Movie Star Salaries Reduced – 1927

CUTTING MOVIE SALARIES, perhaps 25 per cent., creates a universal sensation, because through the films everybody seems to be personally acquainted with movie stars.

Similar cuts in salaries of the officers of producing companies, say down to $150,000 a year for presidents, attract some- what less attention, altho that is part of the policy of retrenchment announced by the Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky and fifteen other leading companies. Is such cutting down a good sign of the times? Yes, indeed, in substance answer most of our daily papers, both as an indication of a degree of financial sanity coming into a frenzied business and as a check on ultra-dazzling screen stars. Others, less optimistic, suggest that there is more of making a virtue out of necessity in this gesture of economy than there is promise of benefit to the picture-seeing multitudes. Allowing for “wee bits of exaggeration” regarding salaries actually paid in the fabulous movie world, still, as the Pittsburgh Gazette Times points out, “the warning given of the state of the industry, coupled with the demand for reduced expenditures, indicates that the business is passing from the bubble period and is settling down on a basis akin to that which governs in other industries, one in which there must be care that the outgo shall not exceed the income.” But more than mere business considerations are involved, in the opinion of The Ohio State Journal (Columbus), which says,

“There has been no real economic justification for millionaire incomes in the movies save the keen competition among the producers themselves. The lure of apparently easy money has drawn thousands of men and girls, especially the latter, to the movie centers, has made them discontented when they did not succeed, and spoiled them for what might have been more productive lives. There is evidence at last that the industry itself sees the handwriting on the wall. But the sad part is that it is economic pressure rather than a realization of the essential unsoundness of its position that has forced the issue.”

Hollywood sends out news that the cut will amount possibly to $10,000,000 a year, hitting salaries of an estimated army of 300,000 people, including executives, department heads, producers, stars, directors, actors, writers, and other artists. High salaried “big chiefs” voluntarily accept the maximum cut of 25 per cent. as a starter; stars under contract are to be asked to accept like reductions; other outs range down to 10 per cent.;

$50-a-week employees are exempt. Since recent huge mergers of theater chains have put the movie industry in control of approximately three-fourths of the whole country’s film outlets, these theaters are expected to be subject to the economy rule as well as the scattered executive and distribution offices. Hollywood also reports mass meetings of resentful actors, hints of compromise if a crisis “really exists,” and hoped-for help from the Actors’ Equity Association in a “film wage war.” Officials of the Actors’ Equity in New York point out that Los Angeles “is the greatest non-union town in the country,” and Hollywood stars have heretofore preferred to “go along with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a company union nicely drest up by the big producers.”

Movie Star Salaries continued here

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