Nepotism is Just One Part of Hollywood's Off-the-Books Celebrity Compensation System
There are so many ways for things to suck
Last month, Vulture ran a feature piece about how common it is for Hollywood stars to have famous parents. I thought the article was a bit overwrought; I’m not sure we needed 4,500 words under the headline: BREAKING: HAVING RICH AND POWERFUL PARENTS CAN BE AN ADVANTAGE. I’m also not ready to award the Pulitzer to the sleuth who uncovered the bombshell that Colin Hanks is Tom Hanks’ son — Woodward and Bernstein, you are not. Still, I was glad that people were talking about meritocracy and the lack thereof.
I’m on record as a meritocracy superfan. To me, jobs are about making a thing, and if you’re not hiring the person who best helps you make that thing, then you’re doing it wrong. I also think that most people would rather live in a world where their talents might be rewarded than one in which jobs are doled out according to a random birth lottery. Nepotism is an affront to those values; I think it sucks. But I’m also resigned to the fact that it will probably always be part of Hollywood, because it’s part of a vast celebrity compensation system that influences who gets what job and which projects get made.
To be clear: This system sucks, but it’s not nefarious. There aren’t really evil-doers here. I regret that calling it an “off-the-books compensation system” implies that what I’m about to discuss is corrupt or secretive — it is not. This system is common knowledge to anyone who works in entertainment, so common in fact that it is known even to me, a person who only barely qualifies as “someone who works in entertainment.” But before I became a small Kuiper Belt object in the entertainment solar system, I didn’t know how this stuff worked. I would see terrible movies and TV and wonder “How did this shit get made?” Now I know how that shit got made. And I’d like to talk about that process in order to help people find the good stuff and avoid the bad. Which is to say: As with most of my columns, my ultimate goal here is to help people avoid paying money to see George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky.