The Hollywood Economist Read Online Free PDF

prints. Up until the mid-1980s the initial opening of a movie required only several hundred prints—
Star Wars
, for example, opened in 1977 on only thirty-two screens. Nowadays, with simultaneous global openings, it takes 5,000 to 10,000 prints to open major movies. The 2009 sequel in Warner Bros.’ Batman franchise,
The Dark Knight
, for example, which played on over 9,000 screens in the US alone, required 12,000 prints for its worldwide distribution, each costing about $1,500. Studios order the prints for these immense runs from film labs and then deduct their cost from the first revenues that flow in from the theaters. So the film production company, which is almost always set up as a separate business entity, absorbs the cost on itsbooks. Then after a brief shelf life of a few weeks in the multiplexes, almost all the prints—except for a few hundred sent to theaters on military bases—are scrapped.
    But studios found in this mounting scrap heap a literal silver lining. Each shredded print contains a small quantity of silver, which the studios can “mine” via a recovery process and sell. Silver mining, to be sure, is not a new pursuit in Hollywood. Much of the studios’ pre-1950s libraries, including many of the irreplaceable negatives of its classics, were destroyed to recover the silver. But with rising precious metal prices—silver exceeded $18 an ounce on the commodity market in November 2009—and hundreds of thousands of dead prints to mine, it provides a rich vein of extra income for the studios (which is not returned to the film production companies charged for the prints). Of course, this mine will peter out as more and more multiplexes convert from analog to digital projection, and prints themselves are no longer necessary.
    Even though the proceeds studios recover from prints may amount to little more than “pocket money,” as a Paramount executive described it, it fulfills a vital requisite for the suit culture: finding new sources of income.

PART II
     

STAR CULTURE
     
     

THE CONTRACT’S THE THING —
IF NOT FOR HAMLET, FOR ARNOLD
SCHWARZENEGGER
     
    The nonstop anecdotes that stars give in celebrity interviews about the stunts they supposedly performed, their favorite hobbies, and how much they enjoyed working with other stars may serve to hype their latest project—a job they are contractually required to do—but they evade a centralissue: the art of the deal has come to replace the art of movies. To understand how the new Hollywood really works, one need only read stars’ contracts. Consider, for example, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s agreement for
Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines
. It’s a state-of-the-art exercise in deal-making.
    The contract was brilliantly put together by the Hollywood super-lawyer Jacob Bloom between June 2000 and December 2001, requiring no fewer than twenty-one drafts, and runs thirty-three pages (including appendices). For starters, Schwarzenegger got a $29.25 million “pay or play” fee, meaning he would be paid whether or not the movie was made. (At the time, that figure was a record for guaranteed compensation.) The first $3 million would be delivered on signing and the balance during the course of nineteen weeks of “principal photography,” which is the part of a production during which the actors are in front of the camera. For every week the shooting ran over its nineteen-week schedule, Schwarzenegger would receive an additional $1.6 million in “overage.” Then there was the “perk package”—a lump sum of $1.5 million for private jets, a fully equipped gym trailer, three-bedroom deluxe suites on locations, round-the-clock limousines, and personalbodyguards. The producers Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna did not agree to pay Schwarzenegger this record sum because he possessed unique acting skills—after all, the part he was to play (along with a digital double and many stuntmen) was that of a slow-speaking robot. They also did not pay