No Budget?

I read a long exchange somewhere. It was over what was really a philosophical question. A guy was  outraged that movies made for no money are called "zero budget movies". Because, he argued, even if you didn't pay people, you should still count the value of unpaid labor as part of the budget. They were LYING to people, making them think you can make a movie for no money just because you didn't spend any money to make a movie.

If you make a contribution to a movie that you know full well will have no monetary value, does your contribution have monetary value?

What about Woody Allen? Huge stars appear in his movies and he pays them the union minimum. He underpaid his crew, too. So are they lying when they state the budgets of Allen's movies without calculating how much everyone should really have been paid? Stars appear in Allen's movies only when they have nothing better to do---no higher paying jobs to do instead---and they do it because it's an easy gig and there's a good chance that they'll get an Oscar out of it.

In the case of people working on a zero budget movie without pay, they're getting experience and something to put on their resume. If they're lucky a listing on Internet Movie Database.

One person responded that he filmed his dog in his living room. What was the budget for that video? There was a directing fee, a fee for acting as camera operator, equipment rental and location fee. He was acting as an "animal wrangler". There was dog rental. There's social security, medicare, unemployment insurance, workman's comp. Can you make a home movie for less that $10,000?

The guy thought that people who wanted to make "no budget" movies thought that they would be just like Hollywood movies.