Movie Star Salary

Video Transcript

"A movie star makes whatever their agent or manager can negotiate for them for a particular project. Generally you have what's called a quote, and the industry tends to know what your quote is if you're a movie star. That's not to say it can't go up or down based on your last performance. There's an old adage that I guess you're only as good as your last performance in this business. And that's true for a lot of people, however it's not true for somebody like a Tom Hanks who is given a certain latitude or grace. They come out of the gate, and they try something different, and it's not a particularly great movie. Not to single out Tom Hanks who I think is a great actor, but his quote is kind of bulletproof unless something really horrible happens over the next three or four pictures for Mr. Hanks. He'll still be in that rarefied air of many, many, many millions of dollars per deal. For actors like me, the union has an industry standard that allows me to go out and work and make a nice living. It's called the minimum. Screen actors get a minimum, and usually, I get the minimum or more, sometimes double, double that, and my agent gets ten percent of that. I don't have a manager but many actors do. A manager gets fifteen percent of that, so after you do the math with what you're making, your taxes to go to Uncle Sam which we all pay, and your manager, fifteen percent, and your agent ten percent, who by the way, take that all off the top of your gross. Lots of times for somebody making twenty million a movie, it actually boils down to about seven or eight million, not to feel sorry for these people, but it's not all what it seems to be. So actually your people that are making the twenty and thirty million dollars per picture, are only making seven to ten million dollars, I know, hard to believe, right. Do all movie actors get paid? No. All movie actors do not get paid. Sometimes you have somebody doing a cameo or it's a non-union movie, which means that typically if you're not in a union, you can go out and work on a set, and there's no payment for that."