| Does
fame lead to fortune? | | |
| 'That in turn got her to 'Wicked,'
and other shows. To be a bigger star, you really have to expand to TV and film."
Excellent actors who stick to
the stage make less, he says.
"Sutton Foster, who was in 'Thoroughly Modern
Millie,' got more for 'Little Women.' But ask anyone outside of
New York about Sutton Foster and they'll say "Who?"
"But
Chenoweth, she's been on 'West Wing' and 'Frasier,' and producers will be willing
to pay more because people will know that."
The Tony versus the Oscar
A Tony differs from an Oscar in terms of financial
payoff.
"An Oscar will get you more money right away,"
Seward says. "A Tony, in and of itself, you'll get a bit of
a bump in the asking price.
"I would guess it's 5 percent to 10 percent
more," he says. "And it also depends on how aggressive your agent is."
Besides moving to the silver screen, Broadway winners
can also head to the neon lights of Las Vegas to cash in on a prize,
he says.
"Broadway headliners can get $100,000 a week
in Vegas," he says. So if you're wondering why Harvey Fierstein
is doing "Hairspray" in Las Vegas, that may be why.
Not
that theater numbers for stars are awful, but they are much lower.
"For a star in New York, it can be anywhere from
a percentage of the show's gross to $20,000 to $30,000 a week and
probably more."
Pulitzers
and Nobels
Literary awards are not created equal in terms of post-prize
sales and dollar impact.
"Big awards usually do sell books, unless it's
the Nobel Prize, which usually does not," says Paul Ingram,
book buyer at Prairie Lights, the famed independent bookstore in
Iowa City, Iowa, that is also the site of the nation's only live
radio reading series.
"The Nobel is for the person's entire work, and
many people have read all their books," he says.
There's also the matter of the kind of books
that win the Nobel Prize.
"Partly because they're European, and partly
because they're inadequately translated," Ingram says, not
all Nobel winners sell. "And they're often difficult to read
or highly politicized, like Elias Canetti."
On the other hand, the Nobel itself is quite lucrative.
Winners get 10 million Swedish krona, which
is about $1.3 million.
So what does translate into pumped-up sales? "The
Pulitzer and increasingly the Booker Prize," Ingram says. "The Booker
Prize has gotten really hot because the publicists for it have made it really,
really sexy. "They have big, flashy parties for it. They
announce the short list way in advance so people root for their favorites, and
the Nobel doesn't do that. They just award it."
Pulitzers, which pay $10,000, tend to increase interest
in and sales of all an author's work, not just the prize-winning
book, Ingram says.
Dollars
for poets
And some notoriously poverty-stricken arenas in the arts do
have a few big-money prizes. The Academy of American Poets annually gives the
$100,000 Wallace Stevens Award to recognize "outstanding and proven mastery
of the art of poetry."
No applications for the Stevens are accepted, but
the list of winners is a who's who of the big names. 2005's winner, Gerald Stern, is a leading American poet, and he was preceded
by Pulitzer winner Mark Strand, also a famous name.
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