Nepotism is Just One Part of Hollywood's Off-the-Books Celebrity Compensation System
There are so many ways for things to suck
Last month, Vulture ran a feature piece about how common it is for Hollywood stars to have famous parents. I thought the article was a bit overwrought; I’m not sure we needed 4,500 words under the headline: BREAKING: HAVING RICH AND POWERFUL PARENTS CAN BE AN ADVANTAGE. I’m also not ready to award the Pulitzer to the sleuth who uncovered the bombshell that Colin Hanks is Tom Hanks’ son — Woodward and Bernstein, you are not. Still, I was glad that people were talking about meritocracy and the lack thereof.
I’m on record as a meritocracy superfan. To me, jobs are about making a thing, and if you’re not hiring the person who best helps you make that thing, then you’re doing it wrong. I also think that most people would rather live in a world where their talents might be rewarded than one in which jobs are doled out according to a random birth lottery. Nepotism is an affront to those values; I think it sucks. But I’m also resigned to the fact that it will probably always be part of Hollywood, because it’s part of a vast celebrity compensation system that influences who gets what job and which projects get made.
To be clear: This system sucks, but it’s not nefarious. There aren’t really evil-doers here. I regret that calling it an “off-the-books compensation system” implies that what I’m about to discuss is corrupt or secretive — it is not. This system is common knowledge to anyone who works in entertainment, so common in fact that it is known even to me, a person who only barely qualifies as “someone who works in entertainment.” But before I became a small Kuiper Belt object in the entertainment solar system, I didn’t know how this stuff worked. I would see terrible movies and TV and wonder “How did this shit get made?” Now I know how that shit got made. And I’d like to talk about that process in order to help people find the good stuff and avoid the bad. Which is to say: As with most of my columns, my ultimate goal here is to help people avoid paying money to see George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky.
Show business is a business. People invest in TV and movies to make money. I used to have a bratty art school view of this process; I thought that stuff should get made because of artistic merit, not due to expected rate of return. But when I became a person with a small amount of money to invest, that philosophy went straight out the fucking window. People want a return on their investment, end of story, that’s how it is and how it will always be. Personally, I would invest in Triumph of the Will 2: Munich Nights if I thought it would make money.
Stars are extremely valuable. There’s a reason why Tom Cruise makes $100 million per movie: It’s because he’s worth it. You can pay him that much and still end up in the black. I mean, you could try to save a few bucks and make a Mission Impossible movie starring Horatio Sans, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You really need Tom Cruise. If nothing else, there’s something exhilarating about throwing nine figures worth of movie star off a mountain. You could toss character actors into a ravine until it’s overflowing with Alfred Molinas and Joe Pantolianos and nobody would care, but when it’s Tom Cruise…well, that’s what we call “stakes”.
But fitting a star into your budget can be tough. Everything in a production comes at the expense of something else. To land your star, you’re going to have to make some tweaks: Instead of Paris in 1940, your setting becomes present day Tempe, Arizona. Your CGI dragon gets nixed — it’s now a guy in a gorilla suit. Your big ending — a base jump into the Grand Canyon set to the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” — becomes a skateboard trick in front of a Hardee’s set to “Turkey in the Straw”. These are significant downgrades (except for the gorilla suit — those are always funny). It’s inevitable that you’ll ask yourself: “Is there some way I could shift this star’s payment off the books?”
Lo and behold: There is! Your star has a minimally-talented son who’s looking for his big break! Would it really be that terrible to plug the little dullard into a non-gorilla-suit role? If you find a part for the kid, the star will work for cheap, and your budget problems are solved. So, you put the kid in the movie and hope for the best. In fact, with all the money you’re saving, you might be able to CGI some emotion onto Dipshit Junior’s face.
This is one way that nepotism happens. If you’re famous enough, nepotism is a perk — it’s a non-cash form of compensation. And there many types of perks, all of which influence which projects get made. Consider…
Some stars operate on a “one for them, one for me” system. That is: For every big, money-making film that they make, they also do some naval-gazing arthouse bullshit to satiate what they imagine is their yearning for artistic expression (but is actually just narcissism). So, the star makes a gazillion-dollar blockbuster film about superhero robot wizards or whatever the fuck, and then they make one about hearing-impaired lesbians who express their love through finger puppets during the Boxer Rebellion.
The question for a producer is: Can you stomach the “one for them” in order to do the project that will actually make money? Can you sign a star to a three-picture deal, get two money-makers out of them and write off the lesbian puppet shit? Is there any universe in which the arty farty garbage makes money, or at least comes close? Or, if you’re a writer: If you know that a star is dying to play Sacco and Vanzetti in an Eddie-Murphy-in-The-Nutty-Professor-type situation, can you make that part of your script? There’s certainly an incentive to try. If you’re famous enough, people will indulge whatever horribly-misguided choice you’d like to make.
Or what about this: Can you let the star do something that they definitely shouldn’t be doing, like write or direct? A lot of actors are looking to expand their résumé, and they might agree to do the thing that they do well (act) in exchange for also being allowed to do something they might do well, badly, or House of D-level badly. It’s a strange system — not a lot of plumbers say “Sure, I’ll fix your pipes, but only if I can also give you an appendectomy.” Nonetheless, it’s the system we have. And it’s another thing that happens for people who are really famous.
And then there’s the sweetest plum: The Executive Producer scam. There are several types of Executive Producers. Some are visionaries who oversee every creative element of a project. Others are extremely silent partners who swoop in twice a year to toss off some half-assed advice and then cash an eight-figure check for doing so. You definitely want to be the second kind. If you’re a big enough big shot, a network or studio will let you “Executive Produce” something, but you’re basically just licensing your name and doing nothing. It’s the best gig imaginable; I dream of one day making bank by Zooming into a meeting, giving advice like “the monkey should have a name that indicates he’s a monkey, like Mister Bananas,” and then spending the next five months in Bora Bora recharging my creative batteries.
This all sort of sucks. These are all processes through which the powerful accrue more power. And they result in bad things getting made — they force producers to focus on questions other than “How can we tell a good story in a compelling way?” In a perfect world, nobody would have to consider these things. Of course, in a perfect world, nobody would be fuming about HBO potentially bungling a reboot of Scooby Doo.
What can be done about any of this? Well, nothing…except one thing. If consumers got better at spotting these tricks, networks and studios would be less likely to pull them. Certain things are red flags — not certain indicators of danger, but definitely warnings. “From the mind of (some big-shot who is way past the point where he’d be getting heavily involved)…” is a red flag. “Written and directed by (some actor mostly known for their looks)…” is a red flag. “Starring (some huge movie star’s kid)…” is a red flag. Consumers already see the danger sometimes — they certainly didn’t bite on, say, After Earth, the 2013 Jaden Smith vehicle in which Will Smith sits perfectly still for 100 minutes while his son gets out-acted by cartoons. The better consumers get at sniffing out the garbage, the less studios will resort to off-the-books methods of compensation.
It would be nice if the person most likely to make something good always got hired. That would be best both for consumers and for people who make stuff. That doesn’t always happen — maybe it doesn’t usually happen — and none of us should be happy about that. Bringing about change won’t be easy. But when it comes to entertainment, if you ever see an ad for She-Puppets of Shanghai, Written and Directed by Vin Diesel, Starring Vivian Diesel and decide “I’m sitting that one out”, then you’re absolutely doing your part.
"hearing-impaired lesbians who express their love through finger puppets during the Boxer Rebellion."
I'd love to see a movie like that, write the script and reach out to Colin Hanks.
I was teen (or maybe in college) when Warner Bros. had "Tiny Toons" which was essentially Looney Tunes: The Next Generation. Steven Spielberg was the EP of the show and there were a couple of running gags in the first season or two about how he had no involvement in the show. It turned out Spielberg actually watched the show and was getting depressed by how they were making fun of him so someone had to reach out to the writers and tell them to knock it off.