Pajamas Media

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You had a percentage of the net? Oh, my. How green you must have been. A law professor of mine who had spent years in the entertainment industry told us to always get a percentage of the gross, becuase there’s never a net.

Don, your law professor was even more green than I was. Writers almost never get a percentage of the gross. The system is rigged against them.

I could go into the rare instances when they do, but it would bore you. (One minor one is that those previously nominated for an Academy Award – a tiny number of writers – are entitled to one percent of the gross from one studio – Sony – via a determined negotiation with the WGA.)

Roger,

I bet Universal claims that Rockford Files is still in the red and that the gold Firebird is still in a collision shop getting repaired for more than what a new one would cost.

Though I’m not going to cry about the sad plight of screenwriters. I understand the going rate for a screenplay that won’t get produced is about $100K.

Like most negotiated labor benefits, residual payments exist to give the average worker some economic leverage. Jack Nicholson has the leverage to get gross points on the Batman series, but an actor in a Cheerios commercial doesn’t have that kind of power.

As you pointed out, the residuals can be a significant source of income. Susan Calloway, a Detroit area singer songwriter, was able to buy a home from the residuals on commercials with her singing a Sears jingle. Peter Himmelman, who has put out about a dozen critically acclaimed albums, started working on movie and tv scores. He was the music director for Judging Amy which was on the air for at least 5 years and is now in syndication. He’s indicated that the residual income from the reruns gives him considerable economic freedom. Not considerable enough to stop working, he’s doing Fox’s series Bones now, but still a nice chunk of change.

residuals mean that the artist is paid each time his product is shown to paying audiences, right?

very off topic (I think): I was a librarian and very interested in information, ALL information, being Free and Available to all. Photocopying a poem, a book; copying a video for use in a classroom; what was the problem? Well, during a panel on copyright law, one fella noted that not one librarian in the audience was going to work for free. Well, neither should actors and writers, eh?

The trouble with the future is: how to do you make the internet pay???

The uh, shall we say, “Adult entertainment” industry has been able to make the internet pay quite nicely. (Or so I hear. Wouldn’t know myself.) For example – without getting into the merit of the series itself – ‘Firefly’ fans would have been thrilled to plunk down money for a subscription that let them download a new epsisode each week. For those with slow or no connections a DVD could be sent via snail-mail. Although e-books and such really haven’t taken off, that is likely a problem of download times, which are improving, and the reputation of the product. But by beginning with niches for which small groups of devoted fans are prepared to put up the $$. In fact, it seems to me that the writers would be doing themselves a favor by offering their best efforts to smaller producers who will be thrilled to get them, taking advantage of how loudly internet ‘word of mouth’ can talk.

I don’t get it.
People sue each other all the time in Hollywood. If the studio is being fraudulent and cooking the books, aren’t there lawyers who can get them for it? I hear similar claims alleging fraud by music companies, and that also doesn’t make sense to me. Where are all our lawyers?

Does this explain why summer action pictures appear to be made without the benefit of writers?

LTEC, yes Hollywood is full of lawyers. But… for a screenwriter to sue the studios (considering that they already have mammoth full-time legal staffs) is a hugely costly endeavor. You had better be sure you are going to win. And the odds are stacked against you. The movie companies instituted something called the “rolling break,” as inrolling break-even. What that means in the short form is that whenever a movie seems to be going into profit, more money on prints and promotion is spent and the elusive profit disappears (essentially never happens). They have brilliant accountants a la Meyer Lansky.

To Michael, your question is much simpler. The answer is yes.

Not great news for an aspiring screenwriter with a day job. But then, the RWB Principle is in force; those in power have risen above the level of their incompetence, the rest of us are barely paid scale.

Roger –

Have you ever read overlawyered.com?
It seems that plenty of people much poorer than screenwriters, with very weak cases, seem to be able to successfully sue very rich organizations. It happens all the time. Fancy accounting the problem, you say? We often hear about criminal cases and lawsuits (Black, Enron, etc.) involving incredibly complicated accounting issues.

Sorry, but I still don’t understand the helplessness in the face of fraud of screenwriters and musicians.

I’m talking about the studio production executives – those well-coiffed factotums who fill the studio offices writing endless useless script notes and taking pointless meetings for which they are paid salaries commensurate to the former Shah of Iran.

I think those executives are earning their money by, among other things, getting scripts at cut rate prices. Remember, the job of corporate executive is to maximize the return of the owners/investors, not to insure that various vendors make a lot of money.

Since all the studios seem to follow the same model, it would seem that there is no competitive disadvantage in low balling the pay of the vast majority of creative talent that wants to make movies.

I suspect that screenwriting follows the “rock and roll” economic model wherein a vast number of people want to be rock stars but only a very small number ever make a good living at it. Its a running joke that everyone in LA has a screenplay. Supply and demand dictates that prices won’t be good. Studios also put up all the money for movies. Without that money, nothing gets done so they have tremendous leverage when negotiating.

So youe “Fess”-ed up that you got “Boone”-ed

One benefit of residuals to the studios might be that they are able to buy screenwriting for less, since the real $ will be paid ONLY if the production is successful enough to be shown multiple times. Kind of like a contingency-fee arrangement with writers. If they succeed in eliminating residuals, they might be surprised to find the cost of the initial scripts going up … unless the supply of (good enough) screenwriters so exceeds the demand that they will forever be a dime-a-dozen….