Four For Friday - Child Slaves That Hollywood Hushes Up

Announcement time. Huh. Hmm. Yeah. Not much to say really. It is Friday. Oh, I ate all the Halloween candy. Four bags over the past five days. Need to buy some more. The good stuff never goes on sale after Halloween because they just throw it in the Christmas section. I will be here all weekend with reveals and blinds and any breaking news. I'm on the Twitter thing if anyone wants to follow me. I am @entylawyer

This week is not a traditional blind. I will give you a person but it is going to be hard. The reason I am writing it is not so much to out the one person I discuss but to tell you that Hollywood knows this happens and just because you have a bunch of people who claim they care about the world they really don't. Tell me the next time you see an actor walk away from a million dollar paycheck because their costume making was outsourced to child labor. Even if you told them to their face they would say they are just there to act. Huh. Then why do you have a producer credit? Why are you screwing over your union and pretending you are working for scale while that huge "producer" or consulting fee check that SAG can't touch gets deposited in your account. I have seen a President of SAG do that same trick. Didn't even blink. So why should they care about some child labor making their costumes?

If you are going to talk about costume designers today the first name you are going to mention is this woman. If she is not the first name out of your mouth, she is going to be in the top three. She has literally worked on the biggest movies on the planet designing thousands of costumes that all need to be made. The producers of the movies she has worked for made hundreds of millions of dollars on these productions and the actors in these films are the biggest stars on the planet.

This costume designer has all her garments made south of the border. All of them. Nothing here that she would be forced to pay scale wages on because the producers don't want that. They want cheap. If some kids get exploited in foreign countries so be it. In the last big budget movie she worked on which starred arguably the biggest actor in the world who was also a producer this designer paid each worker a flat fee of $700. That was for three months work. 16 hours a day. Do the math and it works out to about 48 cents an hour. No overtime. If you want a lunch you need to bring it. You only got the money after the three months were up. If you worked two months and got sick you got no money.

The movie has grossed just over $500M to date worldwide.