Issue 16, Fall 1998

William A. McEachern, Editor

Star Bucks

Speaking of performers, students are always interested in the nexus between show business and money. Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations that actors had to be necessarily well paid to compensate them for the "discredit" they brought on themselves by performing in public. He likened acting to "a sort of public prostitution." How times have changed. Few today would claim that celebrities are paid so much because they humiliate themselves in the process (Jerry Springer aside). Must Harrison Ford be paid $20 million or Julia Roberts $12.5 million per movie because of the huge discredit each reaps in the process? I think not.

But there is, I believe, a modern day equivalent of what Smith was talking about. Stars are reluctant to do TV commercials because of the public humiliation of hawking products. Evidence that stars are worried about their image is brought home by the fact that the top ones will do commercials only for overseas markets and the more foreign the better. Especially fertile ground is Japan. Leonardo DiCaprio earned $4 million selling cars and jeans in Japan. Harrison Ford was paid $4 million for Japanese beer commercials. Schwarzenegger will make up to $6 million for two day's work in Los Angeles for commercials selling DirecTV in Japan. And that ham Sylvester Stallone picked up $2 million selling ham there.

As I see it, the ranking of activities from least to most humiliating goes something like the following. Least humiliating is doing no commercials or endorsements of any kind, and some top stars follow this course. Next down is doing foreign ads only. Perhaps on a parallel at that second tier are those stars who do voice-overs for commercials, un-credited, without face time. More humiliating are regular commercials with appearances by the star. But even here there is a hierarchy among products. Other things equal, stars would have to be paid more to advertise Depends or Preparation H than Mercedes or Rolex. Finally, at the bottom of the humiliation barrel is hosting the home shopping network or doing an infomercial-buns of steel, quick weight-loss, or the psychic friend network. By the time celebrities are recruited for this stuff, they might as well follow Dante's directions in The Divine Comedy: "This way to join the lost people...Abandon all hope, you who enter."

Incidentally, little of this humiliation seems to carry over to professional athletes, who appear willing to sell anything, anytime. This might be an interesting class discussion-why actors seem so much more protective of their image that athletes. My guess is that an athlete's performance is measured more objectively, so they need not be as concerned about their public persona. Acting success, on the other hand, depends more on the priors of movie-goer.

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