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Wired on Hollywood's Elite Message Boards
superflippy writes " Wired journalist Ben Mezrich gets the scoop on the online forums that film producers and other Hollywood heavyweights use to "track" the buzz on spec scripts, actors, writers, etc. "The tracking boards are the herd mentality gone digital," says one tracker. This helps explain how dreck like Kangaroo Jack makes it to theaters."
How much were people paid? Did you meet guild rates and all that? What, more generally, did things cost?
Well, SAG makes several contracts available for producers who wish to use SAG actors, but don't have a lot of money. They are all listed at the SAG Indie website (warning: it's flash hell) http://sagindie.com/flashFS.html
For those two movies I mentioned, I worked for the SAG minimums, and took some profit-participation incentives. I did it because they were both great scripts, and I wanted to work with the people involved.
I'm very conflicted about actor's salaries. On the one hand, if an actor is going to be "opening" a movie, he or she should share in the massive profits that movie will be bringing the studio. On the other hand, because of this phenomenon, we're looking at one actor getting a multi-million dollar salary, while all the other actors work for scale.
In Sydney Lumet's book "Making Movies," he talks about those stupid actor bonuses, and how money that's spent on those things doesn't end up "on the screen," and the audience gets cheated because of it.
I'm not sure what the crew and department heads got paid. I'm sure you could get an idea for that stuff by tracking down some indie film makers . . . they usually like to help out aspiring film makers.