TOS was made in the 60s when residuals for TV shows were limited to only about 6 repeats.
No. But could he do comedies? Yes.
He’s turned into a pretty good comedic actor. I wouldn’t have guessed he had it in him when he started on Buffy.
He was the worst of the three. Watch any of the old westerns in which he appeared. Oh, man, talk about stiff. :smack:
Hey, I LIKED “Down Periscope.”
I heard somebody did.
That fellow who played that redshirt in engineering on ENT, Ensign Rivers, is doing fairly well for himself.
There is a distinction between royalties and residuals, but it’s not exactly this. Royalties are paid to someone who owns intellectual property, whether patent, copyright, or trademark. An actor doesn’t own IP rights his or her performance – actors’ compensation is an employment issue and is decided through a contractual arrangement. “Residual” is just a term for one side of the compensation (You get “X” now and “Plus Y” for each of Z reruns. After that you get nothing.) . It’s not really equivalent to royalties.
There’s no basis for comparison here. For the television show, they were ordinary TV actors who probably got paid according to the union scale, which I believe doesn’t guarantee much in the way of residuals for non-starring cast. Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley’s compensation structure would have been far different from that of Doohan, Koenig, Takei, etc. By movie time, Doohan and the rest had the clout to negotiate much better deals – they didn’t have to settle for union scale.
Very few actors, even those who appeared as regulars on a hit TV series, could effectively retire on their salary and residuals. A very select few gets to negotiate sweet deals like that.
I think Audrey Meadows could (or nearly so). In fact, she made out like a bandit after her lawyer brothers (nether of whom specialized in contract or entertainment law) put a residuals clause in her contract which the Honeymooners producers readily agreed to since the idea of serious profits from rerunning an episode was unheard of.
Or so the legend goes.
Sweet deals like what? Kelsey Grammar? Yeah, I know.
But I’ve heard $100K/episode isn’t unheard of for a popular show. If you’re on a seven-year Star Trek run, that’s 168 episodes and $1.68 million dollars. Plus residuals, rentals, DVD sales.
I’m not saying you’d be filthy rich. But if you handled your money somewhat conservatively, you wouldn’t necessarily be struggling to get by month to month.
Well, agents take 10%, taxes a lot more. The real cash cow in being a former Trek actor is personal appearances, if you’re willing to subject yourself to weekends of geeks (or geek-ends, as I call them). If you can stomach being subjected to the same nerdly questions over and over, you can do pretty well. The key is not to get a reputation as being “difficult.”
Oops. That’s $16.8 million, isn’t it? :rolleyes:
Speaking of conventions, Doohan was by far the king of the circuit in the 80s and 90s. For a few years he was doing 45-50 weekends per year (depending if there was a Trek film underway, or if he had other film/TV work). I always figured he probably got air fare, lodging, meals and a couple thousand dollar fee each, maybe more for the HUGE cons.
So, maybe 80K per year and free food to talk to/sign autographs for fans. Not bad, really.
Sir Rhosis
Not bad? You do realize that you are talking about Star Trek fans don’t you?