Soooo..... there's been the Sony hacking story. And while the prominent angle is about the ramifications of "The Interview" and there's been some talk about racist joking between industry insiders, another aspect of the story is about how gender pay gaps are alive and well and thriving in Hollywood.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/17/stop-denying-the-gender-pay-gap-exists-even-jennifer-lawrence-was-shortchanged/
As the friend of mine who posted that link on Facebook wrote above it: "Srsly y'all. If JLaw with staff still doesn't get equal pay, what shot do the rest of us have?"
With all due respect...for %$#!'s sake!
I think there are absolutely cases where women get shorted for same work. But so too do I think that the pay scales of American Hustle are flat-out wrong examples of unfairness in pay towards women.
Oh, I mean, if you just looked at the bottom line, sure. But you'd be a mouth-breather who gets their news from buzzfeed....or in this case THE WASHINGTON POST(!!!) (Where the hell is the editor?) Because Sweet Christ. But, hey, I'll give you the mouth-breather version, and then I'll give you the real world version that is more complicated (as well it should be).
The mouth-breather version: "Men and women were in the same film, but the women got less than the men! And, OMG, like, Jennifer Lawrence, who is like, totally, the biggest star in the world right now, got the least! Gross old Christian Bale got a deal of 9% of the back end profits on the movie. So did weird-eye Bradley Cooper. And so did ugh(!) Jeremy Renner! But then Amy Adams, who's been nominated for like, a billion oscars, only got 7% and JLaw (JLAW!!!) only got 5%! I mean, JLaw's later got raised to 7%, but Men are assholes, executives are chauvinist bastards, and women get screwed over yet again, like they have for all of history!!!!"
Screen Time
Per Fandor.com,
Lead Actor Christian Bale was onscreen for 60 minutes (46% of total screening time).
(http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/oscar-2014-video-evidence-lead-actor)
Lead Actress Amy Adams was onscreen for 46 minutes (35% of total screening time). (http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/oscar-2014-video-evidence-lead-actress)
Supporting Actor Bradley Cooper was onscreen for 41 minutes (32% of total screening time). (http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/oscar-2014-video-evidence-supporting-actor)
Supporting Actress Jennifer Lawrence was onscreen for 20 minutes (15% of total screening time). (http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/oscars-2014-video-evidence-best-supporting-actress)
Supporting Jeremy Renner was on for an unknown amount of time but less than Cooper or Adams and (probably) more than Jennifer Lawrence. He didn't get nominated and I haven't found where someone was bored enough to time his screen time. For this it doesn't really matter. Let's guess and say 30 minutes.
Per boxofficemojo.com, the budget was $40 million dollars (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=davido2013.htm)
There's no way the five actors took up the whole budget so you can't simply say they all should have been paid 8 million each. I'd actually bet that they didn't make up half of the budget (because, holy crap, movies are expensive, and it's not like prima-donna director David O. Russell was going to make it for free), but for the sake of this we will say that they did. 20 million dollars for all five actors and actresses. Well, there are leads and supportings, so off the bat, there's no paying them the same because THAT'S NOT FAIR. IT'S UNFAIR TO PAY PEOPLE THE SAME PAY FOR DIFFERING AMOUNTS OF WORK. So far as I know, there's no knowledge of what their front-end, up-front salaries were.
But we can talk about those back-end numbers. The movie made $150.1 million domestic and another $101 million international for a total of $251 million dollars. However, it's not so simple as subtracting the $40 million budget from $251 million because we don't know what the post-production and marketing costs were. Regardless, for ease and to make my point, let's just say that (improbably) the profits for the film were a cool $100 million. Easy peasy.
Bale gets 9 million, Cooper gets 9 million, and Renner gets 9 million. Adams gets 7 million and Lawrence was only supposed to get 5 million, but they bumped it up to 7 million [that's important to note, because usually when contracts are signed, they stay as negotiated. But in this case she ends up with a (40%!!!!!!) raise because they recognized her star-power even though they didn't have to do so! The chauvinist bastards!].
Per minute then (rounded to nearest thousand),
Bale: $150k
Cooper: $220k
Renner: $300k (again, that's going off a pure guess of his being in the movie 30 minutes)
Adams: $152k
Lawrence: $350k
So, the guy on screen most (per-minute-wise) got the LEAST back-end money and the woman on screen least got (per-minute-wise) MOST. The other actress also got more money per-minute-wise than the guy on screen most. PAY INEQUALITY EXISTS, PEOPLE!!! Seriously, this is the sorta thing that makes me wanna punch people in the face.
But let's continue, shall we.
Prior History
Per boxofficemojo.com,
Christian Bale's lifetime gross at the box office prior to Hustle was $2.1 billion over the course of 33 movies ($64 million average gross). However, he was also, coincidentally, the lead in a little movie series called, um, you know, BATMAN, which very recently had made, approximately a kajillion dollars. He also was recently in a big-budget Terminator movie and he won an Academy Award recently for The Fighter. His worldwide grosses are 4.1 billion, btw.
Bradley Cooper's lifetime gross prior to Hustle was also $1.8 billion over the course of 19 movies ($93 million average gross). However, his main successes, the Hangover series, were ensemble movies so his biggest lead movie was Silver Linings Playbook which made $132 million. He had been nominated for an Academy Award for that movie. His worldwide grosses are 3.4 billion.
Jeremy Renner's lifetime gross prior to Hustle was $1.4 billion over the course of 18 movies ($87.5 million average gross). However, he was the lead in the Bourne series franchise reboot and was being groomed to take over the Mission Impossible series from Tom Cruise. Additionally, he's an Avenger. He has some critical acclaim, but his big draw is that he's in massive money making franchises. So far, his grosses worldwide are $3.5 billion.
Amy Adams' lifetime gross prior to Hustle was $1.6 billion over 23 movies ($74 million average gross). Her largest solo lead to that point was Enchanted at $128 million. Enchanted was a 2007 movie. Since then, she's played the lead actress in much smaller movies or been in ensemble casts. She has gotten numerous Academy Award nominations, but not big money franchises. Her worldwide grosses are $3.1 billion.
Jennifer Lawrence's lifetime gross prior to Hustle was $1.3 billion over the course of 11 movies ($120 million average gross), but it's not quite fair to look at it that way because $424 million of that came from The Hunger Games: Catching Fire which had only come out three weeks prior. It certainly looked to be a behemoth since the first one did over $400 million, but the takeaway point was that she certainly had the smallest track record (though very impressive since she had a franchise and an Academy Award from the previous year). Her worldwide grosses were $2.2 billion.
Negotiation
Principle photography started on March 8, 2013, so contracts were most likely negotiated before then. As these are contracts for employment and not standard salaries, you can't simply say "every one gets the same." For people who follow sports, this is more than easy to understand. Each performer's contract has to be understood in the context in which it was negotiated. The best young player in baseball, universally, is Mike Trout. He just won a MVP award. He just signed a long extension for $144 million. However, a (slightly) older player, Giancarlo Stanton, just signed a contract for over $300 million. He has never won a MVP award. One had significant leverage in negotiations, the other less so. Barry Zito got a $120 million dollar contract and Jay Cutler is the highest paid offensive player in the NFL right now. The non-sports fan has no idea who those two are. The market has fluctuations and people get paid what their circumstances dictate. To not understand that is to be a bit of a fool.
Also, I mean, this is not like getting a job at Burger King where they tell you what they're going to pay you and you just take it. These performers have agents. The agents have other clients. Agents do not simply let their clients get shafted on pay because, you know, vaginas. That hurts their bottom lines since they get percentages of their clients' deals. Since the agents who represent the stars tend to represent multiple stars, they have a good idea of the right amounts and percentages to fight for. That's the whole reason those agencies get high-profile clients.
In light of that, it's easier to see how Bale got 9% ("He's Batman!") and Renner got 9% ("He's trying to be in everything!"). Cooper presents a bit of a question mark for his 9%, but perhaps there was some sort of reward happening for his prior work in Silver Linings Playbook or the role was written for him and if he backed out, others couldn't play it as well. He might have taken pennies up front. Dunno. Admittedly, he's the weak link on contract reasoning.
Adams is a great actress but not one that puts butts in seats. This is a business. She's never been in anything as large as Batman, The Hangover, The Avengers, or Mission Impossible. She did end up being in Man of Steel, but that movie came out after she would have negotiated her contract, and while she's a lead, you don't think of her when you think of that movie.
If anything, JLaw did very well for herself. She hit the perfect storm of landing a mega-franchise and then the sequel blowing the doors off 2013 right as Silver Linings Playbook was coming out. I bet the reason they upped her deal to 7% when they didn't have to was to get her to do promotion and marketing for the film because they realized she puts butts in the seats. It is a business after all.
And it worked!
American Hustle ended up being David O. Russell's largest grossing movie.
Conclusion
While I'm sure that the gender gap exists in regards to men and women's pay, please pick a better example, because this one is flat-out wrong. Shame on the Washington Post for legitimizing mouth-breathing by publishing such inane drivel. Spend some time investigating and presenting an actual gender pay-gap disparity, which surely exists. All that happens when you put forth pablum like this is that you get disregarded as a legitimate news source and appropriately ignored.
