MAD AS HELL : A Few Good Salaries . . .

Regarding the item Nov. 1 on the making of “A Few Good Men” and the reported salaries of Jack Nicholson ($5 million) and Tom Cruise ($12.5 million):

I find it pathetic, depressing and ultimately obscene to live in a world where an actor (Nicholson) can make $500,000 a day for 10 days’ work, when in the same city teachers are forced to take pay cuts on their already meager salaries. It’s just incredibly staggering how sick this is!

I am a teacher making barely $30,000 a year. If I can afford to remain a teacher for another 20 years, even allowing for pay raises, I would make a little more than half what Nicholson made for one day! I don’t mean to pick on Nicholson, as he is one of my favorite actors, but the knowledge of his reported salary was the catalyst to my writing.

We live in an area that overly rewards those in the entertainment industry and forces educators to fight constantly for their salaries. Why is it that actors are treated as our saviors, when educators (who have the more important position of caring for the future of our children) are treated as peasants?

If actors such as Nicholson, Cruise and many, many others took even a 10% pay cut, and these monies went into the education of our children (with better supplies, facilities and innovative approaches, as well as educators’ salaries), then maybe students wouldn’t be more concerned with the lives of celebrities and the world of movies, and would be more intellectually charged by their schooling.

I realize, of course, that this is not the only solution to a staggering social problem. It just underscores the inequities that exist. I’m sure I’m not the only one frustrated by this situation.

ELLYN BELINSKI

Riverside