Uncredited actors
 

I'm watching Anchorman: The Legend... and I'm wondering why actors with speaking lines are uncredited. In this case Vince Vaughn and Jack Black. Is there a reason why this happens? Is it a monetary issue?

Maybe Dane would know.

I've wondered this as well.

In most cases, actors that have less than two speaking roles on film are not members of SAG and therefore, aren't credited.

In the case of "Ron Burgandy", the producers chose not to advertise Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, etc. because they didn't want to "ruin" the surprise. The actors still receive their SAG residuals, so it doesn't affect them monetarily.

I always assumed that when a well-known star shows up in a bit part like this that he's friends with the filmakers and is basically doing it as a favor (and working at a greatly reduced rate).

Well, usually when guys sign on at a reduced rate, they'll make it up with back-end royalties, generally from ticket sales. Otherwise, it would impossible to pay these guys their normal quote because it would cost $60-$70 just for the actors alone.

That can be risky but it could also pay huge dividends. Tom Hanks earned like $38 million from Forrest Gump by eschewing his regular quote and taking back end.

Where the risk comes in is that studio accounting divisions are well-known for making top earning films into losers on the ledger. I think Seth McFarlane even alluded to that during this year's Oscar broadcast. I think I've shared in the past that Disney made the original POTC film a loser, even though it earned in excess of $400 million domestically.

Holy cow.....thats amazing. But surely over time they made their money back right? Overseas market, DVD sales, etc??

I remember hearing that Forrest Gump was also a "loser" as well.

I was at Uni at the time and while they certainly had some "creative accounting", Hanks was paid $38+ million.

If it had been a "loser", he would have earned zero.

I would have guessed it had something to do with the Screen Actors Guild. If a director wants a cool cameo of a big star, but the producer has set a budget of $10 million dollars for the casting, an uncredited actor can, as a favor to the director/fellow actor/etc., be cast uncredited at low or no cost, bypassing some SAG regulation.

I don't know much about SAG's requirements, though, but I suspect that has more to do it than mere surprising of the audience.

If I recall correctly, the author of Forrest Gump was never paid any royalties due to the movie being a box office "failure"

You may be correct. I left there in early 1997 and there's usually a three year grace period in which to audit and for all I know, they missed the window.

This is one of the big reasons why I was so Pro-SAG and Writer's Guild a few years back. I'm not a big believer in most unions because they're very different than "artistic" unions, but if the Producers had their way, no one ever would receive internet residuals, whether that was YouTube or HBO Go and so on.