‘One for them, one for me.” That’s the credo of the actor or director trying to keep integrity intact amid lucrative but soulless opportunities. Today’s passion project justifies tomorrow’s franchise installment, which pays for that art film you always wanted to do, and then it’s time to jump back on the commercial train, and after 20 years, if all goes well, you have lots of money and a corpus creditable enough to make your film-school self feel proud.
Sometimes, of course, it becomes “ten for them to pay my alimony and rehab bills and private-island costs and gambling debts . . .” That’s how you end up with a career like Johnny Depp’s, lashed to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise like a mariner aboard the Flying Dutchman, or the “I’ll go anywhere, play anyone, do anything, just pay me” IMDb page of Nicolas Cage.
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