Slumdog Millionaire cost $15 million to make and so far has grossed $343.5 million (along with winning 8 Oscars). Yet, one of the child stars, specifically one of the two that totally make the movie lived until yesterday in a tarp covered hovel along side a sewer drain. Now that abode has been torn down and he lives nowhere.
So I got questions. Did the production company pay the boy's family but they spent the money on something else? Did someone in India bamboozle the family out of their money? Did the production company actually not pay these kids any substantive amount of scratch?
You know me, I get upset about the NCAA letting schools and coaches make $$ without cutting the performers ("student-atheletes") in on the take, so this is kind of bugging me. Sure maybe the kids or their parents signed a waiver or took what was offered, but as I indicated in the title, this just ain't right.
So now you know, Angus is some kind of crazy socialist!
5 comments:
This is the movie industry. They love screwing actors out of money, its practically their raison d'etre.
Consider this story: David Prowse, the guy who played Darth Vader, was entitled to a percentage of the box office from Return of the Jedi. To this day he hasn't seen a dime because they claim the movie never turned a profit. That's right: the fifth biggest movie in history in terms of box office never made a profit.
I'm too lazy to investigate, but I have a vision of how this came to be: There was a "contract," see? It was ... 68 pages. (The English version, that is.) It was dense legalese, unreadable by any normal human. Somewhere in the middle -- about page 38 -- there is flowery, elegant language that translates to regular language as "We, the moviemakers, don't owe you squat." In our society, a block of paper like that is taken to be a "meeting of minds, testement to a mutual understanding."
So, now you know, the Piper is some kind of anarchist.
yeah Tom, that's what I think happened too. The family probably signed a waiver. I am just nutty enough to think that, in the karmic sense if not the legal sense, they "owe" that kid a place to sleep at night and an education.
Of course, it's not impossible that the family was decently compensated and they are making a grab for more.
Well, I guess I don't feel quite as bad about having bought the $2 bootlegged DVD from a local Indian grocer. I just wanted to see it and didn't want to go to the theater. Suddenly I'm not so anxious to pay my reparations by buying the real thing.
Angus, you hit upon a pet peeve of mine. Wanting the government to take money from other people and give it to the kid is socialism. Giving your own money to the kid is charity. Complaining because the world is not how you want it is called "web 2.0".
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