Thanks, Jan. But what I meant was: does it usually pay well enough to pull the same kind of quality actors to projects? Well, and quality directors and everything else.
I was under the impression that direct to DVD was a market assumed to be "lower" than television or movies.
All of the unions have different contracts, of course, but they usually try to aim for parity when possible. Here's the relevant portion of the 2004 Minimum Basic Agreement (the current contract) for the Writers Guild of America (West) Remember that writers have the
least clout of pretty much any group in Hollywood. (And that includes stuntmen and grips.
)
MADE-FOR PAY TELEVISION OR VIDEOCASSETTE/VIDEODISC
The minimum initial compensation for a writer shall be the same as the applicable minimum initial compensation for a "free" television program. Where the program is of a type generally produced for network prime time, the network prime time rates are to be utilized.
Direct-to-video has been around long enough that the guilds have rules for it. Note, of course, that this applies to
minimums. As Jan rightly notes, the actual compensation comes down to what kind of deal the actors, etc. can make, since hardly any recognizable TV actor is ever working for "scale" in any TV series or movie.
Pay rates on a project like
B5:TLT are less a matter of the medium and the contract minimums than the
budget. (This is also true when it comes to everything
else by the way. If Jim Carrey wants $25 million dollars to star in your comedy and the total budget is $40 million, you call Rob Schneider instead and pay him $5 million.
) Warner Bros. business model for their new direct-to-DVD division is for the discs to turn a profit based solely on DVD sales, with any sale of broadcast or other rights being gravy, so they will budget them accordingly and will probably be conservative in their sales estimates until they see how the first few projects they do work out. So that, rather than this being a direct-to-DVD project is the limiting factor.
That said, there's no necessary connection between the quality of someone's work and their asking price. While it is true that long-established directors, actors and writers might have minimums of their own that would bust the budget for something like
TLT, it is also true that there are plenty of new talents without track-records and an established "market value" who could do outstanding work on lower budget projects like this. Direct-2-DVD could become the kind of artistic bootcamp that "B" pictures, Roger Coreman films, Direct-to-VHS, TV movies and now studio-distributed "independent" films have been for years. At the other end of the spectrum you have people who are so well established and so well paid that they don't have to worry about a perception that their price has gone "down" if they decide to do a project for scale as a favor to a friend or because they just like the project. (Bill Murray did
Tootsie for next to nothing because he wanted to work with Dustin Hoffman. He didn't even get screen credit for the theatrical release, although I think his name was later added to the end-credits on home video when SAG pitched a fit.)
So the short answer to your question is, "It depends."
Joe
