• While, as usual, women don't direct any films, because they can't, due to being women, and therefore they don't get nominated, two women actually at least somehow got nominated for Best Screenplay! That's Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig, who co-wrote Bridesmaids, which should totally win its category. And! A woman actually got nominated in the Adapted Screenplay entry! Co-nominated at least; husband-and-wife team Peter Straughan & Bridget O’Connor wrote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy which should completely and utterly win, because that is a great script. Unfortunately she died in late 2010.

• I bet Spain's really glad they nominated Black Bread, instead of Almodovar's The Skin I Live In. It is, however, the first movie in Catalan to be put forward! It is also the first movie in Catalan to be snubbed in favor of some other countries' films at the Oscar nominations. "Grim but gripping" said Variety! "Stodgy, starchy and not particularly nutritious" said the Hollywood Reporter! "Totally didn't see it," said everyone in America.

What else am I missing? (And no, our boyfriend Michael Fassbender wasn't snubbed, Shame just wasn't a very good movie. Oh also! Drive got nominated for sound editing! Which, YES, OBVIOUSLY!)

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In the end it's not an issue for anyone else but the small number of people who actually both read magazines and go see movies, and Denby's review (LOL, subscription-only) is boring, not revealing, hasty and just not very good. (He's my least-favorite movie critic anyway, but c'mon.) It's 50% plot explanation and 25% praise for its star; it's without any kind of utility for movie-goers, and it actually seems weird and wrong—elaborating on how the titular full-time batteree Lisbeth Salander is a sex goddess, basically, which is like... gross? Makes you wish Andrea Dworkin was alive to handle that one! So it's tough to be on Denby's side. But mostly this whole episode reads like the studio and producers capitalizing on a moment for publicity.

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It's not a question that's entirely straightforward. For example, the answer to the trivia question, "Who was the first actor to get paid a million dollars for a single movie?" is a surprisingly hard one to answer. The game show answer would be William Holden for The Bridge On The River Kwai in 1957 (and, on the actress side, Elizabeth Taylor for Cleopatra in 1963). But not so fast. Holden made a million dollars off the film, but actually his upfront compensation was less than $500,000, as his agent negotiated a deal where Holden would get ten percent of the film's profits. And as such arrangements go, how much did Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and (non-actor) D.W. Griffith make after they formed United Artists in 1919, as they produced and distributed a number of films that grossed over a million dollars at the time. They owned the means of production, and were surely making serious bank, not just as actors but also as distributors.

And for that matter, is it fair to compare a million dollars in 1919 to a million dollars in 1957? Or even 1957 to 1963? "Who is William Holden?" might take the square on "Jeopardy," but it also might not be correct.

BRAD PITT
As a baseline, let’s use Brad Pitt, currently appearing in critical pick Moneyball. Pitt has been around for a while, and his ascent to stardom was steep, initially attracting close attention as the abs in Thelma and Louise in 1991, jetting straight to above the title in short order. This is common knowledge, and Brad Pitt has as household of a name as they come for coming on 20 years, and a favorite topic of the gossip industrial complex. But just how much money does Shawnee, Oklahoma's William Bradley Pitt actually make? To the Internet!

Do keep in mind that an actor's salary is not necessarily a matter of public record. Movie-making in not like professional sports, where paycheck size is disclosed as a matter of course. It makes sense: how much do you make a year, and how likely are you to answer that question in a public forum? On top of that, generally speaking, the size of a budget of a motion picture falls under the category of trade secret, as competing studios don't exactly what to advertise how much money they are (or aren't) making to competitors.

On the other hand, some salaries are bandied about like catchphrases. Take the
$20 million dollar club, which is the recent standard for the highest echelon of movie stars, including Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Jim Carrey, Harrison Ford and Johnny Depp. Why advertise such an obscene take-home? Answer: So that the actor is viewed as someone who must be paid that much for the next film.

In Pitt's case, according to IMDB, Pitt's reps fall on the side of building precedent by releasing (usually through sub rosa means) some of his paydays. Pitt made his first serious bank in 1993, turning his hot guy charm into menacing hot guy for Kalifornia for $500,000. His menacing maybe-imaginary hot guy reprise in 1999 Fight Club made him $17,500,000. And in 2005 he joined the $20 million club for the film he made with Mrs. Pitt, Mr. & Mrs. Smith. By any standard other than a hedge fund manager's, Brad Pitt gets paid a lot of money.

MARILYN MONROE
And if we are going to objectify Brad Pitt, let’s look at the salaries of Marilyn Monroe, or as she was known then, Marilyn Freakin’ Monroe.

One thing to keep in mind when discussing what actors got paid in times past is that up until the 1970s, it was very common for an actor to sign a term deal with a studio instead of negotiating compensation for each individual film. If you were an aspiring actor in, say, the 1930s, your breakthrough would most likely come while you were under contract to one of the major studios, which would pay you a fixed weekly amount. It was possible to get to the point where the actor would have the negotiating leverage, but to get to that point was a question of doing time as a bit player, playing in roles designated by the employer, until popular acclaim could be acquired.

As Monroe began to break into stardom, she was under contract to 20th Century Fox, who paid her $1,250 a week for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (later to be memorialized as a Madonna music video ) in 1953. Three years later, her pay had increased to $100,000 for a serious turn in Bus Stop, the result of a renegotiated deal with Fox that gave her a per-picture fee plus approval rights over roles and production elements, and the right to make films for other studios. Which she did in 1961, filming The Misfits for United Artists for $250,000, a tumultuous production that would be the last completed film for both Monroe and Clark Gable. (Numbers via IMDb.)

WILLIAM POWELL
Let’s go back even further and look at the career of an actor possessing, for the time, a certain Brad Pitt-level of fame: William Powell. Powell was handsome and debonair, though he did rise to fame by playing heavies and hobos, with a career that spanned silent films into the advent of the talkies. Powell (who you surely remember from The Thin Man at least, right?) was as embroiled in the gossip headlines of his day as is Pitt. Powell was not only briefly married to Carole Lombard, he was the beau of Jean Harlow at the time of her untimely death at the age of 26. So how’d Bill Powell do?

According to William Powell: The Life and Films by Roger Bryant (a charming if not obsessive little bio), we know that in 1928 Powell was paid a total of $5,200 for both his and Paramount’s first talkie, Interference. By 1934, when The Thin Man was produced, Powell was under contract for $3,000 a week. And two years later Powell co-starred with ex-wife Lombard in My Man Godfrey (a film which introduced us to the sadly fallen-into-disuse term “forgotten man”) for $87,500.

JANE FONDA
Finally, let’s take second-generation star Jane Fonda. She got into the business the conventional way as a Hollywood player, eventually garnering acclaim for Cat Ballou in 1965, but broke through as a household name after a spell in Europe with then-husband Roger Vadim, resulting in mod/sci-fi Barbarella. Of the films for which info is available (again, via IMBd), we know that: in 1973, five years after Barbarella put her on the map, she was paid $100,000 for post-hippie comedy Steelyard Blues, for Neil Simon-penned California Suite in 1978 she made $500,000, and then $2 million for 1980’s (and eventual Broadway show) Nine to Five.

All of these figures beg the question of total compensation, of course. For nearly as long as there has been a film industry actors have been enticed into making a film in exchange for a simple participation in the net profits. And more recently, an even more exclusive club than the $20 million dollar club has emerged: the first-dollar-gross club, made up of actors who are paid not a percentage of profits, but a percentage of revenue received from exhibitors. Leonardo DiCaprio got that for Matrix-come-lately Inception, which earned DiCaprio the respectable (reputed) amount of $50 million, which, at the prime rate or 3.25%, would provide, around $1.75 million per year.

Please note that the description of the ways that actors get paid is a deliberate simplification for the purposes of clarity. If understanding how it actually works is something you’d like to spend an afternoon doing, start here.

So then, four different actors, spaced relatively evenly over 70 years apart: who made/makes more? Below are the referenced film/salaries, adjusted to reflect 2011 dollars (using the Bureau of Labor Statistics invaluable consumer price index calculator).

WILLIAM POWELL

Interference (1928): $68,890.88
The Thin Man (1934): $50,719.03 per week
My Man Godfrey (1936): $1,426,092.63

MARILYN MONROE

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953): $10,606.04
Bus Stop (1956): $832,886.03
The Misfits (1961): $1,894,188.96

WILLIAM HOLDEN

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957): $8,062,099.64

ELIZABETH TAYLOR

Cleopatra (1963): $7,403,431.37

JANE FONDA

Steelyard Blues (1973): $510,236.49
California Suite (1978): $1,737,308.28
Nine to Five (1980): $5,498,665.05

BRAD PITT

Kalifornia (1993): $807,359.23
Fight Club (1999): $23,796,743.70
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005): $23,199,692.78

LEONARDO DICAPRIO

Inception (2011): $50,000,000

What have we learned from all of these numbers? It seems to be a pretty clear progression (given the meager sample size)—generally speaking, in 2011 dollars, actors have been getting paid more and more over time. To wit, Pitt as Tyler Durden made exactly 200 times as much as Powell did as Godfrey, although that multiplier is reduced to a little under 17 when you adjust for inflation. In fact, if you ignore the little bumps from Holden and Taylor (both of whom were paid the most ever, at the time), it seems like a steady increase until you get to the present day, when compensation is looking for the proverbial roof to shoot through. And of course we're talking about the highest end of the business. Screen Actors Guild minimum scale has been raised pretty much in line with inflation, and is currently set at a comfortable-but-not-exorbitant $2,864 a week, which is not exactly a boatload of money, especially considering the seasonal nature of an actor’s employment.

To get paid what William Powell got paid would provide for a nice little existence. But to be paid what Leonardo gets paid? It must be literally beyond imagination. (Speaking of which, no, I still haven’t watched all of Inception.)

Brent Cox is all over the Internet.

Photo of Pitt by Joe Seer, via Shutterstock.

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But anyway!

Mmm hmm.

The award for most jaw-dropping quote in the piece goes to... Judd Apatow! "The reality is, I'm a dude and I understand the dude thing, so I lean men just the way Spike Lee leans African-American." Please tell me someone has Spike Lee on the phone right now.

My only beef with the discussion of the film comedies with women is that it underplays the significance of Easy A, which at least gets a mention, but it should be remembered that it's done $75 million globally, and, despite some conventionality, still passes the Bechdel test and was also about a girl becoming the school slut.

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Pirates of the Caribbean, even more than Harry Potter, which you know, is a long multi-volume yarn about growing up and wrestling with the demons of our parents, rests on the inherent magic of formula and familiarity: there's nothing more soothing than old friends, back again. It's why people used to read books that weren't Harry Potter that had recurring characters! (Or at least why they used to read the Narnia books; now you can watch the increasingly more terrible movies—an extremely pure example of the evil of franchisedom, where each movie must continue to exist for its payday and yet should never have been made at all.) A franchise in general is good business, it's good psychology and it's good marketing. It's certainly a deeper draw than 3D, which, Jesus, let the 3D stop now.

And that the Internet is literally aflame today with the news that Anne Hathaway and Tom Hardy signed on for the next Batman movie, Christopher Nolan's third/last of that franchise, truly shows our deep devotion to running stories. (I mean, you knew this: among the top five films in the 2010 box office: Toy Story 3, Iron Man 2, Twilight: Eclipse. Poor Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1 came in at #6.) And there's a weird line down the middle of these franchises: some are fantastic (I mean, there is nothing wrong with Iron Man) and some are garbage. That's why Christopher Nolan isn't necessarily just big-budget-whoring with the Batman films, although there's questions about what Nolan is doing in general, to be sure, but: he's trying to make real movies about a man who fights crime.

What's going on though, what's a little unnerving about the whole thing, is that all this success means the hunt has been on, and hard, for future franchises. That means we live in a world where Peter Berg is directing a $200-million budget film, starring Rihanna, based on the game Battleship. (Her acting debut!) It is called Battleship! ("OMG, like, Rihanna, you sunk my battleship!) Also there are film versions coming of games including: Risk, Asteroids, Missile Command and oh so many more. They are all trials for franchisedom. That is what the shit-pile that is the Transformers franchise has brought to the entertainment industry.

That being said, The Green Hornet: Too Fast Too Furious is going to be kind of awesome though. I will attend its sequel! Jay Chou needs to get famous in America, he is awesome. Maybe America is ready for a three-film series of The Atom?

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Also Kate Hudson is doubling up this year, playing a hussy whose wedding blows up or something in Something Borrowed, which is the latest iteration of the "brides at war" chick flick, which, that is a genre I do not do, due to blatant sexism. It's just gross.

But, but, but, we're about to be assaulted by No Strings Attached, formerly known as Fuckbuddies, then known as Friends with Benefits, now not known as such, because that is the name of the now summer-slated Justin Timberlake vehicle about how Mila Kunis is a slut. (But that one's directed by the director of Easy A, which everyone loved, so!) And we were just assaulted by Love and Other Drugs, which at least is about a loose woman with Parkinson's.

The one film that sounds the stupidest is actually the one I'm taking the most seriously: What's Your Number? is a dumb-sounding film about how a woman has slept with twenty guys and is like, that is too many, one of them must have been Mr. Right!, which, LOL, but? The woman in question is played by Anna Feris, so, see you there, sluts.

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No expense has been spared, naturally; Warner Brothers has seen $5.7 billion out of these movies in theatrical revenue, so far. The visual imagination of director David Yates (he has helmed Harry Potter 5 through 8) is kind of pedestrian but there are some lovely set pieces, notably an animated vignette that is just so beautiful and interesting. The movie was bound to be entertaining, a spectacle, provided you don’t look too closely at what’s being said.

The multitude of sins committed in Rowling’s imaginative but horrible story can be roughly divided into three classes: ethical or pedagogical, literary and political.

Some years ago I was driving a carful of kids to some practice or party, and from the crowded back seat I heard one breathlessly ask the others, “When you were little,” (they were maybe twelve at the time), “did you think you were going to get a letter from Hogwarts?”

Giggles arose in the car, some lofty and some sounding a little embarrassed; a couple of the kids admitted that they had in fact fantasized about receiving such an invitation. (When you are chosen to attend Hogwarts, the public school for wizards attended by Harry Potter, an owl shows up with a letter informing you that you are one of the lucky ones.) This concept of “chosenness” has always put me off the Potter books because it seems so harmful for kids, even though I am a lifelong SF/fantasy fan (a genre where this crops up frequently, to be sure).

In the world of Harry Potter, rules are for the little people. The “wisest” adult, headmaster Albus Dumbledore, showers magical gifts and indulgences on his favorites and lets them break every rule because they are so special, better than all others. How come they are so much better? Well, the general awesomeness and favoriteness of Harry Potter and his friends is mostly arbitrary, the result of the chosenness itself, rather than of effort or application. Harry Potter is just naturally fantastic at flying around on a broom and conjuring illuminated stags up out of his soul and things, Hermione Granger is just naturally the most brilliant student Hogwarts has ever seen, and so on. Ron Weasley, the impoverished aristocrat, is a Sancho Panza-like figure whose rough common sense is meant to keep Harry on the straight and narrow; his noble blood is his “chosen” quality, and marks him, too, as an unimpeachable Establishment figure.

Which brings us to the disconnect between reality and appearances regarding the nonconformity that Rowling so hamfistedly praises at every turn. Harry Potter and his friends, far from being renegades, are in fact slavishly obedient to the all-powerful, omniscient, do-no-wrong Dumbledore. And why not, when he provides them in advance with every rare and fabulous magical gewgaw and hint they will ever need in order to extricate themselves from whatever peril they may find themselves in.

Rowling’s adherence to the old English principle of blood-nobility—that weird but deeply held superstition that has caused countless English protagonists to discover that unbeknownst to them, they were peers of the realm all along—is in stark contrast to the biggest conflict depicted in the Potter stories, the blood purity conflict. The bad guys, Voldemort and crew, are race purists, anti-Muggle (meaning anti-human), which is to say that they are against any magical Muggles or intermingling of Muggle blood (“Mudblood”) and wizard blood. Yet Rowling’s heroes are all noblemen, with the exception of one: Harry Potter learns in the old-fashioned surprise way that his father was a fabulously rich wizard, and his godfather is a rich aristocrat, too; Ron Weasley is a nobleman of the purest blood, though poor. The sole pure-Muggle wizard of any consequence at all in these books is Hermione, the author’s personal projection of herself (there are two other minor pure-Muggle wizards, boys, both of whom are bumped off). So this story can be read pretty effectively as an explanation of why J.K. Rowling should be allowed to hang around with the nobility (she is smart, is why).

Maybe, incidentally, the reason no other woman as smart as Hermione appears in the books is that J.K. Rowling, like the Turk, can bear no sister near the throne. Her volcanic ego burns down everything in its path. Where the Twilight books are works produced from and for a state of sexual yearning and frustration, Rowling’s “wizarding world” is a fantasy place created for the benefit of Hermione Granger, for her infinite sagacity, foresightedness and teacher’s-pet-hood to be rewarded at every turn.

In any case it is a horrible thing to be teaching children, that you have to be “chosen”; that the highest places in this world are gained by celestial fiat, rather than by working out how to get there yourself and then busting tail until you succeed. If the “special” and “chosen” and “gifted” automatically receive all the honors there are, then what would be the point of working hard to achieve anything? So it is really terrible to hear these twelve-year-old kids so smitten with the idea that fulfillment would literally fly to them out of the sky, via owl.

Rowling is a self-avowed liberal who gave a million pounds to the Labour Party in 2008, but her values are Tory through and through. In her books it is the hoary old white guys who run everything; women are popped in here and there for liberal flavor. The tokenism is unbelievable.

Rowling named her first child after Jessica Mitford, the lefty Mitford sister (as opposed to the Nazi-sympathizing ones). Rowling often says she read Mitford’s Hons and Rebels at age fourteen, and that it affected her profoundly; this book in fact provides a perfect illustration of Rowling’s political disconnect, because Jessica Mitford was the daughter of the second Baron Redesdale, a “terrific Hon," as the Mitfords would have said. She was a super-blue-blood with rebelliously liberal views. It’s exactly this privileged, elitist compassion-from-on-high that Rowling admires and has consistently depicted in the Potter books. But the liberal values, the openmindedness, the diversity, are all fake.

I am no fan of Ann Althouse, but I had to admit to a shudder of recognition when I read her criticism of liberals last week:

What is liberal about this attitude toward other people? You wallow in self-love, and what is it you love yourself for? For wanting to shower benefits on people... that you have nothing but contempt for.

This may not be such a very good description of liberals in general but it is an excellent description of J.K. Rowling. In the “touching” climactic scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the house-elf Dobby has been “liberated” by, and now sacrifices himself to save, Harry Potter & co. The house-elves as depicted in the movies are horrifyingly pathetic, small, cringing, grateful; the sad, brave little creature Dobby literally expires with the name of Harry Potter on his lips. It’s like freedom is the gift of the chosen ones to bestow, and those thus benefited can die of gratitude and be “properly buried," which really, there is this long burial scene complete with Harry Potter and shovel. It’s a perfect illustration of the “liberal condescension” that conservatives are always yodeling about, and it made my hair stand on end.

So don’t think about that! Think instead of the strapping young buck Rupert Grint, a fine young actor who manages to rise above the tawdry, maudlin script, or even more, of Helena Bonham-Carter as the queen of the goths, Bellatrix Lestrange, whose gorgeous performance had me totally rooting for the bad guys, as usual. She’s always got a magic wand or a knife at someone’s throat, that girl. Alan Rickman as Severus Snape, too, is as seductive as ever. Just to hear his voice for me is easily worth the price of a movie ticket; really he could read the phone book aloud, for all I care.

The most conservative element of Harry Potter’s world is that it is a materialist paradise, full of costly and rare magical artifacts, invisibility cloaks and piles of “wizard gold” at Gringott’s Bank. Things, that you can make toys out of, things that you can worship and desire and buy. There’s nothing in this story of alleged iconoclasts and rebels that would present the slightest challenge to the establishment. That’s why the story dovetails so easily into a series of Hollywood blockbusters.

The Rowling story of the Single Welfare Mom Who Made Good is not exactly accurate, either; her background is solidly middle class, her dad was a Rolls-Royce engineer, she read French and classics at Exeter, and the father of her first child (whom she divorced, rather than the other way around) was a Portuguese TV personality.

So this good liberal’s face is absolutely the face of the corpocracy. The number of lawsuits brought all over the world by Rowling and Warner Brothers against practically anybody who would dare to slap the Potter moniker on so much as a work of fanfic would curl your hair. Well, finally she allowed this one guy to write a fanfic novel, after having threatened to sue, perhaps because she knew she wouldn’t have won. If it were up to J.K. Rowling, I think Jean Rhys would have been thrown in jail for daring to write Wide Sargasso Sea. Which is fanfic, too, come to that.

In the best-known and most terrible of these lawsuits, the proud liberal Rowling saw fit to sue a fan who’d devoted years of his life to making an online encyclopedia about her books. I don’t believe I’ll ever cry again over the plight of an alleged copyright violator but you never know, I guess. Steve Vander Ark wept openly himself when he testified at the trial, and even though Rowling personally sued him, he later wrote on the blog part of the Harry Potter Lexicon—just like a house-elf!—that he was “still Jo’s man, through and through.” It just breaks your heart, the integrity and gentleness of this man, the love he bears these wretched books, the way he was so wrongly disgraced. A shorter version of Vander Ark’s book finally did see the light of day, in 2009.

On the literary side, suffice it to say that Rowling is ferociously dull and long-winded, that there is no suspense, that she kills people off (nobody Chosen, though) simply in order to show how serious things have become; magical artifacts are produced, used once for the specific purpose for which they were invented and then never seen again; the bad guys, whose actual aims are hopelessly opaque, have got the immemorial bad-guy cluelessness regarding the element of surprise, they let one opportunity after another to bump off our heroes slip past them, etc. Christopher Hitchens’s 2007 review in the New York Times is generous, but pretty searing, too. ("The repeated tactic of deus ex machina (without a deus) has a deplorable effect on both the plot and the dialogue. The need for Rowling to play catch-up with her many convolutions infects her characters as well.")

Anybody should write whatever he or she pleases, of course, and there’s no doubt that Rowling did something right in creating her fictional world of Quidditch and faux-Latin magical incantations, if only because so many people love it so dearly. But if you have a young Harry Potter fan in your orbit, you might steer him or her toward Philip Pullman, whose Dark Materials trilogy is genuine in every way that Harry Potter is false; a fully realized work of fantasy to rival Tolkien in its wisdom, inventiveness and questioning. Because Pullman’s novels really do threaten the establishment view of religion and institutionalized coercion, because they are really subversive in the manner in which Harry Potter pretends to be, the Hollywood establishment chickened out completely and made a perfect hash of the first Pullman movie. Tom Stoppard, who’d adapted the original screenplay, was dumped by director Chris Weitz (of American Pie fame), who preferred to write his own. Hollywood is, unfortunately, an absolute tool of the corpocracy, and will never be equal to any story that presents a legitimate threat to conventionality or to materialist values.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

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