AT&T Tech Support 360May 22, 2008 10:27 AM PDT
A video game star and his less-than-stellar pay
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All those years when he was struggling to get by as an aspiring actor--tending bar, working in a bagel shop in Morningside Heights, spraying perfume at Bloomingdale's--he was aiming for Broadway and prime time. As he moved from regional theater to soap operas, middling musicals and Law & Order, he remained just another good-looking guy hoping for an audition.
His face still isn't famous, but Hollick's voice and gait have moved into the pop-culture firmament recently as those of Niko Bellic, the sardonic, textured Balkan criminal at the heart of Grand Theft Auto IV, the acclaimed gangster fantasy that has become the fastest-selling game to date.
Produced by Rockstar Games and its corporate parent, Take-Two Interactive Software, the game has generated at least $600 million in sales over the last three weeks.
Yet even as Saturday Night Live has spoofed the Niko character, even as Hollick's voice has been heard in tens of millions of homes in advertisements broadcast during American Idol and the NBA playoffs, even as fans have flocked to his MySpace page, his triumph has been bittersweet.
That's because Hollick was paid only about $100,000 over roughly 15 months between late 2006 and early this year for all of his voice acting and motion-capture work on the game, with zero royalties or residuals in sight, he said.
Had this been a television program, a film, an album, a radio show, or virtually any other sort of traditional recorded performance, Hollick and the other actors in the game would have made millions of dollars by now. As it stands, they get nothing beyond the standard Screen Actors Guild day rate they were originally paid.
That is because the contracts between the actors' union and the entertainment industry make little or no provision for electronic media like video games and the Internet. It is a discrepancy that is expected to dominate negotiations between Hollywood and the guild this summer, with many predicting an actors' strike to parallel the writers' strike last year, which revolved around similar issues.
"Obviously, I'm incredibly thankful to Rockstar for the opportunity to be in this game when I was just a nobody, an unknown quantity," Hollick, 35, said last week over dinner in Willamsburg, Brooklyn, shortly after performing in the aerial-theater show Fuerzabruta in New York's Union Square. "But it's tough, when you see Grand Theft Auto IV out there as the biggest thing going right now, when they're making hundreds of millions of dollars, and we don't see any of it. I don't blame Rockstar. I blame our union for not having the agreements in place to protect the creative people who drive the sales of these games. Yes, the technology is important, but it's the human performances within them that people really connect to, and I hope actors will get more respect for the work they do within those technologies."
Rockstar declined to comment for this article, but it is an issue that has been hanging over the video game industry for years. On the one hand, through both creative and technical ambition, game makers are infusing their wares with more realistic characters and stories than ever. On the other hand, the $18 billion United States game industry has steadfastly refused to pay royalties to voice and motion-capture body actors along the lines of other entertainment media.
To the actors, it is a simple issue of equity: equal pay for equal work, regardless of the medium.
"For instance, our contracts say nothing about the use of voices for promotional purposes over the Internet," Hollick said. "The first GTA IV trailer generated something like 40 million hits online, and that's my voice all over it, and I get nothing. If that were a radio spot, I would have. Same thing for the TV ads. I recorded those lines for the game, but now they're all over television. It's another gray area."
Maybe I should give up my job and go into voice acting and let people glue ping pong balls to my body and I dance around and play act. If I got $100,000 for doing that, I'd be ecstatic.
Maybe with that $100,000, he can afford an overpriced lawyer to look over his next contact.
If he's upset, I'm happy to take over.