When making a film, just one number counts

Without the professional worriers and doomsayers, no film ever gets made in Hollywood, or Bollywood, writes Rob Long

Salman Khan and Daisy Shah at the red carpet of “ Jai Ho ” bollywood hindi movie at Meydan hotel in Dubai. (Pawan Singh / The National)

The single most important piece of any film or television project is also the least glamorous. It isn’t the star or the director or the exotic location. It’s the insurance policy.

Boring old insurance is the linchpin to the entire Hollywood system. You can make a movie with unknown actors, you can launch a television series with only the merest notion of where the story is going, but no studio or network will allow the cameras to shoot anything until the entire project has been looked over by the professional worriers and doomsayers in the insurance business.

All of the key actors must submit to a thorough physical exam, the proposed filming locations need to be analysed for safety, the various risk-factors are plugged into a piece of software and out pops a number that is the cost of insuring the project.

The colourful phrasemakers in Hollywood call this “completion bond”, and for once that’s a pretty accurate and honest description. The network or studio needs to know that if something bad happens – a star gets injured or a hurricane hits the set, say – that they’ll either get repaid for the loss or get enough money to complete the picture another way.

A few years ago I was working on a television series and we had to shut down production for a few weeks because one of our lead actors was in legal trouble.

After the tenth or eleventh police ticket for speeding along the Ventura Freeway at around 160kmh – the actor was driving a Ferrari; what was he supposed to do? – the judge in the traffic court would hear no more excuses. The actor was fined, his driver licence was suspended, and he was sentenced to something called “community service” for 90 days.

In many ways, the actor was lucky. First – and this is the most obvious way – he never injured anyone or himself with his aggressive driving. But he was also lucky in the definition, for him, of “community service”. For ordinary speed demons and traffic sinners being sentenced to community service means hours spent in the hot Los Angeles sun picking up rubbish by the side of the road.

For movie stars and celebrities, though, it often means merely spending the day driving to local schools and giving inspirational speeches to young people about the importance of self-discipline, goal-setting, and probably something awful and saccharine like “dreaming big dreams”.

When the 90 days was up, the star came back to work and the cameras started rolling again. But he wasn’t allowed to drive his Ferrari. The insurers had decided that it was too large a risk to take, and as a lead actor in the series he was required to obey. So for the next five years, despite being the star of a popular television series and getting richer each second, the star was contractually compelled to drive a Volvo.

That’s how it works in Hollywood. But Hollywood and Bollywood aren’t that different.

When Bollywood actor Salman Khan – arguably the most famous movie star on Earth – was sentenced to five years in prison, following a conviction for negligent driving that killed one person and injured four others, the reaction from the stars’ friends and fans was immediate and overwhelming.

The justice – or injustice – of the sentence was litigated on Twitter and Facebook and in the press, as partisans on all sides took to whatever medium was at hand to express themselves.

I’m not in a position to judge the fairness of the sentence. Frankly, none of us can. And considering the human cost of the accident, which is incalculable, and the emotional cost on the victims, their families, and Khan himself, the whole episode becomes one of those things where most of us just repeat thankfully: “Thank God that didn’t happen to me.”

That’s how I read the newspaper, which is filled with terrible events that happened to someone else, every day – in a thankful and deeply grateful posture – and I’m sure I’m not alone.

But the cost of the sentence – which is at this moment suspended pending Khan’s appeal – was also calculated in the least sentimental and most bloodless way by the insurance agents, who now have to sort out the precise financial cost associated with films that right now may or may not go forward.

Khan, of course, is an immensely talented and famous actor. The next five years of his career were probably being scheduled and negotiated right up until his sentencing. There were people in rooms calculating the risks associated with his co-stars, the filming locations, the cholesterol counts of the film directors involved, that sort of thing.

That’s all suspended right now – pencils in the air; fingers poised and frozen above the calculators – as the most important people in the movie business, the insurance agents, wait to hear from the other most important people in the movie business, the appeals court judges, if the star is going to be available for shooting in the autumn of 2017.

In the movie business, the only thing more powerful than a fan is an insurer. And the only thing more powerful than an insurer is an appeals court judge.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl