"Xyz has bought a car!" That was my brother wondering, just around the time India's economy opened up. The economy had nothing to do with Xyx, but owning a car was a big deal in those days. My brother, after having slogged for a few years to get to a respectable qualification couldn't come to terms with a cinema comedian buying a car.
Photo by Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash
A century ago, performing artists have to perform regularly to earn a living. Two technological inventions made a huge difference in the lives of performing artists - Faster transportation and more importantly the invention called cinema and its offsprings like Television. Before cinema became pervasive, actors, dancers, and singers moved around in trains and cars, could earn a better living than their ancestors. With the invention of cinema, a movie is produced once, distributed many times, and earns revenue even long after the death of those creative people who created it. That's when the disproportionate remuneration for actors started.
The real reason why a product can generate so much wealth is the technology's ability to distribute it far and wide corners of the world. Neither the writers nor the actors can claim ownership of such a success. It is those nameless scientists, engineers, technical people who made it possible for even a useless piece of creative work to be distributed across the world. Such a thankless job.
Equating them to the pirates of software, music, and movies is a stretch of the imagination, but not too much.
Unlike an entrepreneur, these actors don't invest in a movie to have their skin in the game. They take a salary, disproportional to the effort or the talent, however good it may be. When the movie fails to earn a profit, the fall guy is the one who invested in it, not the actor. This is ethically wrong.
Such an accumulation of wealth by an incapable person often shows up. We've seen actors and musicians who lost all their money in a matter of decades and ended up in the streets. Setting aside the fall of individuals, this model of economy can bring down the whole industry. It does not happen as often as it should, because of the same technology.
Various regional cinema industries have faced near collapse and figured out a way to rationalize the salaries. Bigger industries like Bollywood and Hollywood would continue to survive because of the huge market they have access to. Below the glitz of cinema, there sure must be hundreds of sorry losers, and none of them would be actors!
