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Today there is no safety net -- no majority of compulsive moviegoers -- to catch the weaker films. Every star, every studio, stands like a colossus on a fault line. There are also no plantation workers among actors, only independent operatives. If Schwarzenegger wants $12 million a picture, he'll get it -- and he'll earn it. But a few other stars, who deserve a lot less money than Arnold, will be paid only a little less. The B-minus picture boys get A-plus cash.
Ladling out the largesse might once have been acceptable to studio heads, but the palmy days are past. In the current movie climate, when budgets have soared and revenues are soft, moguls get to wondering if stars are worth the worry. This summer's box-office take is down 10% from the same period last year, which was down 8.8% from the summer of 1989. Viewers are seeing more movies, but increasingly, they watch them at home. "Video is becoming a substitute for film going," says Pollock, who notes that studios receive about 50% of the box-office take but only 25% to 30% of video sales. "If you look at picture making as a hurdle race, the hurdles just went up a foot."
And like the owners of baseball teams, movie executives are tired of paying millions of dollars to the uppity help. "With the recession finally hitting Hollywood," says syndicated columnist Anne Thompson, "the policy of putting big stars in weak stories is being called into question."
This is the new Hollywood gospel, and its prophet is Jeffrey Katzenberg. In January, Katzenberg, who runs Walt Disney's movie operations, wrote a staff memo that was passed around Hollywood more quickly and urgently than a joint at Woodstock. In this back-to-basics plea, he ripped the notions of the bankable star. "If this were true," he asked, alluding to Batman and The Two Jakes, "then how can one explain what happened to 1990's vehicle for 1989's 'most bankable star,' Jack Nicholson?" He apologized for the studio's big- budget Dick Tracy and disclosed that he had turned down Beatty's subsequent project, Bugsy. And he urged his minions to build movies around the story, not the star.
Katzenberg had numbers, not just frustration, to back him up. The top three hits of 1990 had been Home Alone, Ghost and Pretty Woman, with nary a bankable star (though Pretty Woman turned Roberts into one). They were simple tales about people who change: the old stuff of drama, and of Hollywood in the decades when its tinsel glistened like gold. Richard Zanuck quotes his father Darryl, longtime pasha of 20th Century Fox, as saying success in movies boils down to three things: "story, story, story." Zanuck is an independent producer who has defied industry logic and made hits without big stars: Jaws, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy. As he notes with wry pride, "I'm a throwback and part of the vanguard at the same time."