"Who gets the fees and royalties from Babylon 5 licensed
merchandise?"

Warner Bros. This income is cross-collatoralized against costs of
production and distribution in determining net profit. Translation: no
net profit. I do not get a creator's fee from the comic or the novels.
All income goes to Warners, which then puts it against costs.

"Who gets the fees from personal appearances?" The person making
the appearance. I do not get any money from actors' appearances. I do
get small fees for my own apperances, but the problem is that because of
my height, I generally need to fly first. Most cons can afford to pay
for either coach or business. So I make up the difference, which in many
cases means I end up either breaking even, or losing a bit.

"Who gets the royalties from Babylon 5 publications?" Warner Bros.
See above.

"Are these fees and royalties plowed back into the series
production?" No. Warners collects those fees and puts them into an
account marked INCOME. Costs associated with the creation of the show are
marked DEBITS. The job of ALL of the studios is to make sure that, on
paper, the INCOME never gets higher than the DEBITS line.

Re: the production costs...we tell Warners what we think it will cost
to make the show at its best level. That is what they give us. And that
is what we use to make the show.

This is how all TV shows work, particularly at the syndication level.
Hugely rated network shows can use the leverage to re-negotiate and change
the profit formula slightly to redefine "net" and remove such things as
distribution fees and the like. That's not the case with B5.

And now for the one personal observation...you have now hit a new low,
Theron. You can't find anything else to attack, your claims are consistent
bullshit, so now you start throwing around the suspicion that maybe someone
(viz: me) is making huge amounts of profit on B5 and short-shrifting the
production.

Have you no shame at *all*?

jms

Kevin: I'm paid a salary per episode produced, a creator's royalty
of a few hundred bucks per ep, and the script fee for any script I write.
By conventional standards, as compared to truly worthwhile jobs, like
teaching, it's a good chunk of change; compared to what you get on a
network show, it's basically chump-change. But I ain't really in this
to make a gazillion bucks; I want to tell this story.

jms

Neil: on actors getting a piece of their merchandise...roll this one
around for a bit...the majority of ST actors (excluding Nimoy, Kelley and
Shatner) have each gotten, roughly, $16,000 as their share of profit
sharing/merchandising over the 25 years of ST history. Ain't life funny?

jms

It was always clear that we'd go with either 22, 24 or 25 episodes
per season, so that was accommodated in the early structure.

jms

Yeah, maybe it wasn't a direct shot this time, but you have to
understand how Theron works. It works something like this....

T: "That's a nice haircut."

S: "Thank you."

"It shows your profile to best effect."

"Thank you."

"Good sculpting on the back."

"Umm, hmm."

"So overall, it's a very nice haircut."

"Thank you."

"Well, for an axe murderer...."

After a while, y'know...why wait?

jms