Wandering through one of our fine, contract studios today, trying to regain my land legs, a seasoned animation veteran handed me this set of Contract Minimums from 1960 ...
It's from The Motion Picture Screen Cartonists, Local 841 IATSE (New York), so it's a trifle different than the one that existed here on the Left Coast at the same time. To begin ...
Contract Minimums
Director ... $236.25
Head Animator ... $209.48
Animators 1 ... $178.61
Animators 11 ... $138.92
Assistant Animator ... $110.25
Inbetweener ... $93.71
Layout Man ... $178.61
Assistant Layout Man ... $121.28Story Man, Story Sketch ... $178.61
Background Artist ... $159.86
Assistant Background ... $121.28
And so on. You'll find the actual sheet with all the actual numbers directly below.
What these rates show is: 1) We've negotiated a lot of contracts with a lot of wage bump-ups over the last five decades, and 2) Inflation lives.
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6 comments:
How would this compare with inflation?
This inflation calculator:
http://www.halfhill.com/inflation.html
says that the Head Animator making $209.48 a week in 1960 would be the equivalent of making $1,567.56 a week in 2011 dollars.
And the minimum contract rate for Journey Animator in 2011?
$1628.56
Was "Head Animator" equivalent to Journey Animator or Supervising Animator, in terms of duties?
I would rather have a list of costs of items in the 60's, like rent, milk, gas, taxes, in other words, cost of life back then. The dollar obviously went way farther back then than it does nowadays. I know the issue of inflation was addressed, but somehow that's not enough of a picture...
d
It depends on where you're living.
New York in 1961 was comparatively expensive.
L.A. in 1961 was less so. Rents, at that time, were cheap.
Obviously the situation is different now than then.
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