Give me a break, can you honestly not see the motivation behind making movies for a living and yet not making them the most lucrative, pandering blockbusters possible? Just because something’s a business doesn’t mean that everyone involved in that business is in it purely for the money. I’m a cynic, but this article is just far too simplistic.

There is one problem with your article. It has to do with understanding the use of words and qualifiers.
“They’re just doing it for the money”
“The studio is just being greedy”
“He’s just in it for the pay check”
“All they care about is money”
“The studios just want another cash cow”
These are the examples. They all have one thing in common. They indicate that the subject is only performing their job for money. They key here is that we are saying it is ONLY for money. We are saying that there are zero additional reasons besides money for their decision. There is a large difference between “doing it for the money” and “only doing it for the money.” Sure we all work for money. We have to. It is what we use in our society to live. I do my job for the money. I also enjoy programming enough that I also do it in my free time. So when I come to work and have to write code for applications that we use, I am doing this job for money AND because I enjoy writing code. I am only doing it for the money. The point of saying that a person is only doing it for the money is to express that they have no care or emotional investment in the project. They are using it as a means to an end, but not for any other benefits, wants or needs.

People are driven to improve themselves. Not for money, but because it is a basic instinct to get better at anything you can. I am a programmer. I write code for computers. In my free time, I often will try to learn new computer programming languages because they can teach me new things that I didn’t know. You would suggest that I am doing this for the money because, as I learn the new languages, I am raising my skill level and thus my value, so I can earn a higher paycheck. That argument makes sense and sounds like common sense truth, but it is actually false.

When I was in high school, I taught myself to write code in a variety of programming languages, as well as teaching myself a variety of speaking languages like Spanish, French and American Sign Language. I went to college for Architectural Engineering in college, and it was something I was good at. My past time of learning code was not in any way a benefit to what I was expecting to be my employment. Designing buildings is not the same as writing code. My interest in learning new languages was my hobby, not my job. I learned that because I enjoyed my hobby and I could be good at it, that it was a better and more enjoyable career. However, it wasn’t until years after I started learning programming that it would become something that I would turn into a career, and thus was not something I had been doing for money at all. My habits for studying and learning languages has not changed since it began, but as stated earlier, you and other would guess that my hobby is partially something I do “for the money.” As I have shown here, not only do I not teach myself new languages “only for the money,” but money has no basis for my interest at all. Appearances are deceiving. I have multiple hobbies. Beside programming (which I do for work and for fun), I also sew. Yes, sew. With a sewing machine and everything. If it is not obvious, this hobby has nothing to do with programming. Everything I learn from this hobby has no worthwhile application to my job. I still try to get better at it because I want to be better. I use the skill to make outfits and costumes for friends and family, but I make no money from it since they don’t pay me, and I don’t save money because it would cheaper to buy the outfits instead, but it’s still fun to make them and learn from the experience. I do it to better myself because that is what drives me.

Bruce Willis is good at action films. He gets paid well for doing action films. Did he do Sixth Sense just for the money? Perhaps he did it because he wanted to improve his acting skills, because acting is his hobby AND his job. He could certainly have a monetary benefit from becoming a better actor, but only because acting happens to also be his job.

This is getting off base because my original point is just to say that using the qualifier of “just” or “only” is a way of saying that they don’t care for any other reason.

You suggest that if they weren’t going to pay him, he wouldn’t do the job. I submit that you can’t be sure of that. As believable as that sounds, I can transplant that exact scenario to my life and prove it is wrong. You would suggest that if my company didn’t pay me, I wouldn’t have written any code for them. Here’s the catch. They didn’t hire me to be a programmer. They hired me as a database administrator. My original job is to make sure the databases that we use here stay operational and to train new employees how to use them. I became a programmer here because I wrote some programs on my own that help out coworkers with jobs they had to do. The programs did not make my own job faster, but helped them. Simple tasks that they had to repeat over and over again became automated because I helped them. For free. Because I wanted to help and because it was a hobby of mine. And, just to drive the point home further, I also write code for people I don’t work with or have never met, that I make available online. I do not get paid for it. They are for other people to benefit from and I enjoy it as a hobby.

It is entirely possible that some actors are doing things for more than just the money. They might be doing it because they enjoy it too. Or perhaps, they just happen to get paid, but would do it regardless. As you can see, I do, and I know I’m not the only one, so it’s not a fantasy.

I think they take pay cuts/no pay so that they can get a bigger percentage of the gross at the end of the movie……….
Ex. Brad Pitt recived $10M for Oceans 11 and then $20M after the movie because it was such a success vs.
George Clooney who recived $20M upfront and didnt get anything after the movie.
But I guess there are other times like when Steven Speilberg asked not to be paid for his work on Schindler’s List.

Fantastic response.
However, after your end notes, it reads that you’re classifying films and filmmaking as being one in the same.
If not, you’re referring to films as a piece of art (”The ideal in this business is to produce a piece of art that brings in…”)
….and only a few moments later, insist they aren’t. (”To suggest that film, in general, is ‘art’… Uh, no.)

To clarify, films are in fact, a collaborative art piece, whether being garbage, exploitative or mastered. The “argument” here -better described as a topic rather than an argument with a foreseeable outcome- is the business side of filmmaking.

As for trying to understand the motivations of anyone involved in the film industry…whether or not they do what they do ‘just for the money’… In all fields of endeavour, there will always be varying reasons why people do what they do. But as an awful lot of the film industry’s participants are creative sorts (some ‘artists’, some not), and clearly, many of the people here are not…to presume an actor’s, or director’s or even producer’s ‘true’ motivations is as ridiculous as the armchair quarterback presuming to understand the motivations of their favourite athlete. (If you don’t understand how utterly divergent the creative world can be from the daily-grind one that most of the population exists in…then making proprietorial comments seems even more nonsensical.)

I know that to some, what I’m talking about just won’t register. THAT’S how attached they are to this feeling of ownership. (And in turn, to ‘knowing the score’.)

A couple of end-notes:

-Cars are NOT necessities. They’re a lifestyle choice at the core of the –suspect– North American value system. But this remark said SO much about the tenor of the comments in general.
-Movies are not -by default- ‘art’. They’re a commodity that when done in a certain away, can rightfully be regarded as ‘art’. But then your ‘art’ may be the next person’s dreck. It’s eternally subjective. However, filmmaking is, in the end, a BUSINESS. The ideal in this business is to produce a piece of art that brings in hundreds of millions of dollars of profit. But as in many other areas of Life, the ideal is rarely achieved. Most films are made to entertain…and by extension, bring in gobs of money…and maybe grab some artistic accolades along the way. To suggest that film, in general, is ‘art’… Uh, no. )

But it will be nice to have a good movie that comes from that money. Movie that didn’t suck and looks like a trash. It’s nice to have a masterpiece coming from those money.

And if that what it needs to make a good movie (money). Then let it be. The fact that they make a good movie from and for money is not an issue. The issue is how hollywood still make a crap just because the money.

It’s an issue for me, but apparently not for some people. So…