When Movie Stars Work for Less

On Oscar night, red carpets and gold backdrops and a shouting, clicking press adoringly cocoon the arriving stars. The day after on Hollywood Boulevard, it’s just another show that’s left town. Billboards come down at the Kodak Theatre, litter skitters along the bedraggled street which is generally a stage for truck-stop-quality souvenir shops, has-been museums and stars-homes barkers. The chain link fence that kept the sidewalk honky-tonk at bay will soon roll up and drag away, leaving the seediness to reshape itself.

It’s an apt metaphor for the bad economy that has struck Movieland. The real we see today does not resemble the real we believed in yesterday. The game is changing. Few actors command high salaries these days. Angelina Jolie may still get $20 million for a film. Many more are getting contracts that pay a paltry million or two up front, but require the movie to break even or make a profit before additional money kicks in. The actors in “Precious” got about the Screen Actor’s Guild minimum of $65,000. Ed Asner got a small fee (think $50,000) for his voice-over of the old man in Best Film nominee, “Up. “I was paid for sessions,” he told New York Times reporter Michael Cieply, but negotiated more for the film’s success. “If it does well, you do well.”

Sam Worthington, who starred in “Avatar,” had the best message for you who are job seekers: “Every actor fears unemployment,” he told the Herald Sun (Australia). Working “beats sitting there waiting for the phone to ring thinking, ‘Give me some work, I’ve got bills to pay.’”

His drive to work as much as he can “raises my game because it means I will always be trying to improve on myself.

“I live an ordinary life. I go home, drink beer, do my washing. . .Doing normal things, that’s how I recharge. . .I love working. It beats being unemployed.”

I want you to dream big and reach for the stars and to get what you’re worth in the marketplace. I also want you to be a hard-eyed realist and understand that marketplace. It won’t do if you’re an aging star wafting the mean streets in her blue chiffon scarf believing a producer will give her an ingénue role. You may have to take the job you’ve thought was beneath you, to make less, to work more than one job. While we’ve never walked this harsh a reality before, WE HAVE ALL BEEN WHERE YOU ARE, AND WE ALL FOUGHT LIKE HELL TO GET OUT OF THERE.

You may be tempted to wait for your agent to call or to meet some director at a glamorous party, but – hey – you’re not in Hollywood, and even Hollywood’s not looking great these days. Go get some work.