How much would Manny Ramirez make as a movie star?
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You can’t open up a sports section or read a sports blog without being bombarded by story after story about Manny Ramirez’s tumultuous contract negotiations with the Los Angeles Dodgers. The whole affair has an air of melodrama, punctuated with more bitter recriminations, wounded egos, sarcastic charges and thinly veiled threats than a Middle East peace conference.
But from my perch, as a sports fan who spends his time covering Hollywood, what I find most fascinating is the astounding public nature of the negotiations, with the most intricate financial details all out in open and being broadcast and reported on daily.
As any casual fan now knows, the Dodgers have offered Ramirez a two-year, $45-million deal with an opt-out clause that Ramirez could exercise at the end of the first year. Scott Boras, Ramirez’s sports agent who represents a huge cache of top baseball talent, has rejected the Dodgers’ proposal, largely on the grounds that most of the salary was deferred, with most of the payments being spread out over five years, beginning with a $10-million payment this coming season.
This is decidedly not the way negotiations work in Hollywood. With rare exception, they are conducted totally in private and veiled in secrecy, with most actor salary details filtering out to the showbiz press long after the deal is done and often long after the film has concluded shooting. Sports fans all know how much C.C. Sabathia was paid to sign a long-term deal with the Yankees, how much Kobe Bryant makes with the Lakers or, for that matter, how much David Beckham earned with the Los Angeles Galaxy. But in Hollywood, star salaries are rarely of household fascination. For all the insider talk about movie box office and Oscar campaigns, the average fan (and not someone who reads Forbes or Fortune) has little knowledge -- and even more important, little interest -- in how much money Robert Downey Jr. made for ‘Iron Man’ or how much Ben Stiller will get for ‘Night at the Museum 2’ this summer.
Last week, for example, Sony announced it would make ‘The B Team,’ an action comedy that would star Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg as cops woefully unprepared for real action. Variety, the leading showbiz trade paper, made the announcement of the deal. But there was no mention of any film budget or star salaries, much less any of the Sturm und Drang that occurred during the negotiations, which involved a number of other studios. If it had been Scott Boras up against Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, we would’ve been treated to a daily string of breathless stories, recounting the ups and downs of the negotiations, with headlines like ‘Will Ferrell ‘B-Team’ Deal Goes Sour: Sony’s Amy Pascal Rejects Latest Offer From Endeavor’s Ari Emanuel.’
Why is Hollywood dealmaking so much more cloistered than baseball contract negotiations? Part of it is to because of historical precedent, part of it is because of studio culture. The two worlds revolve around superstar talent, yet the customs are totally different. Here’s a few possible explanations. Keep reading:
Hollywood has always been an insider’s business. It’s much more closed and contained -- perhaps the best word would be parochial -- than the sports world. In some situations, an outsider -- like me -- can pierce the veil and extract information, as I did in the case of ‘The B Team’ negotiations, but only because there was a bidding war for the Will Ferrell pitch between a number of studios, so there were several studios for me to call that, having lost out on the pitch, had their own motives to share salary and budget details. Most of the time, inside financial information is stashed out of sight.
When I recently asked a studio marketing executive about a big-star signing his studio had made, he pleaded ignorance, saying, ‘At our place, our business affairs guys are so secretive that they often won’t even tell me what the numbers are -- you need a pretty damn good reason to get the numbers out of them.’ Baseball, on the other hand, has always been about numbers. Statistics are how you measure a player’s worth, so another set of numbers -- a player’s salary -- have taken on a greater weight in recent years as a way of tracking a player’s value versus their performance.
The two businesses also have a very different history. In baseball, salaries were a pittance until the 1970s, when players were allowed to exercise free agency. Free agency also eventually led to arbitration, where salary numbers were openly bandied about, with the team offering one salary, the player offering another, with an arbiter making a very public final judgment. The more cynical members of the sports-writing profession suspect that the baseball owners are actually often eager to disseminate salary information as a counterweight to powerful sports agents like Boras, who regularly drive up free-agent salaries by exploiting a team’s fear that they could be out-bid by a rival team, even when it often turns out that there was little or no rival team interest.
In other words, the team owners want the salary figures out in the open so they don’t end up bidding against themselves. During the Manny Meltdown, the Dodgers even issued a news release sarcastically referring to Boras’ repeated claims that he was fielding other serious offers for Ramirez’s services, saying: ‘When his agent finds those ‘serious offers’ from other clubs, we’ll be happy to restart the negotiations.’
Hollywood has its share of aggressive, high-profile agents, but they almost never negotiate in public the way Boras has with a number of top players. They are content with the knowledge that if they propel a star to a new, higher salary figure -- known in the industry as the star’s ‘quote’ -- word will get around fast enough within the showbiz community. The studios certainly have no interest in boasting about their salary deals. In fact, when then-Sony chief Mark Canton paid Jim Carrey $20 million to star in 1996’s ‘The Cable Guy,’ the first $20 million deal of its kind, he was roundly pilloried by rival executives for being willing to shell out so much money as well as for being a party to the information becoming public.
‘There’s a long tradition to this secrecy,’ says Joe Roth, a former studio chief who’s now the majority owner of the new Seattle Sounders major league soccer team. ‘If you look at the people who started Hollywood -- whether it was [Jesse] Lasky or Louis B. Mayer or Harry Cohn -- they were tough customers. They didn’t want anyone to know their business. And that attitude obviously carried over to the modern era. Can you imagine what would’ve happened when Lew Wasserman was running Universal if an agent had publicly bragged about how much he’d gotten a star for a new movie? That would’ve been the last deal that agent ever bragged about.’
There is also a very different level of fan interest in Hollywood than in baseball. As a Dodger fan, you want to know who’s going to be on the team. That doesn’t apply to movies. Fans really don’t care what studio is signing Will Smith to a new deal -- they care about the movie, not the deal. It’s inherently more interesting to watch the Dodgers put together a team of players than it is to follow a studio signing actors who’ll perform in a slate of new films. As one studio chief (who, being part of that cloistered Hollywood world, wasn’t willing to be quoted by name) put it: ‘Here’s the real difference: We don’t have any season ticket holders. We’ve got to go out and sell tickets for every game -- or movie -- so our salary issues are far less interesting to the average moviegoer.’
There’s another subtle difference between the two businesses. With rare exception, baseball players follow the money, taking the best available financial deal, even if that means leaving the team that drafted them out of college or the city where their family had put down roots. Movie stars don’t just follow the money -- they go to the studio that has the script that will make the best movie. So their decision is more complicated. Team Warners can offer them all the money in the world, but if Team Fox has the most enticing script, it immediately gets a leg up in any negotiation.
For a business that can seem so dysfunctional in so many ways, Hollywood has a far healthier way of handling its business dealings than baseball or most sports. The public is allowed to obsess about where the stars have lunch or go to shop, they can even ritually follow how much films make each weekend at the box office. But when it comes to the seamy inside scoop on vitriolic contract negotiations, it’s Hollywood, not major league baseball, that has the stiff upper lip.
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