Perhaps the problem is people needing to be employed to justify their existence or as a proxy measure to their ongoing contribution to society and its degree?
I’m a firm believer in a post toil to survive reality. The end of employment is godliness would be a great thing. I’d rather see artists create art than work in artist hamster wheels for the health insurance.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
I generally agree, but the specific premise here is vile. Some megacorp gets rights to your digital puppet that they can exploit to their pleasure, while the actors get almost nothing? Yikes.
Even if we didn't need to justify our existence, a lot of actors would probably still like to & want to act.
Oh, I agree. The concept of being capable of being coerced into signing away your likeness in perpetuity is absolutely vile. In a real sense it's the only thing you own that can't be separated from you. These contracts should be illegal just in the way signing a contract to endenture yourself is illegal.
I don't understand the likeness thing. We can reliably generate faces of all kinds. Why pay anyone for it when it can just be generated? Are they worried the generated one will look like a real person and open them to liability?
Well, they're not buying the 'likeness' in most cases as much as they're buying the actor's 'star power' - i.e. their ability to trade on their own name and performance independently of any one media product. That is, simply having their name attached to something makes that thing more likely to do well financially. This is what they're buying - and why casting "unknowns" in a "big budget" production is rather unusual. It's more risky than simply paying, say, Chris Pratt or Scarlett Johansson to perform. As you might imagine, investors don't like risk except the kind that guarantees them returns.
It could be quite useful/profitable for a Hollywood studio to acquire the rights-in-perpetuity to a young actor's image in 2023 for $200, if that same actor then goes on to become a superstar.
