer. Most of the action takes place in one apartment. The $60,000 budget is primarily spent on renting equipment, light, sound, and minimal wages paid to some of the 60 members of the cast and crew. Over 100 benefactors donate either money or services. The result – Darren Aronofsky's cult masterpiece Pi, which goes to win nine international awards, including Sundance, and makes $3.2 million in the US alone.
In another recipe, based on a dramatic play, adapted by the playwright himself (his first feature, so he is not asking too much), the filmmaking can still be fairly simple, almost as austere as the theatrical version itself: no CGI; mostly inside a studio with a few Manhattan, London, and British seaside shots; four protagonists and only 16 extras; basic crew. Essentially, this movie could've been made for less than $1 million. But it's a psychological drama and the studio that acquired the successful play hires a daring director who's been dissecting human dynamics for 40 years ($8 million). He, in his turn, picks the four actors that he believes at the moment (2004) to be the best match for the main characters (one of them reprises his stage performance) - an actress with a record-high salaries ($20 million), an A-list actor ($9.5 million), a painfully beautiful 23-year-old actress on her 12th movie (two of them were new Star Wars installments) ($1 million), and a prominent British actor on his way to become a major Hollywood player (salary not reported). These five people pretty much make the entire $40 million budget of Michael Nichols's Closer.
Now, mix together a hot international star playing an iconic character for the third time ($12.8 million); a highly respected director who won an Oscar for a movie that became an instant classic ($5 million); a team of Hollywood writers specializing in high-octane action blockbusters ($2 million); a cinematographer who shot, among others, every single of the Coen brothers' movies ($600 thousand); a supporting cast of 50, including a knighted actress, a Spanish superstar, and Ralph fucking Fiennes; hundreds of extras; a theme song by a pop star who broke all records with her album sales and Grammies; a score by a composer nominated for 10 Oscars; an Oscar-winning production designer; an Oscar nominated editor; filming in London, Scotland, Shanghai, and Istanbul; Smithfield Market car chase and helicopter shots; CGI that makes jumping out of the air into a fast-moving train look real and took 389 visual and special effects professionals to design; a stunt staff of 72 – and you got yourself an MGM tent pole with a $200 million budget, i.e. Skyfall.
You've got the principle, right? You can do it yourself – pick any movie, break it down into cost items, and estimate the budget. Making movies is an expensive business.
The funding for these cinematic cocktails may come from various single or multiple resources: family and friends, high personal wealth individuals with interest in arts (Michael Bloomberg, for example, has been investing in movies for decades), firms specializing in film financing (such as Future Films), financial institutions, strong production companies with sufficient capital, and, of course, studios. It's up to the producers, whether it's the beginning filmmaker himself or a Hollywood power player, to pull together the sufficient funding to cover the movie's budget.
Theoretically, all projects financed by any means other than a big studio's funds are considered to be "independent" movies. Not too long ago we believed that the positive side of not having big bucks from the Big Bad Wolves was a filmmaker's ability to avoid the market-demand concerns. Those were the good old days…
Like with any other form of arts and entertainment, there are two distinct types of "success" for movies: the inexact, flawed, and unfairly subjective artistic achievement (measured in festival wins, awards, critical praises, and cult-like fan following) and simple, solid, and undeniable commercial success (measured in dollars and cents). Most of the movies achieve one or another, rarely – both.
Of all branches of entertainment, the motion pictures industry scores the largest audiences. Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know, commercially speaking, is a small movie – it was made on a $2 million budget and grossed $3.9 million in the box office (it also won 17 international awards, among them four in Cannes, including the Camera d'Or). However, this means that 300,000 people went to see the movie – 39 times more than those who bought Miranda July's collection of stories No One Belongs Here More Than You. If a music album achieved a number like this it would be certified as a triple platinum.
Now, think about really big hits – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part II made $169 million in its opening weekend in the US ($1.33 billion worldwide gross to date). This means that in the first three days of its release here, over 12 million people went to see this film.
The theaters showing the movies pay either a bidding fixed amount or a percentage of the box office for the right to show the movie; the balance is remitted to the distribution company (the same pattern applies to DVD sales and TV rights). The distribution company that picked up the movie for sale from a studio or a production company also takes either fixed fees (leasing model) or 10-50% of the net profit (profit-sharing model). Whatever is left comes to the producing entities. Hopefully this remainder covers the budget (pays back the investors) and leaves the room for the residuals.
Clearly, the business of making movies is a high-stake financial gamble. The funds are invested into making a product of frequently unpredictable quality and then you wait and see what happens. No matter how much money studios spend on the market research, no matter how strong the producers' sixth sense is, you just never fucking know. Who could possibly predict that a first feature written and directed by a 26-year-old Steven Soderbergh, Sex Lies and Videotape, will not only multiply its 1.2 million budget by 20 in the box office, but will make the filmmaker the youngest person in history to win Cannes top prize – Palme D'Or.
Essentially, every single movie project is a start-up business. I will let my readers to go on IMdB and count how many businesses the Hollywood powerhouses, like the Weinstein brothers or Scott Rudin, originated and brought to a full success.
Hey you, hard-working people, regardless of your profession, stature, or rank! I am talking to all of you! Beware of "NICE" BOSSES!
You know the type – he always smiles at you, tells you jokes (and laughs loudly himself), asks about your family (sometimes even during first interviews), says "thank you" at the end of the day, declares that he wants everyone who works for him to be happy, claims to keep your opinion in high regard.
This is all BULLSHIT!!! This boss is a liar and a hypocrite! Don't think for a second that because he acts like that on the surface, he really cares and will do right by you in terms of things that really matter, i.e. create material (compensation, benefits, working space) and moral (respect, recognition) stimuli for you to work harder and feel satisfied with your own performance!
In fact, this faux exterior should be taken as a first sign of a shitty character. There is an old proverb that applies perfectly here: "He makes a very soft bed that will be hard to sleep in." The only person such a boss cares about is himself! At the end of the day, all that huggy, phony warmth is just for him and him alone. And because people like that lie to themselves the same way they lie to others, he goes home honestly believing that he is a swell guy and a wonderful boss. He simultaneously pats himself in the back and jerks himself off.
But when it comes to serious, important staff… This is the guy who will fight you tooth and nail for every penny of raise or bonus you want to give your direct subordinates at the end of the year. It doesn't matter to him that you only want to reward those who applied themselves the hardest, grew, learned, developed, and that you keep it all within the budget. He'd rather double his own withholdings (for being so wonderful!) than reinforce the merit. In fact, he will say, "Didn't we pay for her plane tickets when she went to her grandmother's funeral?" Yes, we did – you suggested it to be "nice." So, now you think that was in lieu of the annual performance bonus?
And this is the guy who will reply to every great proposal from the members of his executive team, writing the exclamation-point emails: "Thank you!" "Great idea!" "Brilliant!" But he will never green-light the actual implementations. You will see the mean gleam in his eyes every time the life proves you right or someone on the outside of the business confirms that you understand it much better than he does. If that happens, he will enter a crazy cycle, competing with you all the time, even though he is the boss and, therefore, already won by default.
I believe that the best working environments are created not by cuddly fakeness, but by indiscriminate fairness, accommodation of professional growth, and respect of achievements (the principles I myself exercise). If that's impossible to have, I prefer an honest brute instead of a "nice" hypocritical bastard. In this economy (or, as I call it "new reality") only a few of us get lucky and find "better" jobs. The rest must tolerate whatever hateful things they are forced to experience. And that's Ok (there is no such a thing as a "perfect" job anyway), as long as you face the reality with the full understanding of the situation and don't get fooled by appearances.
From time to time I feel a need to come back to the discussion of an emotional burden carried by the accountants who find themselves in the unfortunate position of recognizing and reporting business losses. And I feel absolutely justified doing so, because it is one of the most painful professional experiences. Moreover, it is a reality many small-business CFOs and Controllers have to face with a persistent regularity. Less than three months ago, for example, I wrote about the effect of losses on bosses (upon closing of the second quarter by the companies with a calendar fiscal year). Nobody ever mentions how hard it is for us to be the messengers of news that may translate into budget cuts, layoffs, credit line recalls, and possible termination of business. So, I feel obligated to talk about it.
Imagine my surprise, when I discovered a depiction of the familiar sentiments in a Booker Prize winning novel about one woman's wasted life – Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. I don't know whether Ms. Atwood is acquainted with somebody who shared their experiences with her, or she is that good at getting inside her characters' heads and imagining how it would feel to someone in real life. What matters is that it's very accurate. So, here it is:
"Two and two made four… But what if you didn't have two and two? Then things wouldn't add up. And they didn't add up, I couldn't get them to; I couldn't get the red numbers in the… books to turn black. This worried me horribly: it was as if it were my own personal fault. When I closed my eyes at night I could see the numbers on the page before me, laid out in rows on my square oak desk… – those rows of red numbers like so many mechanical caterpillars, munching away at what was left of the money. When what you could manage to sell a thing for was less than what it paid you to make it… – this was how the numbers behaved. It was bad behaviour – without love, without justice, without mercy – but what could you expect? The numbers were only numbers. They had no choice in the matter."
Olde William used the melancholy Jacques to channel his own musings on life, "All the world's stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances, and one men in his time plays many parts…"
Of course, in 1600 this notion wasn't fresh. Shakespeare's mesmerising, rhythmic words only serve as the best description of this behavioral phenomenon. Yet, philosophers of ancient times wrote about it, including the father of dramatic theory himself Aristotle (check out his Poetics).
If you think about it, this makes theater the oldest of all arts. Since the beginning of times, humans put on various situation-appropriate personas and played out their dramas, tragedies, and comedies. The mere understanding that everyone acts, creates a subconscious desire to observe others. The concept of "people-watching" is the most primal theatrical experience. Humans always gathered in designated places (clearings in the woods, forums, public houses, squares, boulevards, ballrooms) to witness the spectacle of "acting in public."
Then, there were those who possessed a talent to turn themselves into different people on cue and had a desire to show it off for the amusement of others. First, they would simply replicate actual events and emulate real people. When that wasn't enough, they wrote fictive situations with imagined characters.
This created a demand for people who could write better stories with multiple characters. The actors playing those characters needed to be coordinated in time and space, instructed on how to understand the writer's ideas… And thus the collective effort known as performance arts were born.
I adore theater. For me, there is nothing more powerful than the intimacy and the immediacy of a high-quality theatrical experience. No other high-art form can compare to looking straight into Kevin Spacey's eyes when he personifies a dead-end insanity as O'Neill's Hickey; or contemplating the perversity of marriage as lived by Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin in Edward Albee's masterpiece Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; or play after play marvel at the surgically precise dissection of human conditions by Donald Margulies, Theresa Rebeck, or Tracy Letts.
Theater is a wonderful litmus of true acting talent. It's not like the movies, where performing amounts to a series of dress rehearsals with the best one going to print. There are no reshoots or outtakes: it's right here, right now, and then gone forever. From time to time, you witness magic conjured by an actor, whose name you've never heard before. And frequently you squirm in your seat seeing Hollywood A-listers failing to deliver.
Sometimes you get fabulously lucky when, trusting your intuition (and Scott Rudin's impeccable sense of quality), you go to see a tiny production of a three-person play in a small theater on Barrow street, and discover a gem of one of the best contemporary plays you've seen: Adam Rapp's chamber tragedy Red Light Winter.
And, if you are a real theater freak, you may jump on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and hit an artistic jackpot – become one of only 500 people who were fortune to witness the marvel of The Pod Project.
So, are people who create these incredible, unforgettable artistic experiences – the playwrights, the directors, the actors, including the super-stars with household names, adequately rewarded? Let's see.
We will start small. The Pod Project, with its 13 stations, each occupied by a single actor performing in front of a single spectator, was produced on a $20,000 budget. It was financed primarily by the contributions from the creator Nancy Bannon's friends. With just one spectator in each pod at a time, only 13 tickets per performance could be sold ($35 a ticket, if memory serves). They had just enough rent money for a two-week run. With two-three performances a day, slightly over 50% of the investment was recovered. I believe, each actor received about $500 for the entire engagement. After paying all expenses, the creators of this, one of a kind, event didn't get any pay at all.
This type of micro-budget theatrical endeavors are typical for Off-Off-Broadway, with average total budgets of $18,000, of which over 35% is eaten away by the space rental. Set design, lights, sound, props, costumes, hair, and make-up can all be obtained in NYC for about $2,800 (16% of the budget). Some sort of publicity and advertising is a must – another 15% of the funding. You can easily find a qualified stage manager to cover the entire run for about $300. The directors bring home $500 . The engagements are usually short – 2-3 weeks.
For each performance, the actors come on stage and transform themselves into characters, living through love, loss, insanity, obsession, or what have you. 38% of them don't get paid and those who do make about $400. And the author? Most likely, she and her volunteering helpers are the ones who put all pieces together for the sake of showcasing the play. Essentially, nobody makes any money. They do it out of love for their arts and everyone hopes that something will come out of it "in the long run."
Off-Broadway productions are still relatively small, but far more established. They are usually put on in better known spaces (such as Theater Row theaters, Lucille Lotrel's, Peter Norton's, etc.), which, on average, can fit 200-300 of avid theater-goers. With the median ticket price of $65, a limited run (let's say 12 weeks) of a popular play can generate over $2 million in ticket sales. To fill the seats, off-Broadway theatrical organizations try to stage works by playwrights with some cred for edgy, frequently controversial, material, which, in turn, can attract actors with known names. The preference is usually given to psychological dramedies with smaller casts (for economical reasons, if nothing else).
This is how we got such memorable wonders as the NYC revivals of Lanford Wilson's Burn This with Edward Norton and Catherine Keener, Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party with Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Wallace Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon with Lili Taylor and Kristen Johnston; world premier of Jonathan Marc Sherman's Things We Want directed by Ethan Hawke with Peter Dinklage, Josh Hamilton, Paul Dano, and Zoe Kazan; the first staging of the two-act version of Edward Albee's Peter and Jerry with Bill Pullman; Propeller Theater's Shakespeare at BAM, and many other notable productions.
Of course, no matter how dedicated to their craft and how tempted to test themselves against the brutal nakedness of the stage, these actors don't work for free (nor should they). In fact, except for some volunteering ushers, everyone involved in an off-Broadway production usually gets paid at least the minimum regulated by their respective unions.
Obviously, the $2 million in tickets sales will not cover a production budget of a play performed 60-100 times. This is why most theatrical organizations dominating off-Broadway are non-profits: The New Group, MCC Theater, The Signature Theater, Second Stage, Playwrights Horizons, Lincoln Center Theater, and BAM. They rely heavily on subscriptions, grants, donations, patronage, and bequests.
On the other hand, Broadway productions are all for-profit (not to be confused with profitable) enterprises. The commercial scheme behind a Broadway machine is not much different from a standard business model: develop a show's idea or acquire/opt a play, attach possible talent, pitch the project to investors, fit the budget to the obtained capital, hire the team, conceptualize PR and advertising, and go to work with a purpose of selling enough tickets (from discounted mezzanine for Wednesday matinees at $65 to premium seats at up to $350 per ticket) to generate a satisfactory return on investment.
The profitability concerns start at the bottom – at the playwright level. According to one of the most prominent of American stage writers, Tony Kushner, "no writer can make a living writing for stage." If you are writing for Broadway and live in New York City, no matter how good and lauded you are, you will not make enough even to cover the rent. If a writer is a member of the Writers' Guild (WGA) he must be paid at least the minimum prescribed by this union: currently $63,895 (my God, I know secretaries who make as much). It appears that the highest contract payment in 2012 season was around $120K. Of course, if the writer has a powerful agent, some royalties will be added as well. Then the total earned will depend on the length of the play's run.
Just like the fiction writers, many playwrights supplement their income with teaching. Some succeed writing for television and the big screen (David Mamet, Alan Sorkin, Alan Ball, Theresa Rebeck, among others). And good for them: not only that they make more money there, but they also access larger audiences (successful plays, on average, are seen by maybe 100-200 thousand people). But the painful truth is that, while the best of stage writers are busy in Hollywood, they are not writing plays. Thus, the great American Drama suffers.
Broadway directors are members of a union as well – the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, which dictates the minimum contract fees of $62,280. All Broadway directors' contracts include royalty clauses. Unlike the writers (who, if they are very prolific, are most likely to write a play a year), the directors can stage more than one project in a span of 12 months, thus multiplying their revenues.
Again, the very medium of the theatrical experience, the actor, who has the guts to come on stage in front of a live audience and forget himself in the tribulations of someone else's life, is the lowest paid stage asset. Still, those who get to be on Broadway consider themselves lucky. Not only because they do get paid (the minimum guaranteed by the Actors Guild is $1,600 per week), but also because this is their chance to be noticed by the theater-going casting professionals and to establish contacts with other actors and playwrights, who may move to Hollywood and remember them one day… Hey, this is the profession they chose, might as well try to make a living out of it.
As I mentioned, many actors, who started on stage and became big stars, from time to time come back to experience the raw test of theater. Of course, their agents and managers would never let them work for $1,600 a week (they need to keep their own 10-15% cuts lucrative too). But, comparatively speaking, they are willing to go on stage for peanuts (such is the power of theater!).
As this "post" has now officially reached the size of a long e-mag article, I cannot go through all the data I've got about stars' theater-vs-movies compensation. Just a few examples then. In 2006, Julia Roberts headlined 12-weeks run of Three Days of Rain ( a disappointment, to say the least). Her pay rate was $50,000/week, or total of $600,000. At the time, her salary for a lead role in a feature (average shooting time 3 month) was $15 million.
In 2009, we were blessed to witness the phenomenon of an Englishman Daniel Craig and an Australian Hugh Jackman eerily transforming themselves into two gritty Chicago cops in Keith Huff's A Steady Rain (playwrights LOVE that rain-on-stage effect). Each of them was paid $100,000/week over a 16-weeks run. By then, Daniel Craig has already achieved the status of possibly the best James Bond of all times and finished shooting his second 007 installment, Quantum of Solace – reported salary $7,200,000. Hugh Jackman just completed X-Men Origins: Wolverine, in which he turned from human to mutant and back for a paltry sum of $20,000,000.
Of course, it is not economically proper to compare theatrical and cinematic financing, especially when it comes to blockbusters: they differ in the most important factor, which drives all the numbers – the size of the audience. The only stage productions that attempt to match the international multi-screen reach of the film industry are the Broadway cash cows, better known as big-budget musicals.
They are deliberately intended for long-runs and cater to the endless rivers of out-of-town visitors. How long a run? Just to give you an idea: according to NY Times calculations a $65 million production (Spider-Man, the most expensive musical to date), housed in a 2000-seat theater, will need to survive for at least 4 years before it recovers the initial investment.
In their mass appeal and risky investment undertakings, Broadway musicals are similar to the big studio movies with high gross expectations. It is no wonder that many of currently running musicals are based on movies, and many successful stage spectacles are transferred to the silver screen (the latest, Les Miserables, is to open on Christmas Day). And that brings us to the next installment in this series.
The Frustrated CFO 