Dennis weaver is 80 years old now,, but he still resembles the familiar lanky, mustachioed cowboy cop he played on McCloud, a TV series that ran all of seven seasons before getting canceled by NBC in 1977. Today Weaver lives in the House That Reruns Built―a comfortable beachfront home in Malibu, Calif. Under Hollywood's standard union contract he still collects periodic residual checks from 45 episodes of McCloud. Though the show ended decades ago, the checks will keep flowing for the rest of his life, thanks to a contract provision he personally negotiated for all actors as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the mid-1970s. Hollywood studios and producers pay out $2 billion a year in residual fees, a virtual corporate welfare system tha harks back to the dawn of radio in the 1940s. The revenue flow amounts to a small trickle for most of the thousands of actors, writers, directors and stuntmen eligible for payment, but it underscores everything that is upside down about the economics of Hollywood. In what other business do you get paid handsomely for a day's work―and then keep getting paid over and over again for years to come?
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