There is a lot of talk in the production industry about the need to have an A-List celebrity attached to a project in order to obtain funding. This is a bit misleading.
First, most people do not understand exactly what an A-List celebrity is. There is a general understanding that an A-List celebrity is someone extremely well known, and therefore marketable. But, the term actually comes from a complex system of measurement invented by an entertainment journalist named James Ulmer.
The Ulmer Scale is a rating system designed to quantify an actor’s value to a production. It includes an analysis of professional demeanor, public image, historical box office success, willingness to travel in order to promote a film, and their over-all versatility in handling different roles.
An actor’s placement on the Ulmer Scale then determines their marketability in terms of a score similar to a person’s credit score. These scores are then broken down into subcategories that are given letter grades.
The top percentage, and highest paid, are categorized as the A-List. Slightly lesser known actors, new faces in the industry, and pop stars that may not last are then categorized as the B-List. The C-List is then populated by working actors with a solid body of work that are recognizable, but are easily forgotten.
The final category of marketable talent is the D-List. This is an unusual category because it contains smaller celebrities with little market value, but they tend to be incredibly vocal about their ranking. This is the List that tends to contain the majority of comedians, stand-up acts, live performers, and general extroverted personalities. While their pay scale is at the bottom and their marketability is ranked as minimal they still manage to maintain a cult status that is nearly as great as the reputations associated with A-List celebrities.
The flaw in the Ulmer Scale is that it is based on a broad generalization of the production industry as a whole. It can only determine an actor’s value to a production that is designed for standardized mass media exposure. There is no inherent methodology within the Ulmer Scale for determining an actor’s value to a production that has a specific target demographic.
For example, a romantic comedy that targets an LGBT audience would benefit more from signing Ellen DeGeneres than it would from signing Will Smith. Or, similarly, a production designed to target a young Latino audience would benefit more from including Jessica Alba than a well know A-List actor like Danny DeVito.
Therefore, the importance of having an A-List actor attached to your production in order to obtain financing is not exactly a rule so much as it is a guideline. You must be able to analyze your production in advance in order to determine what actor would be the most valuable to your production as an individual business venture, not just to the industry as a whole.
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