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Must not upset the boss, must not upset…

Money is the cause of, and solution to, a family spat, writes Michael Idato.

For fans of The Simpsons it is devastating news: their beloved television program could, after 23 years and 488 half-hour episodes, come to an end.

The six main voice actors – Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer – are locked in what looks at first glance to be a pay dispute.

But the deal-making surrounding the story – and the question of whether the studio, 20th Century Fox, will strangle the most golden of its stable of geese in pursuit of the almighty dollar – reveals an even more complex world of studio economics.
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As presented in the news, it reads like any wage dispute, albeit with immensely greater stakes. On one side we have the titanic studio, anxious to keep the money rolling in. On the other, a motley assortment of voice actors who believe they have been exploited by one of Hollywood’s most productive profit machines.

The lead actors make roughly $US440,000 an episode.

Fox is crying poor and claims the escalating cost of the show versus its steadily shrinking audience (up to 20 per cent in the US television market, according to estimates) means it now faces an uncertain future.

Fox is insisting on a pay cut for everyone, including producers and crew. According to sources, the producers have already agreed to take a cut. For the lead actors that means a trim of the weekly pay packet back to about $US240,000 an episode.

The deadline for the actors to agree is 6am today, Sydney time. If the cast capitulates, Fox will likely extend the series by two or three seasons. If not, this season – the show’s 23rd, of which two of 22 planned episodes have aired in the US – will be its last.

It does, at face value, beggar belief that Fox could cry poor. The studio has already earned more than $US1 billion in profit from The Simpsons. Long-term projections suggest it could, in the next decade, push that to up to $US2.9 billion.

According to one report, the studio has already rejected one offer from the cast – $US300,000 an episode plus an increased share in the ”back end”, that is, the money from reruns, DVD and merchandise sales – a hint, perhaps, that Fox is less interested in solving the contract dispute and more focused on stabilising its long-term profit.

Fox has said it ”cannot produce future seasons under its current financial model”, and hopes for an ”agreement with the voice cast that allows The Simpsons to go on entertaining audiences with original episodes for many years to come”.

Or does it? The relationship between the stars of The Simpsons and their employer has never been a harmonious one. Fox took only a few years to parlay a short cartoon segment from The Tracey Ullman Show into one of its biggest earners but it took a succession of pay disputes over a decade for the cast to get what it considers to be its fair share of the cream.

It clashed with the studio in 1998 and managed to get a pay increase from $US30,000 an episode to $US125,000. And again in 2004 – a particularly strained negotiation in which the six main actors refused to return to work until Fox caved into their demands – at which point they won about $US360,000 an episode. Any mutual affection has been, over the years, worn to nothing.

But unlike those past pay disputes, this time the studio is no longer anxious to keep its billion-dollar cash cow in production. Something of which the show’s producers perhaps have an inkling.

In the world of television economics, the brutal truth is it makes better business sense to finish the show and send it into syndication – American industry jargon for multi-channel reruns – which would allow Fox to sign new rerun contracts with a multitude of channels that could be worth, according to estimates, anywhere from $US750 million to $US2 billion.

By demanding a pay cut, and couching the resulting media coverage in terms of the show’s increasing cost and its high-to-unsustainable star salaries – Fox has effectively shifted the blame from the greedy studio to the show’s greedy stars.

Proof, perhaps, Fox is as ruthless in marketing as it is in business, and a monumental gamble that by the time the colourful world of the Simpson family fades to black, Fox will not be left facing the accusation it destroyed the studio’s golden goose simply to sell off its eggs to the highest bidder.

Photo: AP/Fox

Updated: October 7, 2011 — 9:31 pm

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