MICHAEL HOLLICK never thought that his big break would come in a video game. For years he was struggling to get by as an aspiring actor – working in a bagel shop in Manhattan, spraying perfume at Bloomingdale's – while aiming for Broadway and a prime
-time TV show. As he moved from regional theatre to soap operas, middling musicals and Law & Order, he remained just another good-looking guy hoping for an audition.
His face still isn't famous, but Hollick's voice and gait have recently moved into the pop culture firmament, as those of Niko Bellic, the sardonic, textured Balkan criminal at the heart of Grand Theft Auto IV, the acclaimed gangster fantasy that has become the fastest-selling game to date. Produced by Edinburgh's Rockstar Games and its corporate parent, Take-Two Interactive Software, the game has generated hundreds of millions in sales over the last three weeks.
Yet even as Hollick's voice has been heard in tens of millions of homes in TV adverts, even as fans have flocked to his MySpace page, his triumph has been bittersweet. That's because Hollick was paid only about $100,000 (£51,000) over roughly 15 months between late 2006 and early this year for all of his voice acting and motion-capture work on the game, with, he says, zero royalties or residuals in sight.
Had this been a television programme, a film, an album, a radio show or virtually any other sort of traditional recorded performance, Hollick and the other actors in the game would have made millions by now. As it stands, they get nothing beyond the standard Screen Actors Guild day rate they were originally paid.
That is because contracts between the actors' union and the entertainment industry make little or no provision for electronic media such as video games and the internet. It is a discrepancy that is expected to dominate negotiations between Hollywood and the guild this summer, with many predicting an actors' strike to parallel the writers' strike last year.
"Obviously I'm incredibly thankful to Rockstar for the opportunity to be in this game when I was just a nobody, an unknown quantity," Hollick, 35, said last week. "But it's tough, when you see Grand Theft Auto IV out there as the biggest thing going right now, when they're making hundreds of millions of dollars, and we don't see any of it. I don't blame Rockstar. I blame our union for not having the agreements in place to protect the creative people who drive the sales of these games. Yes, the technology is important, but it's the human performances within them that people really connect to, and I hope actors will get more respect for the work they do within those technologies."
Rockstar declined to comment for this article, but it is an issue that has been hanging over the video game industry for years. On the one hand, through both creative and technical ambition, game makers are infusing their wares with more realistic characters and stories than ever. On the other hand, the $18 billion (£9.2bn) US game industry has steadfastly refused to pay royalties to voice and motion-capture body actors along the lines of other entertainment media.
To the actors it is a simple issue of equity: equal pay for equal work, regardless of the medium. "For instance, our contracts say nothing about the use of voices for promotional purposes over the internet," Hollick says. "The first GTA IV trailer generated something like 40 million hits online, and that's my voice all over it, and I get nothing. If that were a radio spot, I would have. Same thing for the TV ads. I recorded those lines for the game, but now they're all over television. It's another grey area."
One of the big differences between games and traditional media is that while a film, play or TV show is usually marketed around a few well-known stars, games almost never highlight the people behind the digital characters, and almost no-one buys a game based on which actors are used in it.
"What drives video games is the conception of the creative director," says Ezra J Doner, a former Hollywood executive who represents entertainment companies as a lawyer in Brooklyn. "The actor whose appearance or voice is used is more analogous to a session musician for a band. The session musicians don't get residuals on the sales of the CD. They get paid a session fee. It's not like the star quality of Tom Cruise that's getting people to buy that video game." Hollick says he "asked about residuals when we negotiated, but I was told that was not a possibility."
Ryan Johnston, the 29-year-old actor behind the Irish hood Patrick McReary, one of the main supporting characters in the game, says he believes it is just a matter of time before actors' financial participation in games catches up with their popularity. He says the general guild-negotiated rate for actors is around $730 (£375) a day. Hollick says he was paid about 50 per cent more than the standard rate, or about $1,050 (£540) a day. A spokeswoman for the union said this week that no-one was available to discuss the issue.
"What we're seeing is a basic shift in the way that people seek their entertainment," Johnston says. "People want their entertainment to be convenient. They want it in their home or in their iPod for the train ride, which is a lot different than the old mode, where I had to spend hundreds of dollars to see a Broadway play or pay $12 to sit in a crowded movie theatre where I can't even pause or go to the bathroom. And games are the first entertainment product that has taken full advantage of that shift."
The game companies that make millions in royalties appear reluctant to share. Among their executives, one real fear is that if they start paying royalties to a handful of actors, they will soon face similar demands from the legions of artists, designers, audio producers, musicians, programmers and other people who work for years to make a top-end game. If the actor doing a police officer's voice-over gets royalties, the argument goes, why not the artist who designed his face, or the artificial-intelligence programmer who designed how he chases the bad guys?
Doner, the lawyer, says the situation fits into the general food chain of the media business. "When it comes to video games, the actors are being paid for their work for that initial use, and what they get paid is what they get paid," he says. "If they can negotiate a big fee for themselves, great. If not, well, that's too bad. So long as it's the medium for which they were hired, the logic of the industry has always been that you get paid for the work that you do."
Compensation is a particularly delicate issue for Rockstar, which has positioned itself as a creatively independent voice amid what the company construes as the staid mainstream game industry. Rockstar markets itself as a hip entertainment company along the lines of a record label or movie studio, rather than as a mere game publisher, and that carefully cultivated image could suffer in any dispute with actors or other artists.
For Hollick, Niko has still been the role of a lifetime – his masterly performance as the voice and body of Niko appears to stem both from his rich conception of the character as well as from a stellar script.
"Developing Niko, the dry sense of humour, as the story begins, he's this really hard guy with this really difficult background, but what gives it depth is that there is this naïvete as well," Hollick says. "He comes to the big city and he's not on firm ground. He's not sure where he stands. So there is a lot to work with. And as he becomes more confident, the sense of humour comes out. The screenwriters and directors were really hip to that and really did a great job of making the character three-dimensional."
Of course, because this is a video game, in addition to thousands of lines of dialogue, there were the more, shall we say, atmospheric effects. "So we would have the 50 pages of screaming, ten pages of being shot, ten pages of being thrown off a roof, 20 pages of being burnt alive, just screaming," he says. "The ones being burnt alive were the best. And I'd just be like: 'Bring me more hot tea and honey and lemon. Earl Grey.'"
On the game
LARA CROFT (TOMB RAIDER) The saucepot lady Indiana Jones essentially just runs around raiding tombs, requiring little acting skill, but actors have been recruited to bring her to life – Nell McAndrew and Rhona Mitra for PR purposes, and Angelina Jolie in the movies.
ALICE (RESIDENT EVIL) The zombie shoot-'em-up game has various named characters – although, interestingly, Alice, played by Milla Jovovich in the Resident Evil films, only appears in the movies. Some characters from the game do appear in the films, however, such as Jill Valentine.
SUPER MARIO (SUPER MARIO BROTHERS) Dreamed up in the earlier days of video games, the intrepid Italian plumbers were merely cartoons, but were made flesh and blood on the big screen thanks to Bob Hoskins. It wasn't one of the finest moments of his career.
ROSE (SILENT HILL) In this game a man called Harry, voiced by Michael Gough, searches for his missing daughter in the mysterious, ghostly town of the title. The game was made into a film in 2006, in which Harry became Rose, played by Radha Mitchell.
The full article contains 1661 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
