Rock has Alec on career roll

ALEC Baldwin would often get the jitters about his commitment to sitcom 30 Rock.

Rock has Alec on career roll

ALEC Baldwin would often get the jitters about his commitment to sitcom 30 Rock.

Playing Jack Donaghy rebooted his career, but whenever contract negotiations came up there was speculation Baldwin would pull the pin.

As fans prepare for the season seven finale - and the end of the show - Baldwin has revealed he not only wanted an eighth season, but he'd have taken a salary hit to achieve it.

"I offered NBC to cut my pay 20 per cent in order to have a full seventh and eighth season of 30 Rock. I realise times have changed," he tweeted.

Baldwin has conceded that his only real low point came during season five. He wanted out because he felt the standard of writing had slipped. His faith was restored when 30 Rock writers delivered cracking scripts for season six.

Cast and crew have marked the show's end by posting a farewell video titled Thank You Tina Fey, on the show's website. They lauded Fey's brilliance as a writer and mentor and the kindness she showed as a friend and workmate. Filming the video reduced stars Tracy Morgan and Jane Krakowski to tears.

"She has gone through a phase in her career where her light shone so brightly and she shared her light with all of us, which is really sweet," Krakowski said.

"She's a champion," Morgan added.

30 Rock boosted Baldwin's stocks in the movie business, with credits including the critically-acclaimed Woody Allen film Blue Jasmine. But he's less than cheery about the effort involved in trying to get a decent film made.

In Seduced and Abandoned, Baldwin presents a portrait of today's movie business and an elegy to what it once was. In person, Baldwin's even more candid, venting on tasteless studio executives.

Baldwin knocked around the Cannes Film Festival last year, documenting the humbling process of Hollywood deal-making and trying to get financing for a film.

"You wind up not having any faith in it, in terms of having a career at it," Baldwin says of movies. "The business model in terms of actors making a living at it is collapsing because you can't get paid to make a movie. Everybody does TV because you're not out there having to kill yourself to get an audience the way you do in the movie business.

"People I work with, they want you to become their partner in raising money. They want you to become their partner in collapsing their fees. They want you to become their partner, now, in selling the movie. They want you on a plane going to festivals and you're on the phone with reporters all the time. The amount of work outside the shooting of the film has become absolutely unconscionable. All the fun of it is gone. You talk it to death."

* 30 Rock finale, Channel 7, Wednesday, November 13, 11.30pm