20 Directors Who Got Richer Than The Stars They Filmed

Alfred Hitchcock was a British-born director known for making great suspense films. Paramount didn’t want to make Psycho, so he financed it himself through his own production company. He gave up his normal director’s salary in exchange for 60% of the net profits, as well as the rights to the master copy of the film. It worked: Psycho was a huge success, and Hitchcock made over $15 million on his own. Meanwhile, his stars Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh both received flat salaries for their roles.

Charlie Chaplin didn’t just star in his films. He also established the distribution company United Artists in 1919, along with the director D. W. Griffith and the actors Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, to distribute his pictures. He paid for his own films, owned the studio lot, and kept the rights to the negatives to many films, including The Gold Rush, while supporting actresses were paid salaries. Chaplin died in 1977 with an estate estimated at $50 million to $100 million.

Walt Disney was a cartoonist and director before he set up shop. He created Steamboat Willie in 1928. He never sold the rights to the characters when his studio branched out into features, TV shows, and theme parks, instead retaining copyright and equity. Disney’s performers, including the man who voiced Goofy, received salaries, not royalties. At the time of his death in 1966, Disney’s net worth exceeded $100 million.

Instead of taking a flat fee from Paramount, Leo McCarey, the Oscar-winning director of Going My Way, negotiated for a share of the profits. When 1944 tax records came out, McCarey was at the top of the list. Not only was he the highest-paid director in America that year, but he was the highest-paid person in the country. His stars, Bing Crosby and Cary Grant, worked under normal studio contracts.

William Wyler, a three-time Academy Award winner, made sure he took more than just a fat salary for Ben-Hur, MGM’s epic. He demanded $350,000 up front plus 3% of the gross if the film took in more than $20 million, a deal based on gross and not net profits. Ben-Hur was one of the most successful films of the time, and it made Wyler another few million. Charlton Heston, the film’s star, received a much smaller, standard-contract fee.

George Stevens, the director, had more power than most of his peers, having co-founded the independent company Liberty Films in 1945. For Giant in 1956, Stevens demanded 50% of net profits, which meant he’d receive an equal share of any proceeds after Warner Bros. recouped production expenses and its distribution fee. When the movie proved a hit, it deposited millions in Stevens’s bank account, eventually making him richer than his young co-star, James Dean.

Cecil B. DeMille didn’t become rich off one movie. In 1913, he helped start a production company that became part of Paramount Pictures, and he had a stake in that company for the rest of his career, in addition to getting a percentage of the profits from his epics, including 1956’s The Ten Commandments. Heston, who played Moses in that movie, earned a flat studio salary with no ownership stake. DeMille’s estate was valued at more than $4 million when he died in 1959.

D.W. Griffith directed The Birth of a Nation in 1915, then co-founded the company that financed and distributed it, before helping to found United Artists in 1919. His investment was backed by his equity in those companies and his ownership over distribution, not by his own percentage on the film’s box office. A separate 25% share of the picture’s profits went to the man who owned the story. His star, Lillian Gish, was paid a standard silent movie rate.

Frank Capra took Columbia Pictures from a struggling independent and turned it into one of Hollywood’s biggest studios. After the success of 1934’s It Happened One Night, Capra was the highest-paid director of the 1930s, earning base salaries of over $100,000 per film as well as a share of the profits. When MGM loaned its contract star Clark Gable to Columbia for that film, it was just a routine money-making deal, and Gable received his regular $2,000 per week salary. Capra’s bonuses and ownership stake made him richer.

Hungarian-American Casablanca director Michael Curtiz made top studio pay of $3,000 to $5,000 a week in the 1930s and 1940s. He didn’t blow it. Instead, he bought up real estate and farms in Southern California, as well as thoroughbred racehorses. Curtiz’s number-one studio contract star, Errol Flynn, blew through the same kind of money and died deeply in debt. Curtiz’s land and horses kept paying out long after the movie cameras stopped.

Two of 1939’s most iconic films, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, were directed by Victor Fleming, who was the highest-paid director at MGM, making more than $200,000 per film. Fleming steadily invested those earnings in real estate in Southern California, cattle ranches, and top-quality shares, amassing wealth that dwarfed the weekly wage of his young Wizard of Oz star, Judy Garland. When Fleming died in 1949, he left behind a multi-million-dollar estate.

As an MGM director, Clarence Brown had trained as an engineer before he trained as a filmmaker, and he approached his financial matters in the same way. He invested his director’s salary in Southern California real estate, stocks, and aviation ventures. At the time of his death in 1987, he bequeathed $12 million to the University of Tennessee. That was more than any of his contract stars, Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford among them, ever managed to retain.

King Vidor, the film’s director, took backend profit points on the 1925 film The Big Parade, which was MGM’s highest-grossing silent movie. With those proceeds, he purchased six acres on Summitridge Drive in Beverly Hills in 1936 for $16,000. By the end of the century, they were worth tens of millions, far more than Gilbert, the film’s lead actor, ever made.

Howard Hawks, who made The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo, turned down the long-term contracts most directors had. Instead, he worked as a freelance producer-director, kept backend points and rights to stories on his films, then invested the money in Southern California real estate and oil wells. It made Hawks richer than the star actors he directed, such as Cary Grant or a young John Wayne.

Starting in the early 1950s with films like The Moon Is Blue, Otto Preminger, an Austrian filmmaker, made movies on his own terms rather than following studio censorship rules. Being self-financed allowed Preminger to retain control of his master negatives and foreign distribution. The proceeds were invested in real estate and a valuable art collection, making Preminger vastly richer than the stars he worked with, such as Frank Sinatra and James Stewart.

Alexander Korda was a Hungarian-born film tycoon, the director who made The Private Life of Henry VIII. He founded London Films in London, then built Denham Studios in Buckinghamshire. He held the majority stake, all distribution rights, and the real estate. In 1942, Korda became the first film director to be knighted. He was far richer than Charles Laughton, the star of The Private Life of Henry VIII, who earned only a salary for his films.

Hal Roach, the Culver City studio founder behind Our Gang and the comedies of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, kept sole title to his film library. He licensed it to TV in the 1950s, pioneered syndication, and continued to collect royalties for decades. Laurel and Hardy, contract players at Roach’s studio, received flat weekly wages and reaped nothing from that money. Roach died in 1992, at age 100, worth more than $10 million.

German-born director Ernst Lubitsch, famed for the wry humor in Ninotchka, did something no other Golden Age director managed. In 1935, Paramount named him head of production, making him responsible for the studio’s overall output while still working as a filmmaker himself. His $250,000 salary plus a percentage of profits was more than most stars signed on for, more, even, than what Greta Garbo, one of MGM’s biggest stars, took in. He quit his post as production chief after a year, but he kept his salary.

Raoul Walsh was also one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and spent 50 years as a director at Fox and Warner Bros., sinking his paycheck into buying up California ranch land. In 1928, he was scouting locations in Utah when a jackrabbit leaped into his windshield and took out his right eye. The story goes that it wasn’t a barroom brawl, as rumored. He kept directing for decades and died in 1980 with a vast ranch portfolio, surpassing such contract players as James Cagney.

The six-time Oscar-winning writer-director behind such classics as Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder negotiated percentage profit shares on his ’50s pictures and invested in works by Picasso, Miró and Giacometti. When 94 pieces of his collection were sold at Christie’s in 1989, they fetched $32.6 million. “I didn’t get rich making pictures. I got rich collecting pictures,” Wilder said.

This content was created with the help of AI.