Kevin Sorbo — the muscular star of the syndicated TV series “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” — might be the bravest actor in Hollywood for taking on the “creative accounting” practiced by the studios.
“They are certainly, truly a mafia. They hide the money. They bury the money. They won’t share profits. They won’t pay actors what they’re due on the back end of series,” Sorbo said in a BlogTalkRadio interview last month.
“If you can actually get a truth machine on them, and hear what they really say, and hear what they really think, they don’t even like themselves,” Sorbo said.
After starring in “Hercules” for seven years, Sorbo said, he turned down a contract for another three seasons to pursue other projects. “I had a back-end deal, but they claimed there were no profits,” Sorbo told Page Six. “If that were true, why would they want to do three more years?”
Sorbo said, “In the circle of actors I know, they talk about it all the time. James Garner sued for his share of the profits from ‘The Rockford Files.’ Alan Alda sued over ‘M*A*S*H.’ ”
The late Art Buchwald had an epic court battle with Paramount over “Coming to America” (1988) when the studio claimed it made no “net profit” from the movie’s $288 million gross.
When “Titanic” grossed more than $1 billion and won 11 Academy Awards, Arnold Schwarzenegger got a big laugh from the 1998 Oscar crowd when he cracked that the film’s “profit may grow so large that no [studio] accountant can hide it.”
Sorbo isn’t worried about being black-balled. He has six movies coming out, including “Soul Surfer,” the story of Bethenny Hamilton, the 13-year-old surfer whose arm was bitten off by a shark.
But Sorbo told us he regrets the mafia reference: “I guess I should have said the studios are like a family.” Hmm, a Sicilian family?