I think a lot of the industry's professionals are looking for innovation and a way into the future while the industry itself refuses to provide.
Almost every case I've heard of where an actor or director sued the studio for cooking the books; the studio loses. Why is this not considered a criminal practice? If I were an IRS agent, flying-spaghetti-monster forbid, I think I would make a call to the studio after one of these cases to ask about auditing those cooked books.
Of course, I've heard stories of studios keeping one set of books for the government and another set for people they owe money. Which goes back to that whole fraud thing.
Also, it's not just the movie/tv industry that does this. Just about any major industry that involves a content creator having a relationship with a content distributor you likely see the distributor stealing from the creator.
Somebody eventually makes some money and as long as that money pays taxes the IRS is probably OK with it.
Knowing that this is how the game is played the actors just have to ask for a big pay check so that it works out the same at the end, more or less.
But advertising costs has been one of the "excuses" I've seen why a movie fails to make money. I find that doubtful since the majority of advertisement spending is at the beginning of a movie's lifespan. Many movies continue to generate revenue years after theatrical release due to sales outside of movie tickets such as DVDs or streaming licenses.
In the end, I still have to wonder why such practices are continued to be ignored when they seem so suspect to begin with. Don't forget that the IRS is probably willing to spend a million dollars to squeeze that extra thousand bucks out of you, so I doubt they would just be OK with what they get.
The key is to not let anyone realize it's a scheme to begin with. Hollywood accounting isn't quite like that since almost everyone understands that they do it.
Regardless, as we've said, this is already a rather well-known practice so it's not like it has to be proven that much anymore.
I don't for a second mean to talk down his accomplishments- he's an author, blogger and even TV personality these days- but now that he doesn't rely on his acting career he can talk out against Hollywood accounting. I would imagine that other middling-successful actors would worry about doing that, as Hollywood could easily refuse to hire them and destroy their career.
I guess what I would like to see is someone like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, etc. speak out about this kind of stuff. They're big enough that I don't think Hollywood could shut them out, and they're also successful enough that I don't think Hollywood accounting affects them so much personally. But they could speak out on behalf of lesser known actors.
How successful? Courtney Love also complained about this ages ago:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml
And Wikipedia also has a whole list of lawsuits over it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
For example, on paper, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix lost $167 million dollars. How bad is that? Well:
"Order of the Phoenix is the unadjusted 15th highest-grossing film of all time, [...] The film opened to a worldwide 5-day opening of $333 million, fourth all-time, and grossed $939 million total [...]"
But you have a point. The people who aren't that successful can't afford to rock the boat. But the people who are successful have less incentive to want to, because it no longer affects them as badly. They can demand cash up front and worry less about the alleged financials of the work.
Most of us on this board are probably too young to remember the blackballing of (accused) communists in the 50s and 60s, but that put a permanent end to the career of some fairly big stars of the time. The context is somewhat different, but I think if the (perceived) threat is big enough that there isn't really any actor that's too big to shut out.
Besides, you wouldn't portray him as a terrorist. You'd portray him as a Muslim.
Or a Muslim sympathizer. Better, and yet worse.
True that would probably fail.
However you could say that $ACTOR is a film pirate, and is publicly supporting the pirates, they are publically critizing the anti-piracy campaigns that are affecting this industry, you don't want to hire a star who speaks out about the film industries like that do you? Why don't we all agree that $ACTOR's politicial beliefs make them unsuitable to be the face for $FILM_COMPANY.