reiher@ucla-cs.UUCP (09/06/84)
It's the next thing to impossible to make a Hollywood feature film for
much under three or four million dollars, nowadays. A great deal of this
has to do with the fact that all of the studios have heavy duty contracts
with the unions which require a lot of people to be around the set, whether
you need them or not. If you intend to do any location work, you've got to
hire Teamsters to drive the trucks, and they don't come cheap. Union contracts
prevent the same makeup person from making up both faces and bodies. There are
a lot of other examples. A standard comment of directors from other coutries
watching Hollywood filming is "What are all these people here for?" The studio
is hardly blameless, as their creative accounting methods will pass off as much of the overhead of running the studio onto the production budgets of films as
they can get away with. Add it all up, throw in the stuff you really need,
and you just can't get away cheap.
The really low-budget films are all made by independents. Most of them don't
deal with unions, or only with the unions for actors, directors, cinema-
tographers, editors, etc., and not with the unions which handle key grips,
cameramen, etc. They also have little overhead outside the actual costs of
the film. Even so, if you want your film to have a moderately professional
look, you'll either have to go with unknowns as actors or defer everyone's
salaries to stay below the million dollar mark, and it's a crisis if you haven't
got a scene by the third take. Even back in the thirties, it cost a major
studio $100,000-$200,000 to roll out a one hour long formula western. Movies
just aren't cheap.
--
Peter Reiher
reiher@ucla-cs.arpa
{...ihnp4,ucbvax,sdcrdcf}!ucla-cs!reiher