Explain the Wahberg/Williams pay gap controversy.

Cafe Society
21

Isn’t that kinda moot? I’m not a tax expert, but ISTM you’re not saving money [on taxes] by donating money since you don’t have the money anymore. That is to say, yes, he won’t pay the taxes on the 1.5m, but he also won’t have the 1.5m. From a financial POV, he’d better off keeping the money, paying the taxes and still having a million, or whatever is leftover after. In this case, he has nothing.

It’s like when you mention that the lottery is up to 10 million dollars. Someone will always say ‘yeah, but after taxes it’s only like 7 million’ and all I can think is ‘what an odd thing to say, if you can’t have 10 million dollars you’d rather have 0 than 7 million?’.

22

I’m pretty sure the $80 was not scale but per diem.

23

Per diem literally means per day. It’s usually used to refer, not to salary, but to an extra given to cover expenses. If someone’s expenses are covered, it can be either as direct reimbursement for a pile of tickets or as a fixed amount per day.

If the scale pay is $80/day, that’s USD80 per diem literally.

If you think the $80/day was not meant to be salary but to cover expenses, I’d like some reason for it other than your left elbow, as I see no reason to believe it over mine.

24

From The New York Times, “The film’s female star, Michelle Williams, was paid a per diem of $80, a bit above the union minimum, for 10 days of added work.”

I believe she also gave up her Thanksgiving holiday with her daughter for the reshoots. (It’s a minor thing, but it demonstrates what she was willing to give up for the movie.)

And a big reason that there was such time pressure is that an FX series scheduled to air in March is about the same kidnapping story. (Plus I assume they wanted to release the movie before the end of the year so it was eligible for the Academy Awards.)

25

I think the controversy makes sense and is relevant when placed in the larger picture. Nobody is debating that there is a pay gap in Hollywood - plenty of examples exist where actors/actresses are roughly equal in role, talent, etc and the woman is paid much lower than the man.

For Wahlberg/Williams particularly, the relevant points for me are:

  • That’s a pretty big gap. It would be one thing if Williams got $1 million for the reshoot and Wahlberg got $1.5 million. Essentially nothing to $1.5 million is significant. A star as big as Williams being paid what the extras are being paid is absolutely significant.

  • why did Williams’ agent NOT negotiate a reshot fee and/or co-star approval in her contract? As others have pointed out, they share an agency. What’s going on that Wahlberg’s agent thought to add this to the contract and Williams’ didn’t?

  • If all this was a one-off and the pay gap didn’t exist, I’d just be writing it off as Williams is a shitty negotiator. Putting it in the larger perspective, I see it as more evidence that women’s work is not valued as high as men’s.

So yeah, overall I see it as newsworthy and relevant.

26

I think your main point is correct about a value gap but no actor is paid based on role or talent. The main factor in their pay is their perceived box office value, followed by how well they are represented. Why Mark Wahlberg is worth even a nickel is beyond me, but this incident is simply cherry picking two actors, one who happens to be a man and the other a woman. You can find this same pay disparity between two men or two women all over Hollywood.

27

There seem to be two ways to make big money in Hollywood, either be able to draw a large audience or be a good self-promoter.

Nicole Kidman, for example, I don’t know that she ever made any movie that people wanted to see because she was in it. And yet, somehow, she is a name that people know and has had steady work in the industry for 20+ years. And, I suspect, she earned herself some decent salaries by simple process of being a ruthless negotiator at every step in the process. I assume that she has an agent, but most likely the agent just fields phonecalls and idiots. The real heart of the engine is Kidman herself.

Amy Adams, people want to go watch her films. They trust that she’ll have picked a decent script that, even if serious or dark, still does it in a classy way.

Michelle Williams, I’ve never heard of. It doesn’t sound like she’s put up much of a fight to see to it that she’s getting well-paid.

Wahlberg didn’t get a payout because his agents care about him more than they cared about others, it’s probably just because Wahlberg is a dick, didn’t care about Kevin Spacey one way or the other, and knew that he had the studio over the barrel. He knew that he could get the extra money, so he got the extra money. That’s just how his mind works.

An agent isn’t going to be able to make a decision like that. What if they decide to play tough and ruin Wahlberg’s reputation, get him written out of the script, or otherwise screw him over by trying to play hardball with the studios? That won’t fly for a business. It has to be Wahlberg himself making the decisions.

So, really, this is a matter that Wahlberg cared more about his finances than he cared about what Kevin Spacey did. That’s not admirable, but it tells us more about Mark Wahlberg than it does about the studios or the agency.

28

So you’re saying you don’t find the well-documented and rampant gender pay gap in Hollywood as anything more than box-office value and representation?

29

No, I’m saying that’s not the case with Wahlberg and Williams and the reshoot pay. If you look at the regular pay they receive for their parts you’re likely to see some evidence of that.

30

I’ve never heard of Michelle Williams until today. Marky Mark has been a huge star for going on 30 years now. Whether he’s an asshole or not (and he totally is) doesn’t seem to be relevant. He sells a lot of tickets. In addition, both actors got what they asked for. I’m not seeing the issue here.

Lesson learned for Williams, I guess. Big budget motion pictures aren’t charities. I’m a nobody and even I wouldn’t “donate” my time to a movie, so why would a professional actor? That’s what really confuses me.

31

She was poorly represented. It’s reasonable for actors to do post-production work at a low rate or for free, some might say it’s part of what they’ve been paid for already, although most don’t see it that way anymore because this is not the first case where someone used contractual leverage to get a better deal. Williams’ agents are at fault here, but it’s a case of poor representation, not gender discrimination.

If you dig down deeper, you’ll find that Hollywood is based on an old boys system, women in general are denied opportunities, especially the opportunity to become top paid stars, to produce and direct, and to create the same kind of value for themselves that men can more readily.

But in general I think it is a poor example to compare the paychecks of millionaires. This problem is far far worse at the lowest level, for the lowest paid people in all industries.

32

She’s not a household name to the casual movie fan (and she undoubtedly doesn’t have the box office power that Wahlberg does), but she’s by no means a nobody in Hollywood.

Williams has been nominated for four Oscars, including “Manchester by the Sea” last year, and “Brokeback Mountain.” She won a Golden Globe for “My Week With Marilyn” in 2011. When she was younger, she was one of the leads in the TV series “Dawson’s Creek.”

That said, she might have been most visible to the public as Heath Ledger’s girlfriend (and mother of his daughter), particularly just after his sudden death.

33

I think Wahlberg screwed up on this. Yes, he was able to get his $1,500,000. But he did it by effectively holding a production hostage. The studio paid him rather than waste all the money that had already been spent on the movie.

But I’m sure studios remember things like this. They’re going to think about this the next time they’re starting a production and casting the lead. Do they want to risk Wahlberg doing something like this to them again? So Tom Cruise or Matt Damon or Will Smith gets the lead instead.

34

Exactly. There are people that are trying to deny any institutional sexism exists. “It’s just an actor taking advantage of the opportunities that were available to him. An actress would do the same thing.”

Yes, that’s true. But the fact that opportunities are available to actors that aren’t available to actresses is pretty much the definition of institutional sexism.

35

Risk what? Paying actors for their time, recognition and skills? This is literally what every studio does every time they film a movie.

I’m not an actor, but if a project I worked on and thought was finished comes back up later and needs more work done through no fault of mine, I expect my employer to pay me for it. I don’t work for free just because somebody else screwed up. I doubt it is any different in Hollywood. I really don’t know what Miss Williams was thinking here.

36

Okay, you’ve established you’re going to take all the money you can get and if an opportunity comes up for you to get more money, you’ll take it.

Now, I’m the employer. I can hire you or I can hire somebody else who’ll agree to one flat fee for the entire project, even if unforeseen circumstances come up.

It’s in your best self-interest to take any additional money from your employer if you have an opportunity to do it. It’s in my best self-interest not to hire a person who will be looking for opportunities to take additional money from me.

The studios are going to treat Wahlberg with the same attitude he’s treated them.

37

I’m not in the industry, but my first thought when I read the above is “I thought the union/scale minimum was HUNDREDS of dollars a day, not TENS of dollars”. A quick web search shows that the SAG minimum is $933 per day or $3,239 per week. So, if Williams did agree to “help out”, perhaps she waived her pay and only accepted some sort of per diem expense amount. Seems foolish to me, but everyone has their own motivations, as well as negotiation skills.

38

Given that half of Hollywood is in or needs to be in rehab, I suspect that having to deal with someone that actually has an eye on the business is not at the top of their annoyance list. Nor is a businessman likely to look down all that hard on someone else for acting like a businessman. All Wahlberg has to say is that he has other commitments. He could be reshooting film for no money, all because the studio did some dumbass thing wrong, or he could be out making $100k an hour doing commercials for sports cars in Japan. Why would he commit to reshoots at some unknown date, for some unknown duration, when he doesn’t know what all else might be available for him to be doing - and raking it in - at the same time? And now that he does know when the reshoots are going to happen, why wouldn’t the studio have to be competitively priced with the other things that he could be doing that week?

That’s not being a problem child. That’s just the math of someone who understands that time is money.

39

Because like you say, these guys are businessmen. They’ll hire people with drug problems or with histories of child molesting or hate crimes as long as they can sell tickets. Your past gets exposed and people stay away from your movies? You’re fired and we reshoot your scenes.

It’s always a money issue. If you get one guy who will work for $100,000 and another guy who will work for $1,000,000 you hire the cheaper guy. It doesn’t matter if both of them are worth a million and the first guy just has low self-esteem. You exploit his lack of awareness over his true worth. You might respect the second guy more for knowing how business works but you hire the cheap guy who doesn’t. That’s how business; you do what’s best for your business, not what’s best for other people’s businesses.

40

I don’t understand how asking to be paid for your time is the same as “taking all the money you can” or taking advantage of anyone in any way. But I’m not very familiar with how Hollywood works. Maybe big name actors are donating their time left and right and Wahlberg is being an unusually huge dick about it.

What am I missing here? Are the producers donating all the film’s profits to sexual assault victims or something? Why is there an expectation that anyone work for free on this particular project?