Above-The-Line Costs

Let's do lunch, baby. You're a Hollywood producer on your way to the Paramount Studios with a budget in your hand for the next Brad Pitiful vehicle. You've carefully added the costs for union gaffers and grips, you know what it'll cost to blow up seventeen used trucks, and you know you'll have to shoot eighteen miles of film with a small army of camera men, lighting people, and street sweepers. All of these functionaries are below-the-line costs, because they get paid, and then they go away. Above-the-line players are people like the headliner, Brad Pitiful. Above-the-line also includes the director, the writer, and the producer...yeah, you.

Why the distinction? What is this mysterious line all about? Profit participation. Above-the-line players in Hollywood often take a salary cut, even working for minimum wage, in return for a cut of profits when the film comes to market. Famously, when Jack Nicholson played the Joker in Batman, he took a very small salary and a large profit chunk. That decision ended up netting him somewhere close to a hundred million bucks, in today's dollars. Nice work if you can get it, eh?