And possibly better-casted, although I know part of the problem with casting is money.
That depends. It's not like the names on a movie necessarily have to be Big Names -- that's just Hollywood hedging its bets on the notion that people will default to seeing Actor X or Y (and I'm using 'actor' as a sex-neutral term here) no matter what they're in (which empirically isn't always the case, but it is enough to make such an assumption reasonable). In this case Star Wars is really an excellent example: the primary characters were all played by relative unknowns, with only one or two anchor characters (like Obi Wan) who were Big Names, and those Big Names were not the story's foci characters.
So it can be done. And even more, there are instances of actors agreeing to be paid less in return for a percentage of the final intake. It's like the actor's version of sweat equity, and when it's a movie that an actor personally believes in, that can be of additional importance to the actor. It's not like we non-actors are the only ones allowed to take a job for reasons that have more to do with principles than with the actual paycheck; it's something plenty of people would do, given the opportunity, I think. That, too, can become a way to reduce a movie's immediate outlay, and IIRC is a way that some of the smaller art-house films have not only gotten made, but managed to do so with Big Names in the cast list.
Plus, there's also movies like Sita Sings the Blues to prove that the public will finance directly, before and after the movie's production. I do think as that kind of power grows into its own -- that is, we as the public get used to being able to support directly, much like a latter-day public broadcasting system (in that public broadcasting is really just publicly-funded broadcasting -- we may see more and more of Sita's ilk.
no subject
Date: 7 Apr 2010 05:50 pm (UTC)That depends. It's not like the names on a movie necessarily have to be Big Names -- that's just Hollywood hedging its bets on the notion that people will default to seeing Actor X or Y (and I'm using 'actor' as a sex-neutral term here) no matter what they're in (which empirically isn't always the case, but it is enough to make such an assumption reasonable). In this case Star Wars is really an excellent example: the primary characters were all played by relative unknowns, with only one or two anchor characters (like Obi Wan) who were Big Names, and those Big Names were not the story's foci characters.
So it can be done. And even more, there are instances of actors agreeing to be paid less in return for a percentage of the final intake. It's like the actor's version of sweat equity, and when it's a movie that an actor personally believes in, that can be of additional importance to the actor. It's not like we non-actors are the only ones allowed to take a job for reasons that have more to do with principles than with the actual paycheck; it's something plenty of people would do, given the opportunity, I think. That, too, can become a way to reduce a movie's immediate outlay, and IIRC is a way that some of the smaller art-house films have not only gotten made, but managed to do so with Big Names in the cast list.
Plus, there's also movies like Sita Sings the Blues to prove that the public will finance directly, before and after the movie's production. I do think as that kind of power grows into its own -- that is, we as the public get used to being able to support directly, much like a latter-day public broadcasting system (in that public broadcasting is really just publicly-funded broadcasting -- we may see more and more of Sita's ilk.