Here's an example of a film worker in animation who has the leverage for a nice pay day.
FUNNYMAN John Cleese is laughing all the way to the bank - after netting $1MILLION for just 23 minutes' work ...for the fourth instalment of hit movie "Shrek."
He picked up a whopping pay cheque of £604,000 for his troubles - which works out at a cool £26,000 a minute or £437 a second ...
On the other hand, Mr. Cleese probably needs the dough.
The thoughts and observations of the leaders of The Animation Guild (TAG), Local 839 IATSE. Jason MacLeod is the Business Representative, KC Johnson is the President. Mike Sauer is Assistant to the Business Representative.
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15 comments:
Okay, I'm sure there are contracts that require Cleese's voice be used for King Herold, but that means Dreamworks has to sell over 83,000 tickets just to pay his salary. (I'm sure his name on the credits will draw the kiddies in.) His pay would keep ten highly salaried animators employed for a year. Too bad they can't use someone with a similar voice for half that amount. Maybe some of the Futurama folks could pick up a little extra pocket change on the side.
And what are Paul McCartney and Justin Timberlake earning? Crap, is there any money left over for the people who actually make the movie? What a waste of perfectly good money.
Oh, but Bill D. and the crack DW's development team had the foresight to get him before he was big, when he only cost SAG scale, a mere one million.
They are paying him for marketing, not making the movie. He is appearing in a commercial for WalMart toys for 1 million dollars.
No, he gets more for commercial work. A LOT more.
And he's got to replinish the coffers since he just paid $19 million to his recent ex-wife.
Just one more reason movies in LA are such crap. They are budgeted to support actors bizarre personal lives, their inability to conduct themselves as human beings. A nineteen million dollar divorce?
Brad Pitt has how many nannies now?
If Brad would just conduct himself like the very godly Mark Sanford and John Ensign, men who take their marital vows seriously, all would be well.
Oh, wait ...
well, the most infuriating part about the payout to Mr. Cleese, is the 23 minutes part...
Dreamworks is just stupid.
rufus.
I'll bet you a dollar he didn't make a million. What are the chances the "source" (a tech in the VO studio?) was really privy to the details of anyone's contract?
To play a killed-off character? There's no way they spent a million just to get a few lines from a completely optional character.
Or is someone claiming the Shrek universe is so airtight that no other character could have been dreamed up to fill the plot need?
This is just hype from the always reliable British press. It has a "Brit screws Yanks" flavor to it.
If the million exists, it is connected somehow to Cleese's involvement as a writer on "The Croods", another DWA production.
The million figure is likely pretty accurate. It's how the deal is structured that makes the difference in how you view the compensation. It's not like someone of his stature walks through the door and has a typical contract conversation. There are lots of trades, concessions that go on all the time. A contract can have anything and everything under the sun.
thats stupid to pay these voice actors that kind of money. get a sound a like and call it a day.
They use sound-a-likes a LOT. Actors never know--and it saves the studios a lot of time when the actors aren't available. I do know for a fact that Disney AND Dreamworks does this on their features, and I bet other studios do as well.
And the comment "Crack DW Development Team", I'm assuming you mean that they are once again smoking Crack. It would explain *so much* of what comes out of that Studio.
Smoking crack?
DW's stock is nears it's 52-week price.
Looks like they are selling crack if you ask me.
A couple of things:
If you read about it online anywhere, the plot of the next Shrek film means that Cleese's King character isn't "dead" in it.
I've worked at most of thefeature studios and the ONLY times "soundalikes" were sometimes used in conjunction with a feature was for TV commercials, video games, and (if it applied) for the TV series version of a feature. Sometimes even then they got the original if they weren't too expensive.
I can't think of one feature where the actor had any of his important lines filled in by an imitator. The actor CAN tell the difference, say between De Niro and Charlie Adler, really. Their original contracts allow for all the recording that's needed from them also-they often get a lot more call backs than they would like but that's the way animation is made.
[I know people who have done some very limited looping on live action for stars-very, very limited and only when the stars are not available and even then the "lines" involved are more "efforts" or exclamations, dropped words, etc.]
John Cleese is one of the finest comedic writers and actors around , he is extremely versatile and has and is well known and loved by english speaking audiences around the world for over 40 years . That he makes a tidy sum for his unique creative input and distinctive talent on a very lucrative franchise is only fair.
Nobody here has posted anything negative about Mr. Cleese, as far as I know.
Mr. Cleese was one of the first to contribute his talents to the efforts of "Amnesty International". Kudos to him.
Nobody doubts his talents either.
But getting paid a cool million bucks for 23 minutes of work, does come to the detriment of other artists, who have seen their salaries slashed in recent years, while their hours keep getting longer. That's not Mr. Cleese's fault, off course. He's just taking advantage of the situation.
rufus
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