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negotiation of this contract did not come cheaply—the legal and accounting budget for the movie was $2 million—and, by the time all of Schwarzenegger’s demands were met, the budget of the film had risen to $187.3 million, making it then the most expensive independently produced movie in history. Another $90 million was spent advertising and marketing it.
    Terminator 3
had a world box office gross of $433 million which, together with DVD, TV, and other rights, allowed the distributors to eke out a small profit, but Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had created his own “cash breakeven,” was the big winner. In the bygone days of the studio system, the studios had exclusive contracts with their stars that allowed them to reap the profits from the images their PR machines had created. In the new Hollywood, the stars themselves reap the profit their brand names bring to a film. So it is not surprising that even after Schwarzenegger became the governor of California in 2004, his holding companyprotected his image rights by suing a small toy maker selling a Schwarzenegger-like bobble-head doll on the grounds that “Schwarzenegger is an instantly recognizable global celebrity whose name and likeness are worth millions of dollars and are solely his property.”
    Ironically, whereas Schwarzenegger was crucial to making the deal, once the
Terminator
franchise had been successfully resurrected, his acting services were no longer necessary for future sequels. In 2007, Kassar and Vajna sold the rights to the franchise to the game company Halcyon for $25 million, which produced
Terminator Salvation
in 2009, the first of three planned sequels. Even without Schwarzenegger, who was by now fighting his own budget battles as governor of California, it did almost as well as
Terminator 3
at the domestic box office, though not as well in the Asian markets.

MOVIE STARS COME IN TWO
FLAVORS: $20 MILLION AND FREE
     
    The difference between studio-made movies and independent-made movies is the former have an American distributor before they are filmed, or even green-lit, and therefore investors in themare assured that they will be shown in theaters, while the latter don’t. And since it may take years of screenings, and endless trips to film festivals, before an indie film has a chance of finding an American distributor and many never do, raising money for them is a daunting challenge.
    One ingenious device through which indie film producers overcome this problem is to recruit Hollywood stars who will work for them on the cheap and use their names to pre-sell the movie abroad. The same actors and actresses who quote Hollywood studios $20 million per movie will work on indie films for a small fraction of that fee. Often they accept “scale,” as the Screen Actors Guild’s minimum wage of $788 a day is called, or “near scale” of about $10,000 a week plus overtime. Instead of requiring private jets, luxury suites, and multimillion dollar perk packages as they do in studio films, the stars will fly on commercial flights, stay in inexpensive condos, and get the same per diem as the rest of the cast. Instead of receiving a sizable chunk of the gross receipts as they are accustomed to on studio films, for indie films stars will accept “net points” (even though they—or their agents—are no doubt familiar with David Mamet’s famous observation that in Hollywood, “There is no Net”). “The total cost of a star canbe less than that of running the office Xerox,” explained one knowledgeable producer. The willingness of top stars—including Keanu Reeves, Mel Gibson, Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, Drew Barrymore, Al Pacino, Angelina Jolie, Pierce Brosnan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Charlize Theron, Tobey Maguire, Demi Moore, Sean Penn, and Julia Roberts—to work for near scale in the parallel universe of indie films allows indie producers to take advantage of a star’s cachet to finance the movies.
    Ironically, in the era of the moguls, the Hollywood