FLEMING: Jennifer Lawrence is arguably the highest paid female Hollywood star, but she came out swinging this week on the unfair pay disparity between actresses and their male counterparts. In an essay for Lena Dunham’s online newsletter Lenny, Lawrence attributed the disparity to her “vagina” and the higher pay to her American Hustle co-stars to, well, their “dicks.” When it comes to paydays, women have long held the short end of the stick, not inconsistent with many other industries. While it’s refreshing to see Lawrence put herself out there for a worthy cause, I’m not sure that American Hustle is the movie to use as Exhibit A. Here’s why. Everybody on that particularly film worked for heavy discount to make the numbers work. By the time Lawrence was brought in by her Silver Linings Playbook director David O. Russell to round out that stellar cast, deals were done with other cast members. And then they were changed, as several others gave up back end pieces to make things more palatable to Lawrence, who worked a lot fewer days than most everybody else.

I’m told that Lawrence worked 19 days and was paid $1.25 million and got $250,000 in deferred compensation. She also got seven points in a back end pool that kicked in after cash break zero. Christian Bale worked 45 days for $2.5 million upfront and nine points; Bradley Cooper worked 46 days for $2.5 million and nine points. Amy Adams got $1.25 million and seven points for working 45 days, so if anyone has a beef, it would be her. I’m told that Bale and Cooper each gave a point from their back ends to bring Lawrence up. Russell also gave up some back end and so did Sony and financier Annapurna Pictures, to make the formula work.

BART: Jennifer Lawrence may have fired up her fans, Mike, but she inadvertently focused attention on a related question that she shouldn’t go near: Aren’t all stars, male, female or whatever, absurdly overpaid? The original reason studios lavished big paydays on select actors was that they actually “opened” movies. Shirley Temple opened movies; so did John Wayne. In more recent years, action stars like Stallone and Schwarzenegger triggered substantial advances from foreign distributors. Arguably, neither of these phenomena, however, are true anymore. The combination of an actor and a ‘brand’ – Cruise in a Mission: Impossible, Damon in a Bourne Identity –can guarantee an opening. But the real stars who guarantee opening grosses are faux people like Harry Potter or some character who fell out of a comic book. So Jennifer should be grateful for her fabulous paydays – and change the subject.

FLEMING: I see it a bit differently, Peter. We are watching in real time as this young actress matures and becomes self-aware—I first noticed her like many for her Oscar-nominated turn in Winter’s Bone when she turned 20—and I love the fact she doesn’t pretend to be some fully formed manufactured vision of perfection. She’s this occasionally clumsy coltish young woman from Kentucky who tripped on the stairs before accepting her Oscar, and then laughed about it. When some creep stole her private photos and put them online, Lawrence went public and made people understand what an abhorrent privacy invasion might feel like. Those were stolen computer documents and so were the Sony hacks that put the American Hustle information in circulation and brought it all to her attention. I’ve found those hacked documents are embraced as full truth when they tell half a story and lead to conclusions that are too simplistic. American Hustle was a terrific movie and it doesn’t deserve to be the poster child for Hollywood sexism and unfair pay. Everybody sacrificed to get that movie made; if the actors and director had been greedy and insisted on their usual fees, a worthy film would have died at the negotiating table. That’s why you rarely see films with that many bankable stars. American Hustle got 10 Oscar nominations, including for all four of those actors and Russell for directing and co-writing. From Adams on down, all got momentum from success that benefited them in subsequent film negotiations. That includes Lawrence, who I hear got paid $20 million to star in Sony’s Passengers, a fee that was $5 million or $7 million more than her co-star Chris Pratt got, and he’s undeniably the fastest rising male actor in Hollywood.

It’s too simple to peg these deals to the anatomical terms Lawrence used in her essay. It’s all about momentum and leverage and some deals benefit studios and others benefit talent. Everybody kicked and moaned when Marvel insisted on as many as ten options for actors who signed on for superhero roles. You don’t hear anybody complaining much now, because those movies have been such huge successes that helped all those actors make better deals for other movies. That includes Scarlett Johansson, who because of her Black Widow turns in Iron Man and The Avengers was set by Luc Besson for Lucy, and off that got $10 million or more for the upcoming film Ghost in the Shell. Is she worth it? Time will tell. The actress I feel sorry for is Emily Blunt, who was all but set to play Black Widow until Fox enforced an option and instead made her co-star with Jack Black in the forgettable Gulliver’s Travels. But Blunt has rebounded and showed her chops in films like Sicario and Edge of Tomorrow. So while recent Hollywood chatter has Doug Liman on an inside track to direct Channing Tatum in Gambit, there’s also talk that Liman and Tom Cruise might do a sequel to Edge of Tomorrow. In that case, Blunt’s warrior character would likely be back and she’ll get her payday.

Fairness has never been at the core of pay for actors who in films from American Sniper to Forrest Gump have made back end paydays of $40 million or more for what amounts to a few months of work. You’re right, Peter; almost no actor ensures an opening weekend bonanza, and gone are the days of first dollar gross paydays where you would hear that an actor like Tom Cruise earned $50 million from a Mission: Impossible film before Paramount recouped the hundreds of millions it invested in budget and P&A. Men, more than women, benefited from that system, partly because it was thought they were more reliable than women in action vehicles that performed globally. All that said, good for Lawrence, for being willing to wave the flag for fairer paydays and raise awareness at the risk of being told to shut up—your suggestion—because she makes a fortune now on every movie. Actresses on the low end of the pay scale are the ones who might benefit from her words. I applaud her and other actresses—and actors like Cooper—who are commenting on her comments.

It’s hard for me to speak about my experience as a working woman because I can safely say my problems aren’t exactly relatable. When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn’t get mad at Sony. I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early. I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don’t need. (I told you it wasn’t relatable, don’t hate me).

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Jeremy Renner, Christian Bale, and Bradley Cooper all fought and succeeded in negotiating powerful deals for themselves. If anything, I’m sure they were commended for being fierce and tactical, while I was busy worrying about coming across as a brat and not getting my fair share. Again, this might have NOTHING to do with my vagina, but I wasn’t completely wrong when another leaked Sony email revealed a producer referring to a fellow lead actress in a negotiation as a “spoiled brat.” For some reason, I just can’t picture someone saying that about a man.