Saturday, April 19, 2008
What Salary You Can Make In...
Parade Magazine on Yahoo! News: "George Clooney may earn $20 million per movie, but he's a rarity. Overall, the median wage for actors in the U.S. is less than $12 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As for the rest of the crew, they're clearly doing it for the glamour, not the money."
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6 comments:
Those rates seem extremely low. I hope there is some flaw in this calculation. Hopefully since we are all in CMU drama we will skip those lower brackets after paying almost $50,000 per year. Unemployed actors should consider beocming nurses since they apparently make a lot of money and since we will need so many more before 2016. Why was that random fact added to this article?
I think it is difficult to gauge the yearly salary in Entertainment because so many of the occupations are based on the payment by the project. That combined with the fact that projects are sometimes done less for the money and more for its importance to the individual. Entertainment is such a tentative industry, but I think anyone who is pursuing it for the money should really re-evaluate their options for high-paying jobs.
I don't think a lot of students fully grasp this concept when pursuing careers in the arts. We might be able to say we are at a higher advantage than most students because we come from CMU, however the salaries in the end are usually the same. I completely agree with Kevin in saying that projects are the consistency of our work. I guess you could say coming from CMU allows us to be offered more projects than most artists.
Those numbers do seem pretty low, but I feel like when you combine a huge group of different skill levels and backgrounds into one set of statistics, you are asking for numbers that don't mean anything. Keep in mind that many of the people who they're talking about might hold down other jobs, or move from the 8 dollar an hour PA position to a higher paying one as they become more skilled.
Although these rates certainly do not seem too farfetched, I do not like the fact that they neglect to tell you how the went about getting their information. There response would probably be that the reader doesn't care about their statistical analysis. Some readers, though, may actually understand the way statistics works, and would be able to understand (and most likely, see the many flaws in) their experiment.
I think that there is a dangerous line being toed with all this "we're from CMU we're at an advantage." I think that the most important component of whatever advantage we may have is that we are prepared to work harder and smarter than designers from elsewhere. Who's to say that NYU and BU students aren't trying to comfort themselves with the same thing.
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