Nowadays (since 1978), aside from works made for hire (ie., employees doing so for their employer), and absent a ‘written’ agreement to the contrary, whoever ‘fixes’ a work in a tangible medium of expression is the author, and claimant to as well as owner of the copyright rights to the work.
A ‘work made for hire’ is an employee authoring the work (ie., fixing the work in a tangible medium of expression) for the employer, wherein the employer is deemed the author, claimant and owner.
Under U.S. law, a transfer of copyright rights requires a written agreement (and is preferably recorded with the U.S. Copyright Office or else a subsequent transferee might take good title over previous transferee(s)).
You have no copyright rights in your face or performances because neither are ‘fixed’ (in a tangible medium of expression) until recorded.
Copyright rights are essentially the right to ‘exclude’ others from using the copyrighted work, as the right to use it may be in conflict with someone else’s right to ‘exclude’ its use.
This happens way too often when a patent owner pays a software developer to author code which has no other use but an infringing use of the patent rights, did not secure in advance a written transfer, and then the relationship melts. In such situations, the patent owner and copyright owner have a standoff. Each can exclude the other from infringing each one’s personally-owned Intellectual Property rights, but has no right using the other’s. Usually this leaves the software developer with code he or she cannot use/re-use, and leaves the patent owner shopping for a new software developer who will be commissioned to produce an independently original work (probably under a written agreement).
If a photograph is taken of a copyrighted poster, the right to copy the photograph might be excluded by the copyright rights in the poster.
The right to use a copyrighted work might be in conflict with other sources of ‘rights’ beyond copyright and patent law, such as and without limitation the rights of (to a lesser extent) privacy and/or (to a greater degree) publicity.
A use which might be squarely encompassed by someone else’s right to exclude its use might be allowable nevertheless under some permitted defense, the ‘fair use’ use defense being the most commonly-given justification to self-help (the validity of such defenses are not known until raised in court and the court delivers its decision).
One brief remark to make about Hollywood films is, that these are expensive business undertakings conducted under a highly formalized structure of contracts, something which would make the amount of documents you sign when refinancing your home mortgage look like peanuts. And in any event, the work authored by an employee-cinematographer would belong to (in the absence of a written agreement to the contrary, either between the employee and employer, or else employer and a transferee) the employer.
Or at least this is what my students at a local college have been being taught since 1999. Here’s some ‘air’ photos from 1998 (Covered by U.S. Patent Nos. 5,647,294; 6,070,544 and 6,073,568).
Ollie.
Heelside.
Toeside.