Ok
Why do actors stay with a cast and not leave?
Why does anyone leave a job?
For better pay, promotion or conditions?
Usually but it depends on the marketplace they are working in.
In some fields where such as computers - there's a lot of money for hot jobs - hence people swap jobs more quickly and tend to be less interested in conditions since they are only going to be there a few months if conditions are bad. However there are areas that are legacy jobs- these are jobs that once were hot jobs but are now not as useful any more - here the pay does not go up and if you lose your job you might not get another one.
Acting is pretty stagnant market - most actors dont work in acting - Amber was doing very well that she didnt have to do alternative work to survive from job to job - Aly was working in a video store at one point I belive.
The movie business is a business, a really nasty shark invested business - basically because it has to be - your making multi-million pound gambles on what works and what doesnt. if it doesnt work out you have lost in one film more money than most people se in a liftetime. For example a typical salary might be 40,000 US dollars per annum (avereraged of theire lifetime, ignoring inflation, taxes and at current market rates) asuming they have a a working life of 45 years that’s 1.8 million dollars (about 1.2 million ish UK pounds) thats the budget for a small independent picture for the average Hollywood movie is peanuts. So if you were going to have to gamble with your life - you would want to be pretty certain of the odds - make sure that you have the best chance that you can that you will get your money back.
For movie producers getting the right look to the product is key, getting someone who will work well with the team and deliver a product that will return on investment. An average actor that nobody knows is basically worth little - and for a long time was paid very little until actors unionised fought and suffered greatly for their colleagues and built organisations such as Equity (UK) and SAG (US) so that actors (and everybody else) actually got paid a minimum amount i.e. they got a share in the profits.
Now if all actors were unknown then pay would remain a small factor – but the very nature of the business it creates well known faces that become part of our everyday life. And just as we are interested in the gossip about people we know in real life so we are interested in people we know in virtual life. Since TV and Movies are hyper-real (i.e. more real than our humdrum reality) so we become especially interested in the people involved in the movie/tv i.e. we become fans.
So now there is money available to fulfil our interest in so other media groups supply that information, the kick back to the production company is that interested is generated in their product and so they get more people coming to see the movie – get more money for the next season of production. However its also moves actors from being unknown’s to known’s.
If you met Aly when she was working in a video store, assuming you got chatting to her you might be become acquaintances and then friends, the fact that she was an actor was just one aspect of her life. Now it’s almost impossible to get to know her unless you also work in the biz and know here through work related environments where she can be herself and not – on stage – in the media. For now Alyson has become a product in her own right, there is ‘real’ Alyson when she is being her humdrum self and there ‘stage’ Alyson when she is in the media, and there is ‘work’ Alyson when she is herself at work.
How much she chooses to open up her ‘real’ self to the media is not always up to her as she the product like the product she’s part of is open to the shark’s of the media world – of the business she is in. Her fans what to know the ‘real’ Alyson and the media sharks know this, so are perfectly willing to rip it her life to bits and spew out what ever they can, get to make more money.
So the fans become a pain and a help, the help move Alyson the ‘product’ towards higher sales, the pain is that she has to either sacrifice her ‘real’ self to the media i.e. her privacy or she can build (usually with the help of outside agents such as her agent – who take a cut off her salary/ or need to be paid) a media image all the while increasingly building higher walls to protect herself.
“They move Alyson the ‘product’ towards higher sales” i.e. just as in the movie/tv show higher sales mean more money, better condition etc Alyson becomes someone working in a ‘hot job’. Pay starts to stag up, conditions improve and she becomes a player in different game. The game where as a producer I try to get the best bet that I will get a return on my investment by buying in other products that will increase my sales. So depending on my budget I buy in “stars” i.e. acting product. At the same time the position for the actor changes – rather than having to read for a gig they are headhunted for it – sent scripts. In reality both happens systems happen simultaneously all the way up the movie business depending on the actor ‘product’ perceived worth i.e. how famous the actor is compared with how famous the tv/fim product is. So for the new Star Wars trilogy very well known actors i.e. high status acting ‘product’ still had to read for the gig.
Here the game becomes especially interesting, because fame is fickle, a hot product can stop being hot very easily. This happens in the computer market 5 years ago C++ was everywhere now it’s increasingly seen as a legacy tool with people switching to Java. Fashions in programming have changed, so equally do fashions change for acting product. So the aim is to move your product from being a fashion product to being an established product, if I knew for certain how to do that – I wouldn’t be here doing this - my company would be worth more than GE and I would be the Time person of the year. It’s very, very hard to do some actors do make it but it almost impossible. Basically it’s moving from one game to another and choosing acting product vehicles carefully. Hence known actors ‘stars’ become very careful what scripts they choose – since they don’t want to get type cast and thus potentially out of fashion.
This is a particular problem with TV shows as people associate actors with certain parts i.e. they get type cast, and have difficulty seeing the person in a new role. Most people play fairly similar roles through out their lives. If you’ve come out to someone about being Gay for example you know how tricky people find it moving their perceptions of you, an even stronger example is transexuals, who when changing over find it very difficult for people to see them as someone else – even on the street by people they don’t know – as people are so used to seeing things I particular ways.
So for example Alyson is working to stop people seeing her ‘product’ = Willow, to widen the base. However producers want a product (for their product) that people will recognise hence they are likely to only want her ‘product’ in roles which don’t challenge peoples assumptions. So Alyson ended playing a nerdy but sexually open character in AP 1+2 widening her base a bit, but still within people’s perceptions of her. However, on film/tv products where her ‘product’ adds more the movie/tv product she can widen her base more. Hence she can play a romantic lead in a period piece or a gun toting killer mastermind.
Thus actors face a bind with TV series, on the one hand it keeps them in the public eye and thus increases their fan base, whilst on the other they risk becoming type cast and not being able to get work after the series finishes. Because Buffy the product is wedded to SMG ‘product’ she has a lot of power to force them to reschedule around her, to let her widen her ‘product’ into a more general movie ‘product’ i.e. to reposition her brand. However all actors also face the problem of when to leave a series to move from being a big fish in small pond to a small fish in a big pond. Sometimes it works e.g. George Clooney, Danny DeVito, etc other times it doesn’t e.g. David Caruso the lead actor in NYPD blue series 1.
Fans disappear very quickly, just as when you move to a new area you tend to not be particularly interested in the day-to-day lives of the people you used to work with, saw in the street etc. Since your market worth is based on transferring these fans – so the actors ‘product’ net worth to producers ‘product’ go down as well, hence the need to stay in the public light. So the need to feed the sharks in the media. When your star is rising doors are open and options are available that can quickly close if your becoming a legacy product. As I said before this can happen to anyone John Travolta looked comparatively (he was still probably bringing in money and work but the price he commanded would have dropped) dead in the water until Pulp Fiction. Hence Amber has taken advantage of her position in Buffy to get into a wide range of other areas that will give her a foot in the door if her either her ‘product’ as part ‘Buffy’ or the product ‘Buffy’ is cancelled.
Thus actors face the same market economics that any new product coming onto the market does. How to make get sales at all (get work on TV/film), how to create a brand (how to get and keep fans and sustain work from film to film/remain on a tv series), how to build a brand and move it into a must have item (how to move from a fashion product to an everyday product – how to stay a ‘X’ ‘list’ actor) how to avoid re-invent, re-label, re- configure, re-brand your product so that it doesn’t become a legacy product (how keep you appeal, to be successful as possible with as little fame as is needed - to remain a player in the game).
All of what have described is as if the acting biz was a perfect market, with everyone having access to the same choices and information. However, the reality is even nastier. Why? Because it’s an imperfect market. A market where even if you image is right, if you can act the socks of anyone else in the world, where you will work for nothing to get a gig – other people get chosen over you. Nepotism is one aspect, the tv/movie biz is like the mafia where all the good jobs go to friends and family of people in power. Where “you’ll never work in this town again” actually means something. Where “black lists” means your career and all you have worked for is over. Think of school play ground politics x money x power.
There are also more human factors, like inertia - people get into something they like and don’t want to stop being there. A team can be a wonderful thing and if you enjoy being with your friends then you don’t think about the long- term issues. It much easier to stay somewhere safe and warm, earning money and being able to buy things and do things that you could never do before. Actors are people and are driven by the same day to day needs as the rest of us. Ok some people are a real pain in the neck, but most people are trying to make the world work for their family and friends, get new projects of the ground, stop idiots from destroying what we have built, protect and families, homes and working environments, and getting a return on our investments so that we can plan for the future would be nice to. The movie/tv businesses are really just like us. Hang on I seem to be saying exactly the same thing as the last paragraph but from a different perspective.
The tv/movie businesses, as are all media businesses, a people business. Whilst they use technology to achieve the end point its people and stories, which are the product. Whilst business might be war, and politics is war by another means people businesses are like civil wars, you never know when a bomb might go off, whether your friends are going to stab you in the back, who you can trust. The politics of the situation means that you might stab your friends in the back and walk over them to get where you need to go. It’s a nasty, nasty, nasty business that you really must love, or have a desperate need to be in, - hang on wasn’t that what Amber said about it. Alyson said recently how everybody working in the movie/tv biz was in insane and you needed to be insane to work in it. I wonder why?
Why, do people do it? Because they love acting, because despite all the craziness they can produce good things, that change people lives, that they can make a difference in the world. And because if they are successful they are very well financially compensated for their work, because of it opens doors to other things, and quite often because it satisfies part of themselves which they cannot get any other way, sadly often this is a need for fame – an incredibly powerful and expensive drug that can seem cheap at first but towards the end cannot be obtained at any price no matter what the cost to the person except possibly their death.
Oh and that’s why SMG is paid more the Alyson or Amber, apparently she is very good at the movie/tv biz ‘game’ - a real player.
X
PS Have you ever wondered why everyone is so nice about their colleagues in the movie/tv game? Imagine a civil war where everybody is armed to the teeth, but where some people have hand weapons but others have arsenals that would make the US Army shudder. Wouldn’t you try to be as friendly and as nice as you could be – at least anywhere anyone who could report back to your ‘colleagues’ and ‘friends’ about what you had said?
Hey but that’s show business, a business all about showing but not about what its doing – it’s a kind of magic.
Edited by: X mass at: 4/9/02 7:28:59 am
by Maj » Mon Apr 08, 2002 7:39 pm 
at: 4/8/02 6:46:06 pm
Sarah's salary was £75,000 a couple of years ago (from Entertainment Weekly), but is allegedly now higher than that, higher than the other cast members. Alyson and Nick get paid less, but by rumour it's not a lot less. But it's peanuts compared to many other non-genre network shows. 
dgeek