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Today's LAT looks at the current tug-of-war between studios and talent over the always prickly issue of money, with studios complaining that movies are way too expensive for top stars and filmmakers to continue to get first-dollar gross, and actors and directors carping about the studios' creative accounting practices when they get to recoup shadily defined costs before doling out profit participation. Here are the arguments in sound-bite form:

"The budgets [of big movies] are just too high," said Disney production chief Nina Jacobson, who declined to comment on the "Pirates" deal. "You can find yourself, under a traditional first-dollar gross deal, writing huge checks while you are bleeding. It just doesn't seem fair. It feels great to be writing checks in success. But it kills you to be writing checks in failure." [...]


Peter Nelson, an entertainment industry lawyer whose clients include Peter Jackson of "King Kong" and Andrew Adamson, the filmmaker behind "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," worries that the new compensation formula is more an accounting ruse than a true partnership.

"The studios have made a fine art out of creating contract definitions that have no relation to reality," Nelson said. "These definitions just create new profit streams for the studios."

Both the first-dollar gross and cash-break-even solutions seem flawed to us, and the mistrust from both sides in money matters has been well-earned. We offer a more even-handed proposal: Every Monday morning, the execs, producers, and talent are gathered in the commissary of the distributing studio, where their hands are bound behind their backs as a pile of cash equal to that weekend's box office gross is dumped onto the floor. After a bell sounds, all participants dive into the money hoard, entitled to every dollar they can snag in their mouth and deposit in their own cash receptacle. (Or, in a less savory, but arguably just as effective tactic, swallow and then later excrete.) Kicking, biting, and other kinds of below-the-belt attacks are not only tolerated, but encouraged; after all, this is Hollywood, where those with the sharpest teeth, hottest-burning desire, and smallest regard for personal safety inevitably flourish.