1626566976 (M) by Deepak Malhotra

Author:Deepak Malhotra
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2016-04-07T21:00:00+00:00

WITHOUT MONEY OR MUSCLE

The seeds for success in 2002 were sown years earlier, during the negotiations for the third season of Friends. Prior to the third season, the six actors had always negotiated in the standard way, which is to say they negotiated separately with the help of their agents. After the first year, for which each actor was given a standard $22,500 per episode, their future salaries would be a function of the success of the show, the perceived importance of the character, and the outside options the actor had. In the second season, these factors resulted in a range of salaries for the six, between approximately $20,000 and $40,000 per episode.4

Before negotiations for the third season began, however, actor David Schwimmer (“Ross”), who was likely to make one of the highest salaries that season, came up with a different approach. He went to his fellow cast members and made the argument that the production company and TV network had tremendous leverage over them because, individually, each of them was replaceable. They would not be in a position to really share in the show’s success unless they agreed to stick together in future negotiations and to ask for the same salary for each actor. This was unorthodox; Schwimmer was asking them to pay no attention to their individual value-add to the show and to instead negotiate based on their collective contribution. If they could somehow stick together regardless of who “objectively” deserved more or less in any given season, they would have increased leverage. Then he played his trump card. To underscore his own commitment to the idea, he offered to make the first sacrifice; he would ask the production company to pay him less money in the third season so that all of them would make the same amount. Jennifer Aniston (“Rachel”) would have to agree to do the same—and she did. As a result, in that contract, each of them was paid the salary of the lowest-paid actor: starting at $75,000 per episode for Season 3, and increasing to $125,000 for Season 6.5 They would never negotiate separately again.

David Schwimmer recalled, during an interview with Vanity Fair:

I said to the group, “Here’s the deal. I’m being advised to ask for more money, but I think, instead of that, we should all go in together. There’s this expectation that I’m going in to ask for a pay raise. I think we should use this opportunity to talk openly about the six of us being paid the same. I don’t want to come to work feeling that there’s going to be any kind of resentment from anyone else in the cast down the line. I don’t want to be in their position”—I said the name of the lowest-paid actor on the show—“coming to work, doing the same amount of work, and feeling like someone else is getting paid twice as much. That’s ridiculous. Let’s just make the decision now. We’re all going to be paid the same, for the same amount of work.

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