Thanks for the Lift, Oscar
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Does winning an Oscar change your life? The real answer is yes and no, but when the answer is yes, it’s followed by a big exclamation mark.
“It changes everything!” says Janusz Kaminski, who has won two Academy Awards for best cinematography, for “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.” “It expands your choices and the jobs you’re offered. Winning obviously elevates you to another level.”
For the record:
12:00 a.m. April 2, 2000 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday April 2, 2000 Home Edition Calendar Page 103 Calendar Desk 1 inches; 21 words Type of Material: Correction
Film composer--Randy Newman is represented by the Gorfane-Schwartz Agency. The agency representing him was misidentified in a story last Sunday.
Before he shot “Schindler’s List,” Kaminski had been working on such low-budget films as “Mad Dog Coll” and “Cool as Ice,” a movie starring Vanilla Ice. After his win, he became a key member of Steven Spielberg’s filmmaking team, shooting “Private Ryan,” “The Lost World” and “Amistad,” which earned him a third Oscar nomination. Kaminski also shot “Jerry Maguire” and will make his directorial debut this fall with “Lost Souls,” which stars Winona Ryder and Ben Chaplin.
After he won in 1993 for “Schindler’s List,” Kaminski says he began getting calls from A-list directors. “Barry Levinson phoned, so did Penny Marshall and Mike Newell,” he says. “Spike Lee talked to me about doing ‘Clockers.’ It certainly helped me get a higher salary, but for me the real importance was having more artistic freedom. Winning an Oscar encourages you to be more daring in your work. Your choices aren’t questioned as much. People say, ‘Hey, he won an Oscar, he must know what he’s doing.’ ”
In recent years, movie studios have used Oscar nominations as a potent publicity tool. The exposure pays off: “Cider House Rules” has more than doubled its box office in the five weeks since it received a best picture nomination. “Shakespeare in Love” had the same post-nomination success last year. If “American Beauty” wins best picture, it could wind up doing as much as $120 million in domestic box-office grosses, with roughly $45 million of that coming after its nominations were announced.
But for individual winners, the benefits of an Oscar win are much harder to quantify. A win almost always guarantees a modest bump in salary. It can catapult a production designer, editor or costume designer onto a studio A-list, which can be mean a raise of up to $1,000 a week. A mid-range composer might make $400,000 to $500,000 a film; a composer on the studio A-list can make anywhere from $700,000 to $1 million. Beyond that, getting an Oscar bounce depends a lot on timing, circumstance and commercial appeal. Helen Hunt’s price zoomed from $2 million to $8 million after she won best actress in “As Good as It Gets”--but most of the credit for her raise went to the movie’s success at the box office. Billy Bob Thornton’s “Sling Blade” was only an art-house hit, but his Oscar for best adapted screenplay transformed him from B-movie actor to Hollywood
auteur, putting him in demand at studios as both actor and director. Geoffrey Rush was an obscure Australian theater actor until winning an Oscar for “Shine.” Since then, he’s worked constantly, both in prestige films (“Shakespeare in Love” and “Elizabeth”) and in commercial projects like “Mystery Men.”
“The Oscar changed Geoffrey’s career tremendously,” says Fred Specktor, his agent at CAA. “It didn’t make him Tom Cruise. But he started making more money, and more importantly he started getting access to scripts that he would’ve never seen before. When you win an Oscar, the ball really bounces in your direction. People start looking at your performances in a different light.”
Rush also started getting better parts, because high-profile actors wanted to work with him. Rush is now doing “The Tailor of Panama,” a John Boorman film based on the John Le Carre novel, with Pierce Brosnan. Specktor says one of the key reasons Brosnan took the role was that Rush was in the film. “Geoffrey was already a great actor,” says Specktor. “But the Oscar gave him a presence in the industry that he would’ve never had.”
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After Marisa Tomei won a best actress Oscar for “My Cousin Vinnie,” her price instantly skyrocketed from $200,000 to $2 million. “She became a movie star overnight,” recalls her then-manager Evelyn O’Neill, whose Talent Entertainment Group manages such actors as Julianne Moore and Reese Witherspoon. “I remember getting a call from a high-profile agent the next day saying, ‘Is there any movie in town that you’re not being offered?’ ”
But Tomei’s Oscar bounce didn’t last. The actress took roles in films that didn’t work, either with critics or at the box office, transforming her from Cinderella to one-hit wonder.
Callie Khouri was one of the hottest writers in Hollywood after her 1991 Oscar win for “Thelma & Louise.” But Khouri has had only one script produced since; Michael Blake, who won an Oscar in 1990 for writing “Dances With Wolves,” has only had one script made since his success as well.
The actors who get the biggest bounce out of an Oscar are usually the ones who can lend prestige to an otherwise ordinary studio project. After Michael Caine earned a nomination for “The Cider House Rules,” the veteran British actor got a substantial salary hike to play opposite Sandra Bullock in “Miss Congeniality,” a beauty pageant comic-thriller due next year from Warner Bros.
Coming off her Oscar nomination for “Boys Don’t Cry,” Hilary Swank also earned a big pay increase to co-star in “Affair of the Necklace,” a romantic comedy due next year from Warners. Moore’s Oscar nomination for “The End of the Affair” played a significant role, along with her recent body of work, in getting her cast as Jodie Foster’s replacement in “Hannibal,” the much-awaited sequel to “The Silence of the Lambs.”
But even a perennial Oscar favorite like Moore has to prove her worth in the marketplace. “When it comes to your salary, the studios always try to argue that it should be based on box office,” says O’Neill. “It used to be that when we were negotiating and we’d remind people that she was in ‘The Lost World: Jurassic Park,’ they go, ‘She was great, but it was the dinosaurs.’ ”
Kevin Spacey is already seeing an Oscar bounce for his best actor nomination in “American Beauty.” He’s not only getting offered higher-salaried jobs, says William Morris President Jim Wiatt, “but he’s being treated like a true movie star--people are sending over scripts saying, ‘If you’ll say yes, we’ll make the movie.’ ” Moore’s Oscar aura has also paid dividends. The actress had been getting $1 million a film, but her price has doubled for “Hannibal.” She has an added bonus built into her contract if she wins an Oscar tonight.
“An Oscar makes you more of a magnet for other talent,” says CAA’s Kevin Huvane. “When Meryl Streep or Robert De Niro is attached to a project, everyone wants to work with them. Most of it is about their body of work, but let’s face it, winning an Oscar helps. It makes you a member of a very exclusive club.”
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Many industry experts believe that actors’ careers are also buoyed by the sheer visibility they receive during Oscar season. For weeks on end, actors are pictured in magazines and trade ads, and photographed and interviewed at industry functions. If they win on Oscar night, they are seen in the most flattering light imaginable, full of actorly emotion, by hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide--far more people than have ever seen any of their films. The accolades become an invaluable advertisement for someone’s career.
“The exposure is phenomenal,” says Wiatt. “From the time the academy ballots go out in January till Oscar night, everyone is seeing your work, whether it’s clips from a nominated film or clips from movies you’ve made in the past. It opens all sorts of doors for your career, because people are constantly reminded of how valuable your work has been over the years.”
It wasn’t always such a big deal. Screenwriter Alvin Sargent, a two-time Oscar winner for “Julia” (1977) and “Ordinary People” (1980), says the Oscars had little impact on his career. “I got invited to a few more parties, and I’m sure it got me some more money,” says Sargent, who was paid $150,000 for writing “Julia.” “But I don’t remember it changing the kind of jobs I was being offered. You still have to do the work. The biggest change was that for a while, people kept saying, ‘I’d like to introduce you to Alvin ‘Julia’ Sargent, like it was my middle name.”
In recent years, the Oscar bounce has become more noticeable. When Columbia Pictures announced its much-heralded gross-points inducement for screenwriters last year, one of the deal points that made writers eligible for profit participation was having an Oscar nomination.
In the crafts categories, an Oscar leads to work with A-list directors. The day after composer Rachel Portman won an Oscar for “Emma,” she was hired by Jonathan Demme to do the music for “Beloved.”
“The morning after the Oscars our phones are always ringing,” says Richard Kraft, whose Blue Focus Management handles a host of Oscar-winning composers, including Portman, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein and John Barry, as well as Randy Newman, who’s been nominated 13 times without a win.
“First it’s the relatives who heard our names when we were thanked. Then it’s the clients who didn’t win. And then it’s the producers and studio people who want to know if the salary figure that we were talking about on Friday is still the same.”
Doesn’t the number go up after an Oscar? “Well, we’d never change the number completely,” says Kraft. “But if we’ve been talking about a salary range, the number usually goes up to the high end of the range.”
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The Oscar bounce has also helped raise industry awareness for foreign-born composers who weren’t household names when they won Oscars. Two recent examples: Luis Enrique Bacalov, who won for “Il Postino,” and Nicola Piovani, who won for “Life Is Beautiful.” “It really makes a difference for a composer, because their music is so tied into the success of a film,” says Kraft’s partner, Laura Engel. “But the shelf life of an Oscar is pretty short, so sometimes when you’re negotiating, you have to work it into the conversation, to remind everyone that we’re talking about an Oscar winner.”
Most Oscar winners acknowledge that no matter how much impact the award might have on their professional life, it rarely makes them feel differently about themselves. “I’m still hopelessly unsure of myself,” says Portman. “With each film, I always think, ‘I can’t believe they’ve given me the job.’ It’s nice to have something that gets you considered for great projects, but I still start each day’s work from scratch.”
Still, even Portman says she’ll never forget waking up the morning after her win, seeing “this bright shining thing” on the table next to her bed. The Oscar statuette has a special luster even in the fickle, transitory world of Hollywood. The morning after the Academy Awards ceremony, Richard Kraft usually goes to the Four Seasons Hotel to say goodbye to various clients as they prepare to leave town.
“There’s nothing quite like watching all these great talents come out of the hotel with their Oscars, getting into cars to go to the airport,” he says. “They all put their luggage in the trunk, but no one lets go of the Oscar--that goes right into the car with them.”
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