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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/how-movie-money-works).

**John August:** Hello. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you today, Craig?

**Craig:** — Caught me mid-sip again. I’m doing fine today. Doing fine. How about yourself?

**John:** I’m doing really well.

Now Craig, whenever I bring up a television show, your standard response is that you have not seen it because you don’t watch any television shows. So I thought today I would ask what was the last movie you saw in the theater?

**Craig:** The Help.

**John:** The Help. Did you enjoy The Help?

**Craig:** I did enjoy The Help, I have to say. I thought that it was very well directed. Viola Davis, who I mention frequently, is a spectacularly good actor, and I like watching her in pretty much everything. I wasn’t familiar with her until I saw Doubt, and she’s only in Doubt for two scenes really.

But she has this one scene with Meryl Streep that is just unreal, I mean just spectacular, and a great example of a scene where the director just got completely out of the way and just covered it over a two-shot and just let the actors do what they do.

**John:** Yeah. The director’s name is Tate Taylor and actually a person I’ve known for a very long time. He’s part of the same crew with Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer, so it’s been great to see him have such a success.

**Craig:** Yes. Tate Taylor did not direct Doubt. He directed The Help.

**John:** No, no, no. The Help. So The Help was also a tremendous success. That was one of the breakout movies that did not cost a lot of money, made a tremendous amount of money at the box office, and should therefore be completely profitable. Isn’t that correct?

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, [laughs] yes and no. It depends. Define “profit,” John.

**John:** Well, I think that’s exactly what we’re going to try to do today. I thought of this actually this weekend. I went to go see Puss in Boots, the animated Puss in Boots, which was actually really good. But I hadn’t seen the Shrek movies for a long time, so this was the first time getting back into that world. It was really nicely done.

But as I was buying my ticket, I started to think about like, “Wow. How much of this ticket is actually going to go back to the movie versus the everything else of it all?” So this is going to be an upper-level discussion I think because it’s not talking just about the words on the page but just how the film industry works and how money in the film industry works. So let’s put on our big brains and talk through the whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s worse than big-boy pants today. Well, it’s a good thing we’re talking about it because it actually is very relevant for what we do. Screenwriters are in a constant state of employment-seeking. We write movies. Movies are expensive to make, still, no matter what anybody tells you, and even more expensive to market.

So we are relying on people to pay us and to support the films that we want to write. If we’re going to do that, if we’re going to dance that dance, it’s probably a good idea for us to understand how the business works from their end, because it directly impacts us.

**John:** Yeah. Well, one of the most fundamental things I think we have to understand about how film economics works is that every movie is considered its own company. It’s considered its own venture. So The Hangover 2, it was set up as its own company to produce a movie called The Hangover 2. All the accounting for The Hangover 2 exists within this bubble for this one movie.

So they will charge any possible expense against this movie for The Hangover 2, and the money that comes in will eventually get a portion to it. The same for The Help. The same for every different movie. On independent films, like The Nines, there’s a little bit more transparency because you’re seeing exactly what money is spent and what money is coming in.

On bigger movies it becomes more complicated, because there’s just so much money coming in and going out. But ultimately they’re set up the same way, which is that each film is its own venture and has its own accounting for profit and loss. Almost no movie is going to show a profit because of the things we’re going to talk about today.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re certainly not going to show a net profit as defined by the studios. Look. It’s all tautological, and a net profit is what they define net profit as. There are certain facts that don’t change, and the facts are some things cost money and some things make money. Obviously, movies tend to make money. That’s why these businesses continue.

These studios, regardless of the fact that the ownership has changed hands over the years, most of them have been around for decades and decades. They are among the older businesses in the country. So obviously, movies make money. How they define making money, the rest of it, that’s the accounting stuff. So there are two ways we can approach this, which is, “How do movies actually make money?” And then, “Why do they keep saying they don’t?”

**John:** Yeah. So let’s break it into two different categories. There’s the money that you spend and the money that comes in. So first let’s talk through all the stuff that’s about the money that you’re spending in order to make a movie and market a movie. After we’ve made the movie, then we’ll start talking about the money coming back in from people buying tickets and buying DVDs.

So let’s first just talk about the money that we’re spending. The first thing if you’re going to approach making a movie is you have to buy the rights to something.

**Craig:** Oop! You’re already too late in the timeline. There’s something before that. The very first thing that will eventually be considered an expense of your movie are the salaries of the people at the studio.

**John:** The overhead.

**Craig:** Yup, overhead. Just business. Cost of business.

**John:** Generally, a 10 percent overhead is charged against a movie, although it can change based on the terms in people’s contracts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So yes, there are preexisting costs called “overhead,” which are going to be a percentage of the total budget of the movie. As you start to approach making this one individual movie, the first thing you’re going to do is get the rights to something, or you’re going to buy a script that will become the underlying source for something.

So if you are making The Help, for example, you are going to buy the rights to Kathryn Stockett’s book I think. I hope I get her name right. So you have to buy the rights to her book. You need to hire a writer to adapt the book, which in this case is Tate Taylor.

Those are your first line out of expenses that you’re talking about for your movie. So however many, if it’s $100,000 you bought her book for, if it’s $100,000 you paid for the script, those are your first expenses that you’re running down.

Shortly after that, you have a director who you’re hiring on to direct this movie. You have the producers who are going to be producing this movie. A whole other podcast can be about producers and what good producers do and what terrible producers do, and why people get producer credits who probably shouldn’t get producer credits. But there will be producers, and those people are accounted for at this point, too.

You have actors. You have talented actors like Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer and everyone else who’s in that movie. Those are additional salaries that you’re paying for in this initial part of the process. Everyone whose salaries I’ve mentioned so far, those are considered above the line. So studio budgets for movies have what’s called “above the line” and “below the line.”

Above the line is the rights to the material, the writer, the director, producers, the actors. Is there anything else that usually gets counted above the line?

**Craig:** No, that is the above the line. The phrase comes from the fact that there’s an actual line, because the notion is “above the line” is the material and the “talent.” Then “below the line” is the crew and the physical expense of making a movie.

**John:** Yeah, and so really talented people are below the line. So you’ve got costume designers below the line. Your cinematographers are below the line. Your editors are below the line. But they’re not considered that above the line talent. Where it could become helpful to discuss the difference between above the line and below the line is certain kinds of movies will be very expensive above the line and very inexpensive below the line.

For example, when they were making those really high-concept Jim Carrey comedies, those were a classic example of “You’re paying Jim Carrey $20 million, but your whole budget in the movie is maybe $40 million.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** It’s a huge chunk of the budget. Increasingly, I would say that I don’t see that split quite as much because it tends to be like you’re paying somebody a ton of money and then you’re also making an incredibly expensive movie beyond that.

**Craig:** Yeah, or in the case of a movie where it’s a smaller film but you want a big star, they get creative with paying the star out of the real profits of the movie as opposed to guaranteeing them a massive payment up front.

**John:** Exactly, but above the line is all those billboard names plus all the actors, the writer, director, producers. Below the line, everybody who’s physically responsible for making the movie, so their salaries plus the actual expenses of shooting the movie, taking the movie through post, color correction. Everything that leads up to “Here is the finished movie that we can deliver and show to the world.”

So when you add together the above the line and the below the line, you have what’s called the “negative cost,” which is confusing because it sounds like it’s a minus number. It’s not. Negative cost literally refers to the cost to get you to the film negative that you are going from there be able to generate all the prints that you’re sending out to the world and releasing theatrically.

So when you see in a Variety story, like “this movie had an estimated negative cost of $80 million,” they’re referring to that’s how much they spent to get the movie finished.

One weird thing that didn’t occur to me until I started really getting profit statements on movies that I’ve worked on is you think the negative cost is just done at a certain point. Like “Okay, we delivered the movie. So the negative cost won’t go any higher than that.” But it still does, because they still find new things to charge against the movie years down the road.

**Craig:** That’s right; that’s right. Yeah, the accounting becomes amazing. Truly amazing.

**John:** So after buying the rights to material, hiring writers, hiring a director, hiring actors, hiring a crew, you went and shot the movie. You took the movie through post. You’ve delivered the movie to a studio. Now is the time to spend the money to market the movie and to create the actual physical prints that will go out to the world. So that’s called P & A, or prints and advertising.

Back when I was in the Stark Program, they would have us budget $2,000 per print for releasing theatrically. So literally it’s a 35-millimeter print that you are having Technicolor or Deluxe make and then ship to the theater and stick in the projector and show to the world. I don’t really know what the correct accounting is for a print now, especially if it’s digital, but there still can be a fee charged for every print to every theater.

**Craig:** There’s a cost. Yeah, there’s a cost involved in just making the prints, and they still make a ton of physical prints for movies. I think probably most movies are still physically projected. That part of the process also includes, I believe, dubbing and subtitling for foreign territories.

**John:** Yeah, and it seems like a weird thing, “Oh, well, $2,000.” Like $2,000 isn’t really that much compared to the budgets of these movies. But if you’re releasing on 3,000 screens simultaneously, that’s $6 million you just spent to make the physical prints.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it’s definitely real money for sure.

**John:** It’s real money.

**Craig:** The “A” in P & A is the killer though. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, so “A” is all the advertising. When you think about advertising, your first instinct is naturally going to TV, which I’m sure is still the bulk of what people are spending for…

**Craig:** For sure, yeah.

**John:** …marketing. So it’s every 30-second spot, every Super Bowl spot you’re buying for $1 million for that one launch thing. So that’s the easy money to think about for P & A. For independent films, you may never have a TV commercial, but you’re still spending on advertising because it gets down to the little banner ads you buy on websites.

You’re paying co-op money to the theater owners for the little listing in the newspaper that says, “Now playing at this…” and “Here are the show times.” You have to pay for every one of those little things. You’d assume that, “Oh, well, that expense would just go to the theater owners.” It doesn’t. You actually are paying for those newspaper ads in the free weekly newspaper.

**Craig:** Yeah. Theater owners don’t spend anything to advertise any particular movie. That is entirely on the studio. So every television ad, every bus side, every billboard, every radio spot, every promotional contest, stuff online, events, the premier. [laughs]

Everything, even the cost of sending the stars to New York to be on Letterman or wherever they go, all of that stuff ultimately comes under publicity and advertising. It’s all folded in as part of this massive expense. Increasingly, that number is starting to rival the budgets of some movies and in some cases actually more than budget.

**John:** Oh, yes. In some cases it’s far exceeding the actual budget of the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, and that’s the thing that changed the most. I started in marketing in the early nineties, and that’s the biggest change to me in this business if I can look at one thing. It’s not so much that they’re making fewer movies. I actually think they’re making fewer movies because of this thing. This thing is that it costs so much more now to attract people to a movie because our attention is so divided now.

It’s not that we don’t like going to movies. It’s that we have less time in the day to notice what movies are coming out, so they have to bombard us and blanket and publicize movies in a way that they did not have to do before. That is enormously expensive.

Because of that expense, they then have to ask in a way they used to ask, but now it’s become almost an essential question, “Should we even make this movie?” If the movie costs $40 million, but it costs $60 million to sell it, what is the more important question? “Is this movie good?” Or, “Can we sell it?” Obviously the answer is, by $20 million to them, “Can we sell it?”

**John:** Yeah. So, it’s important to understand that there is a budget for the advertising and for what all the marketing is going to be for the movie. That is not part of the same budget for the movie itself.

So the line producer isn’t looking at the marketing budget for the movie. The line producer is looking at how much money he has to get this movie physically shot and delivered. The marketing budget is handled by completely different people. A good producer has his or her hands on both the production budget and the marketing budget and has a strong say in both of those. But it is beyond even the director’s control how much money is there and how it’s going to be spent.

**Craig:** Yeah, and the marketing budget is also elastic to a point. The budget for a movie is negotiated between the filmmakers, the producer, and the studio, based on the script and based on the cast and based on the expectations of what this movie could eventually bring back in income.

But the marketing budget expands and contracts based on the end result. They can look at a movie and say, “This is a dog. We’re dumping it. We’re not going to spend that much.” Or they can say, “This is great. We are tripling your marketing budget.”

I know that on the first Hangover, I think they saw the initial cut of the movie and went, “Alright, let’s spend way more than we spent on the movie to sell this, because it’s a hit.”

**John:** Yeah, that’s going to be the case. Another good example would be the Saw movies or any of the low-budget horror movies. They look at one of those and it’s like, “Oh, there actually is great potential here.” So they’re going to spend ten times their shooting budget on advertising because they feel like they can make their money back out of it.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** Other things that get included in the overall cost of making the movie: We have the negative cost. Negative cost would also fold in interest. So basically, in order to have the money to make something, you are taking out a loan. Now usually, you’re actually taking out a loan from the studio itself, but they are charging you interest. So, in a way, it is the studio paying itself, is how it goes.

**Craig:** And insurance.

**John:** And insurance, overhead. Insurance is both the policy for in case a stuntman dies, but it’s also insurance to make sure that the film can get completed if there are other catastrophes. Because the last thing you want to have happen is you get 80% done with the movie, and then you can’t actually finish the movie. A movie that can’t be finished or can’t be delivered is… It’s a horrible situation, because you have burned all this money and you have no way of getting the money back out.

So you buy insurance and a bond, a completion bond, to make sure that you will be able to finish shooting the movie. In some cases it does kick in. A star dies. When River Phoenix died during that Dark Water or whatever that movie was —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** — That became an insurance claim because you have to figure out what you’re going to do with that movie.

**Craig:** Every movie, at some point or another, has an insurance claim. I went down Monday when I was directing, because I had bronchitis. The doctor literally pulled the plug on me and sent me home. That is an insurance day. Every day costs money. People showed up. They cooked food. They built props. They were waiting around. That’s money.

**John:** Yeah. On Go, we had an insurance claim for a camera malfunction – basically had negative flashing and we had to go back and reshoot. So that was two days of reshooting, where we had to really press our case for, “We have to reshoot these things. There is no technical solution for this. We actually have to go back and reshoot.” That does happen on a lot of shows.

While it is not an expense that you have while you are shooting the movie, what is ultimately charged against the overall cost of making the movie will be things you’re paying out to first dollar gross players and residuals. Those are going to be costs that will be charged against the movie ultimately.

There are other things that are siphoning money off from the film, which, for screenwriters, is good, because residuals are a very good thing. Residuals will kick in even though the movie will never, itself, become profitable.

**Craig:** Right. Residuals are based on gross receipts. The other major expense that every movie incurs, and this is the fun one, is the distribution fee. A studio does not distribute. The studio that makes a movie does not distribute the movie. They own a company that distributes the movie.

So every Disney film is not distributed by Disney. It is distributed by the Buena Vista Pictures Distribution Company. What is a distribution company? It’s a bunch of people in the same building, employed by the same people, who work with the theaters to place movies.

Distribution is an incredibly important thing because big studios tend to be able to get any movie into a theater, into lots of screens if they so desire, because they trade on the movies that the theater owners know are going to be big hits.

So, “I have Pirates of the Caribbean coming down the line for Christmas. You need to take this movie now and put it in your theater or I’m not going to give you Pirates of the Caribbean.” “Okay, I’ll take it.” So there is a real value to the distribution company. They obviously do a lot of work.

But, in the end, here is the deal: This is one of the areas where the studios pull a fast one on us. They basically say, “It costs $30 million. Our distribution company charged us $30 million to distribute this film.” Well, what that means is that they moved $30 million from their left pocket into their right pocket. It’s the same company. They’re charging themselves money and then telling you that it is an expense.

**John:** Yeah, there are exceptions to that. When George Lucas hires 20th Century Fox to release the new Star Wars movies, it really is a separate company kind of releasing it. But in most cases it is exactly the same people who made the movie that are the people who release the movie.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It would be useful to step back and take a look at the three big players of how movies are made and released. You have the production company, the people who basically make movies. You have the distribution company, who take movies that have been shot and distribute them to the people who can show them. You have the exhibitors, who are the people who actually are physically showing them, who are the theater owners.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Once upon a time, those were all the same people. That was vertical integration. So, 20th Century Fox would make a movie, distribute a movie and show it in its own theaters. I forget the name of the classic lawsuit that broke up that model.

**Craig:** I can’t remember it either.

**John:** It’s like Taft-Hartley. But it’s not Taft-Hartley.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’ll put that in the show notes, but the studios are not allowed to own movie theaters anymore. So Pacific Theaters or AMC Theaters have to be their own separate companies. The distributors, which are really the studios, negotiate with the different theater owners to figure out who is going to play what movie and how that is all going to work.

**Craig:** Right. The theater owners basically – the way the studios make money off of movies is the theater owners pay them a rental charge, because they are renting the print from the studio. Obviously, they don’t own it. So they pay them a flat rental fee. Then, of course, they give them a percentage of the box office receipts.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s — I’m going to just put a boldface header here. This is the second section of what we’re talking about. So we’ve talked about all the money that goes out. Now, we’re starting to talk about the money that comes back in.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This is how people make money on making movies. It’s by showing them in theaters and showing them on TV and everything else. So with theaters, we are negotiating with AMC or Loews or one of these places. We are agreeing to basically split the box office with the theater owners.

**Craig:** Well, to some extent.

**John:** Yeah, to some extent. Generally, in negotiating with theater owners about which theater we are going to show them in and which screens we are going to have, it’s an ongoing conversation. But you are trying to get into the right houses at the right size.

You say, “Okay, opening weekend we will make a 90/10 split and we’ll pay you a certain amount per theater.” There’s like a – each theater has a house nut. So, “This is how much we are going to pay you for the right to show our movie in your theater.” Does that make sense?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m putting that kind of poorly.

**Craig:** Basically, here is the deal. It’s all a negotiation. If I’ve got a movie — let’s use Harry Potter. Everybody wants Harry Potter. It’s a guaranteed hit. There’s no chance it bombs.

So Warner Brothers says to a theater, and typically a theater chain, a very large chain, “We will give you Harry Potter at this level, but that’s a favor from us to you, because we could give it to your competitor across the street. We’re giving it to you in return for the first weekend,” which is where the big bulk of money is made.

Often times, a third of the entire box office run is made that first weekend. “We’ll make sure that you don’t lose money showing it, and maybe we will give you a little piece of the box office, but the bulk of it comes to us.”

As weekends progress, that split trends more towards a 50/50 kind of thing. And it’s because every movie is different, it’s hard to say ultimately, “What do theaters keep from box office?” because everybody says – they look at box office reports and they say, “Wow, Harry Potter made $400 million in the U.S. That means Warner Brothers made $400 million.” No. The theaters keep a lot of that. Someone once told me it’s sort of like a 60/40 thing.

**John:** Yeah. If you average out all the weekends and how it all flows.

**Craig:** Yeah, 60 is to the studios, and 40 is to the theaters.

**John:** But another truism you will see cited is that the theaters make more money off of concession sales than they do off of ticket sales, which doesn’t seem to make sense at all. Because if you buy a ticket for $11, not everyone is spending $11 on candy and popcorn.

Whether that statistic is true or not, the thinking behind that is that the theater owners keep all the concession money for themselves. They are not splitting any of that money back with the studios who are making the movies.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah. The theater owners are constantly… there is a war going on. I don’t know if people understand this. There is an endless struggle between exhibitors and studios. Obviously, they need each other, but they have cross purposes.

Theaters, obviously, want to make as much as they can. The studios want to make as much as they can. So the studios tend to win the whole box office battle. The theaters, in order to make their money back and to be profitable, obviously, they want to constantly raise ticket prices, which the studios constantly fight against them doing, because studios want more people showing up.

The theater owners obviously keep increasing prices on concessions. The big one that the studios hate is the theater owners run advertising, which pisses audience members off. Then, in return, what the theater owners hate is that the studios, in order to generate more money for themselves, want to shrink the time between the time that the movie is in the theater and the time that you can buy it on DVD.

As piracy spreads, studios are panicked that no one is going to go to the theater or, if they go, they won’t buy the DVD because they can get it that night on Bit Torrent or something. The theater owners hate that, because it means that the theater experience is being cheapened and isn’t as special. It’s this endless war.

Then, one last thing: Another big war is technology. Studios want theaters to have excellent projection. They want them to have 3D. They want them to have better sound, digital delivery. The theater owners are saying, “Great, but that’s entirely our burden. That’s a capital expense on our end and it costs you nothing, so help us.”

**John:** And, to some degree, studios are hamstrung to directly invest in the theaters, because they’re not supposed to be owning theaters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. So it would behoove everyone if everyone had better projectors. It would be best for people who are going to see movies. It would be best for distributors, because that way they don’t have to make as many prints and they can digitally deliver prints and they love that.

It’s better for the theater owners ultimately, because there is less physical stuff for them to have to handle and they can get by with fewer projectionists. There are reasons why it is good for everybody. It’s just that switching over to a new projection system is really expensive.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that’s why when they build new theaters, they tend to have nicer projectors and everything is more digital. In the older theaters, it’s hard to justify converting them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But it comes down to even things that seem really cheap. There was a fight recently over 3D glasses and who should be responsible for providing 3D glasses. Should it be the theater owners or should it be the people who are producing the movie? It can be a very low margin business, so the cost of those $0.50 glasses can add up.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. No, it’s an interesting study in forced partnership. I mean, it’s economic. I’m sure they teach it in some sort of class.

**John:** The only statistics that you are likely to be able to find out about how a movie is doing is by box office. So we talk about domestic box office or worldwide box office, and so it’s important to remember that box office is really a function of how many tickets were sold and at what prices.

That’s the public figure that’s actually ever disclosed for a given movie. Privately, that’s not what really matters to studios. Studios are looking at what is called film rentals, which is, “How much of the money from the theaters is coming back to their pockets?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s what is letting them know which movies are successful for them or not successful for them. Those film rentals that are coming back to 20th Century Fox or to Warner Brothers. That’s where they take off their distribution fee. I think 35 percent is the standard distribution fee now?

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** So 35 percent of whatever is coming back to Fox, they are saying, “35 percent of that is going to the 20th Century Fox distribution arm,” and is not counted towards the actual, individual movie.

**Craig:** Which is, sort of, on its face, kind of dumb. The fact that it’s even a percentage is counter-logical.

**John:** Exactly. If it really was a cost, then add up the cost and charge that cost to the whole movie, rather than making it a percentage.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it’s a scam. [laughs] It’s a total scam.

**John:** Yeah. So, agreed there are issues that you can take with studio accounting, its complexity, its…

**Craig:** Its scamminess.

**John:** Its scamminess.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The distribution fee is certainly one of the biggest ones. I would say distribution fee, interest and overhead are all easy targets for it and that when you really dig in, if you have to go through an audit on a given movie, you find that there are a ton of expenses that are thrown against a movie that may not really be legitimate expenses.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct.

**John:** Yeah. For example, if you are lucky enough to have a movie that is considered for an Academy Award campaign, every possible expense that they could think about to throw – in terms of trying to win you an Oscar — will get thrown against the movie. So every party, every screening, every possible thing will get charged to your movie. That’s going to be a tremendous amount of money.

**Craig:** By the way, those are actual expenses. I don’t mind those. [laughs] It’s the ghost expenses that make me nuts, but what are you going to do?

**John:** Yeah, but when you say, “Where do the expenses stop?” Should you be charging the studio executive’s hairstylist against the Oscar campaign?

**Craig:** Well, it depends on the hair.

**John:** Yeah, if it’s great hair.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If it wins the Oscar, then it’s worth every penny.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** Right now we have been talking about the theatrical experience, which is clearly the first step for most of these movies. But, a lot of movies are going to be making more of their money on home videos. That used to be videotapes. Then it was DVDs. Now, it’s iTunes and all of the other places that people can get movies legitimately and see them on their flat screens of some kind. Pay cable. Free cable. Broadcast television.

And an important thing to understand about when you start making television deals for things is that a lot of times ABC is not buying your movie. They’re actually buying a package of movies. They’re buying five different movies from Sony for $40 million and they’re buying the rights to show those movies several times.

Where that becomes troubling is, if Charlie’s Angels is one of those movies — there are five movies let’s say — so Charlie’s Angels is one of those movies and the other four movies are four movies you’ve never heard of, and you would never, ever want to see, they will try to account for those equally. They will just divide the $40 million among those movies and Charlie’s Angels will not show the profit that you think it should show.

**Craig:** Shenanigans. More shenanigans.

**John:** Yeah, just shenanigans. So when you start to have audit fights or have issues, that’s the kind of thing that comes up often, how they are apportioning things.

**Craig:** That’s what they do. Also, airlines are a big source of revenue for the companies. Hotel rooms — Lodge Net and all that stuff. There is a ton of money in that ancillary market, the afterlife. What is interesting about the aftermarket is, unlike the expense of releasing a movie theatrically, where you are making those expensive prints and delivering them and pouring a ton of marketing in, the ancillary stuff is really profit magic for the companies, or has traditionally been.

The movie is done. It’s got awareness. Hopefully, it was a hit. If so, you are literally just, in the case of iTunes, pressing a button and getting paid and doing nothing else. Someone who ran the studio one said to me that the best way to make money in the movie business is to own a library of movies and to not make movies.

Libraries kick off money every year, every title, without fail, with very little expense, very little cost associated with that. So as the VHS and DVD market boomed, you could see the movie business expanding to just chuck as many movies out there, because there was just this pot of gold at the end of almost every rainbow.

Even if the movie was a disaster, theatrically, somehow it always seemed to make money overseas and here through DVD and home video. Less and less the case now. That is another reason why the movie business has contracted a bit.

**John:** When you see studios freaking out about piracy, this is why they are freaking out about piracy. A tremendous amount of their income was coming from those things down the road. So that guy who was videotaping the movie in the theater is costing them, in their perception, sales of DVDs or iTunes sales or legitimate sales down the road, and they can’t ever possibly make those back.

It’s also crucial for screenwriters who are hoping to make more movies. We only get residuals on those things down the road. We don’t get any residuals on the first theatrical run of a film. Residuals are things that get paid to us from all of those other little bits, the airplane runs and the DVDs.

**Craig:** Not airplanes, actually.

**John:** Airplanes is first, isn’t it?

**Craig:** They count airplane as part of the theatrical release. I don’t know why. But you’re right, everything else in the release of it is where our residual base comes. Frankly, that’s where the profit in the movie business is. If you were to say today, that by fiat, the movie business could only make money by showing movies in theaters, I think, honestly, that every studio would just shut down.

**John:** Pack up and go home.

**Craig:** Yeah, because they cannot make the economics work. Making movies has become extraordinarily expensive. It’s a little counter-intuitive, because you think, “These cameras are getting cheaper and it’s so much easier to deliver content.”

But the other truism is that we have come to expect a certain level of spectacle with movies that is enormously expensive to achieve. Even when you find interesting filmmakers out there doing it on the cheap, it’s still, overall the rule of thumb is that, if you’re going to deliver a big, huge action movie, you need to spend money or it’s just not going to look like a big, huge action movie.

At least, that’s the studio calculation. So they need DVDs and video. They also need DVDs and video tapes to pay for the bombs because there are bombs. When you make a movie for $40 million and it loses $20 million, that is a big hit.

**John:** Yeah, they want to create a portfolio of movies, so that the hits will even out with the misses. Obviously, whenever somebody new comes to Hollywood, whenever new money comes to Hollywood, they, very smartly, say, “We’re only going to make the successful movies and we’re not going to make the bombs.”

The truth is that you don’t know which movies are going to be successes and bombs. So you try to plan carefully for what those will be. The challenge, I think, in our current situation is that the movies that are successful tend to be the incredibly, incredibly expensive movies. So we’re only making those incredibly expensive movies and we’re not making more of these mid-range things. We’re not making very many of The Help, and The Help is a godsend if that is your movie.

**Craig:** It’s very profitable. Then you look at movies, comedies in particular, I think, are extraordinarily profitable. Obviously, The Hangover, Bridesmaids, Horrible Bosses are movies that don’t cost a ton. That’s why comedy, I think, will always be a staple.

It’s not because people like them. Obviously, they do, but they like lots of movies. Horror movies and comedies tend to not require a ton of cash to make, but they can be just as successful or popular as action films are.

**John:** Yeah, because they don’t have to be home runs. You can hit doubles and triples and make a tremendous amount of money. I should back up and say, when I say, “Oh, they’re tremendously profitable,” again, we’re not talking that on the accounting of each individual film that they’re profitable, because they won’t be.

**Craig:** None of them are.

**John:** None of the movies, I think, that we have talked about today are going to show a profit on their actual, individual statements. But they are profitable for the people who made them, because they got to charge that 35 percent distribution fee. They charged their overhead against them. They charged everything they possibly could against them and they have a nice chunk of change because of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, they run these models. That’s a word you hear all the time now. They model the budget based on what they think the movie will do theatrically and what that, then, implies the movie will do on video and OnDemand and iTunes.

They know before they roll a foot of film what they think the movie is going to make. Usually, they are right. They usually have a pretty good sense of it. But — I lost my train of thought.

**John:** It’s okay, because a bus just showed up.

**Craig:** Oh, a bus showed up.

**John:** People who are listening on good headphones may notice that Craig works at a bus stop.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You have to have more than one line of work if you are a screenwriter these days. You have to have many irons in the fire.

**Craig:** Got to stay in touch with the people. Do you know what I mean, John?

**John:** Yeah. So, he gets his best stories working as a shoe shiner. I think it’s good that you are keeping your working-class roots going there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Really, you can smell the urine in the air. I love this bus stop.

**John:** [laughs] Craig, thank you so much for a good and lengthy discussion on how the film economics work. I hope we all learned something today.

**Craig:** God, I hope we have. I sure do.

**John:** One of the things that I actually thought about this as the intro to how we were going to talk about this today, is, as I mentioned before, I am working on Big Fish, the musical. Broadway has a whole different economic model behind it in how it all works.

I am just now starting to learn it and it’s just bizarre. So we are at the stage now where we invite really, really rich people in to listen to the show and they write big checks to invest in the show, hoping that it is a huge success.

But, I honestly can’t say I understand exactly how they would get paid out in success, or God willing success, or why it’s a good idea for them to do that. Obviously, hopefully they want to support great art. But there is actually a profit and a business model and I can’t say I fully understand it yet.

**Craig:** This is one of the ways that I am a creative person. I don’t mind money. I like money, but I don’t understand it, to be honest with you. I don’t understand the ins and outs of it. Frankly, it doesn’t inspire me to talk about finance. I don’t really get it.

So, the people who do get it, I think, they do just much better than we do, because they really understand how it works. To me, it’s just a check. I don’t know.

**John:** One last thing we should slip in here is merchandising. There’s not going to be a perfect answer for this. But if you are making a movie that has toys — let’s say you made a little movie called Star Wars — toys are going to be an incredibly important part of how you are making a tremendous amount of money.

Some of the money from merchandising will be counted towards your movie and some of it won’t — which is a way of saying that those little, small things in your contract that seem like you’ll figure that out whenever they kick in, can become very, very important. So the degree to which all the ancillary toys and such become part of the accounting of your movie is really dependent on how good your lawyers were.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know guys, the deal is if a movie fails it doesn’t really matter what was in your contract. But in success, you and the people that owe you money will go hand-to-hand combat for a while. You see it in TV. When TV shows get syndicated and 20th Century Television sells the show to FX and it’s all the same, it gets so complicated. An industry of lawyers and people deal with it.

For those of us who write, I think the most important thing is to just be cognizant of how these guys make their decisions. So when it comes time to write your script, just know if you write a period piece that is a very adult drama, the studio is going to look at it and go, “Well, I see a whole bunch of budget costs that wouldn’t be in a horror movie.” Just be aware that it’s a little bit of an uphill battle. Just know how they think.

**John:** Yeah. So Craig, they’ve already come back to you. Hangover 3 is going to be PG-13 and there are going to be a lot of toys. Is that correct?

**Craig:** Hangover 3 will be rated R. [laughs] But there may be toys.

**John:** Toys are great. We love toys.

**Craig:** Love toys.

**John:** And we love talking about movies. So, thank you again, Craig, for another great podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** We’ll talk soon.

**Craig:** Bye.

The followup post to this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/more-on-movie-money)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/wga-copyright-and-musicals).

**John August:** Hello, and welcome to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** Hello, Craig, how are you doing today?

**Craig:** Doing great, John. How about yourself?

**John:** I am doing pretty well. It’s a been a day of many small errands and things to take care of. I got my flu shot today, for example.

**Craig:** Which, and you know I’m a huge pro-vaccination guy, but I always feel like the flu shot is the one vaccine that’s kind of a waste of time; it’s just because the whole thing where there’s so many different strains and they’re kind of guessing.

**John:** They are guessing. They have to figure out which flu they think is going to be the biggest strain to hit American shores at the time. My gambler’s aspect of it is that having the flu completely sucks.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so, if I can spend $20 and take 20 minutes to have a very good chance of avoiding a terrible flu, I’ll gladly spend that money and take that time.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And that’s why I’ll get a flu shot, also. And I always get my kids flu shots. I just always feel a little silly about it as opposed to proper vaccinations, which, of course, are life savers.

The other thing about the flu is, I feel like people misuse the word “flu,” because flu is a very specific virus. And usually, when people say they have the flu, what they mean is they have the common cold.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You really have to be pretty sick for it to be the flu.

**John:** If you’re knocked on your back and really, really hating life, that could very well be the flu.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’ve got, like, a serious fever, muscle pains, that’s flu’s bad stuff. And I’m constantly having unprotected sex with random strangers, so I really have to watch myself.

**John:** It is important. And the flu vaccine protects you from all things. It’s a bullet vaccine, too, apparently. It makes you lead proof.

Actual news: we have a new WGA president elected.

**Craig:** That’s right. Chris Keyser was elected last week, along with Carl Gottlieb, who will be our new vice president. Howard Rodman is our new secretary/treasurer. And then a bunch of people — a lot of new people to the board and a few incumbents were returned, as well.

**John:** One of the emails I got from Chris Keyser thanking everybody for the support along the way made a very good point: that we tend to notice the Guild and the activities of the Guild right around those annual election times and not so much in between. So, there’s certainly things we need to focus on now to try to make sure are enacted.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, that’s the theory that it’s really what happens in between the negotiations that’s kind of the important stuff. We fetishize negotiations because they’re exciting and because, in a way, it’s our — you know — we are constantly going through negotiations on our own, and we get frustrated with them, or perhaps they don’t go well. This is a chance for all of us collectively to have a good negotiation.

As I like to point out, when we negotiate with the companies, we’re negotiating on behalf of the minimum basic writer, the scale writer. Oddly, it’s like a combination of our strongest and weakest hand.

But in between those negotiations — which, granted, are somewhat exciting, particularly when a strike is involved — there’s all this stuff that goes on. And where the Guild tends to go wrong is when individuals are having a problem and they call the Guild for help, rightfully and justifiably. And the Guild fumbles it. And this happens all the time.

So, I’m hoping that Chris can kind of turn that aspect of it around.

**John:** The kind of things you call the Guild for most often are about money. And money that is due to you that is not being paid to you. So, collections is a crucial function of the Guild. And making sure that if a writer’s not getting paid, you have someone to reach out to to say, listen, this company is either behind on actual payment for the writing I’m doing for them right now, or on residuals. And there’s different departments that are responsible for trying to enforce those things.

And making sure you have the right people running those departments that you’re spending the resources right to get that money in is crucial, because that’s money that goes to the members you’re supposed to serve. And it’s also the money that is funding the Guild.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is an important distinction for people to understand. Our business is what they call an overscaled business in that, unlike most unions, which set a pay scale that everybody earns — depending on their seniority, the time in — we’re overscale. Almost everybody that writes for a living earns more than scale.

What that means is, if you’ve earned more than scale, the problem that you have may be getting that extra payment, or whatever is above scale, ultimately becomes — it’s far more efficient for your individual, your personal transactional lawyer to handle that sort of thing, or your agent.

But there are areas that are very important to us. You mentioned residuals. This is a big one. It’s important for people to understand this. When a company’s behind on residuals, or not paying residuals or not paying enough in residuals, the injured party is not the writer; it’s the union. Because the union collectively is what’s bargaining here. So, the union is injured, and the union is collecting on behalf of the writer. This is kind of a weird distinction.

So, you can’t really go in there with your heavy hitting lawyer and start suing over residuals. You need the union to do it, because they’re the ones with standing. So, when we call the union, and we say, “Look, we think these guys are behind on their residuals,” and then the union shrugs, then we’ve really got a problem, because they’re the only ones who can help us.

**John:** This’ll be an advanced section of the podcast, is to talk about this esoterica of what the Writers Guild is. We think, like, “oh, it’s a union.” But when we think of unions, we think of people who make things or people who work on assembly lines. And we’re such a strange, different kind of union in that — I was talking about this with Howard Rodman this last week, is that — most unions are concerned about time. So, like, the time and the working conditions and being paid for your time properly.

We are such a document focused Guild that it becomes difficult to figure out how to measure and adequately protect the other things a writer does. An example would be, you’re working on the launch of a TV show. And you’re working on all of the other media that goes with it. So, you’re building out the universe. So, within the course of this TV show, you have these characters and this sort of thing.

But they say, “Hey, we really want to figure out, like, make an alternate reality game for what this is supposed to be.” Is that something that is a Writers Guild covered function? It’s not even clear what the document is behind that, because it’s not clear what writing is happening there, it’s not clear where this falls under our distinction.

This was the challenge we ran into with editors is that editors working in reality television are doing some story kind of functions. But there’s not a document that you can point to that says, “This was a written thing.”

**Craig:** Right. In fact, we do have a word for story like functions in the absence of written material. It’s called “producing.” And we have a long standing tradition on the television side of writer/producers. Almost everybody that’s a show runner who works at a certain level on a TV staff as a writer is also a producer, because they are providing story functions without actually doing the writing — the specific writing. They also write, of course, in addition to those duties.

But yes, the truth is, the only thing that we provide for which we are paid is written material on a page — literary material. And in fact, you mentioned the notion of time. Creative workers who do what we do are exempt from overtime legislation in the state of California. We can’t sue because we worked more than 40 hours a week and somehow ended up getting less than minimum wage or anything like that. We’re exempt. The law sort of says, if you are creative for a living, it’s not about time, it’s about the product.

**John:** One of the things that’s hard to grasp — and maybe you can talk me through it again because I still have a hard time processing it fully — is the Writers Guild is based on a commonly accepted fiction of copyright. And I mean this especially in relation to spec screenplays —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** — I’ve written a screenplay. And I want to sell it to this certain studio, this WGA signatory studio. In the course of selling it to that studio, we will all kind of enter into a mutually agreed upon fiction that this studio has hired me to write this screenplay and that they are the author of this screenplay. Is that an accurate reflection?

**Craig:** It is. Here’s the basic deal: The United States is unique. We have something called “work for hire.” Anywhere else in the world, an author is an author. If you write something, you’re the author. You are the sole author and you have certain moral rights as the author.

In the United States, going all the way back to the Constitution, there’s something called “work for hire,” where a person or a business can cause to be created or commission work that they don’t actually author directly, but they are the authors in law. And they retain copyright.

Now, interestingly, why this impacts us here as professional writers: We have a union. Unions in this country represent employees. That’s it. If you’re not an employee, then you cannot be in a union, because that’s the only thing unions are allowed to do by law.

So, for instance, novelists can’t unionize, because they’re not employees. They are independent contractors. They’re copyright owners. We are not copyright owners. We’re employees of the companies; the studios are the, quote-unquote “copyright authors” of the works that we’re writing.

The plus side of being employees is that we can unionize and we can collectively bargain with the studios, which I think is, obviously, a huge benefit for us.

The other thing is that we can take advantage of certain things as a collective, like getting pension and health care. Obviously, we have a lot of difficulties negotiating with the companies and the other things like compensation and residuals.

But here’s how it ties back to this whole spec thing: I write a spec screenplay. It’s mine. Nobody commissioned it, I wrote it. I have two choices: I can register it with the United States Copyright Office and now I have copyright, or I can just do nothing and just have implied copyright.

Now, it comes time for me to sell it to a studio. They want to buy it. The way it’s all been worked out is, either I transfer the copyright to them — which they just basically say is a condition, so if you don’t want to transfer the copyright to us, no dice, no sale — or, if I haven’t registered it, I just backwards retroactively agree to say that they commissioned it and it’s a work for hire.

That is valuable in a weird way to us. It sounds like we’re getting ripped off, but by agreeing to go along with that retroactive lie, we allowed the specs grip to be covered by all of our Writers Guild protections, including — by the way — some separated rights, which we’re going to be getting into in a second.

So, it sounds like it is a lie, it sounds like it’s kind of a ripoff to us, and in a way, the big ripoff is work for hire. But no work for hire, no union.

**John:** So, without this kind of fiction, the guild could cover us in situations where we clearly were being hired to work on a TV show, but purchasing our original ideas would be very complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah, basically if we didn’t have this fiction, the spec market could become a non-union writing market. That’s why the Writers Guild actually got the companies to agree to say, “Let’s all look the other way here when it comes to specs, even though technically they don’t meet the definition of a truly commissioned work, or a true work-for-hire.” It’s better to call it that, otherwise the spec market becomes this kind of gray zone where they don’t even have to pay minimums. That would be —

**John:** They could literally say like, “I will pay you $500 for this script.”

**Craig:** Or how about, “I’ll pay you $1,” in which, then it becomes almost like a weird option market. Then you also get no credit protections, and if you lose your credit protections, you’re losing your separated rights, you’re losing your guaranteed minimum share story credit, you’re losing residuals. The ripple effect that goes forward from that would be tremendous. It would essentially decimate us as writers and providers of original material.

**John:** So one of the protections that you get as a part of the Writers Guild is what we call separated rights, which is a complicated bundle of things that come with the person who is awarded story credit on — we’re talking screenplays, TV is always more complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you get story by credit, you get screen story by credit, or you get written by credit, which includes an implied story credit.

**John:** Subsequent works derived from your original story, you are compensated for those.

**Craig:** You get — there’s some formula, it’s not particularly glowing, but there’s some formula where you get paid for sequel payments, you essentially get WGA minimums for the sequels. The truth is, that’s one of the weakest separated rights we have, because usually your agent gets you a better deal than that anyway.

When we look at our separated rights — and they’re called separated rights because we’re essentially saying, “OK, we’re giving you all of the rights, but we’re kind of holding these little few ones back.” — the one that’s become the most useful, and the most potentially lucrative for us is dramatic stage rights.

**John:** Dramatic stage rights brings us to our first thing that we want to talk about today, which is Jessica Bendinger. The screenwriter behind Bring It On is in contention with the producers of destined-for-Broadway musical, Bring It On, the argument being that the stage musical is using her story elements, and is not compensating her for those.

**Craig:** Right. We have, one of our separated rights is dramatic stage rights. Basically, the deal is this: if you have story by, or screen story by, or written by on a screenplay — in this case Jessica has that — then the company has two years following the release of the movie to produce a stage version of that screenplay, musical or not musical. If they don’t do so within two years, then the writer essentially has an exclusive license in perpetuity to adapt for the stage, and to benefit from that adaptation on their own without the studio.

What happens sometimes though is that the studio contends that they are making — five years after the fact — that they’re making a stage production that has that title, but isn’t really based on that script. [laughs] That’s where you run into trouble.

**John:** Yeah, and that is essentially what I think is happening in the case of Bring It On is that, based on the articles I’ve read so far, Beacon, the people who made the movie who are behind the musical say that, “Yes, we are making a musical called ‘Bring It On,’ but it’s not using the story that is inherent in Jessica’s original screenplay.” Further complicated by the fact that they have made two sequels to Bring It On that neither of which credits Jessica.

**Craig:** Right, so I mean technically…I believe Bring It On was an original screenplay, so Jessica will always get a based on characters created by credit. If they’re using characters from the first one, then they’re in trouble. If they’re not using characters from the first one, and they’re basing it solely on say, the story of the third movie, then maybe they can wriggle out of it. This is one of those things where unfortunately, the way our society works, people tend to just go, “Well, let’s roll the dice, and if it ends up being litigated, it ends up being litigated.”

**John:** Story is what’s really the crucial aspect here, and having written a screenplay for somebody doesn’t necessarily give you dramatic rights on something. I can speak very specifically about Big Fish. Big Fish is based on a novel by Daniel Wallace. Sony bought the rights to the book for me, Sony hired me to write the screenplay. We wrote the screenplay, we made the movie. Sony has the chance to make the musical based on it, because Sony’s considered the author of the screenplay. Daniel Wallace has the rights to make a stage version of his book because he wrote the book.

However, someone who wanted to make a musical of Big Fish would need to get both Daniel Wallace’s book and if they wanted to use anything from the movie, they would need to get the rights from Columbia Pictures. If a producer were to go in and do both of those things, they could make a Big Fish musical. They could use every word of dialogue from the screenplay, and my name wouldn’t appear anywhere on it, which is a bizarre and frustrating thing about how things are divvied up these days, and that the studio is considered the author of the screenplay.

It’s not a hypothetical situation, Legally Blonde is a Broadway musical, uses a lot of material from the screenplay for Legally Blonde and the screenwriters aren’t credited as writers on that project.

**Craig:** That’s right. I mean the truth is: every screenplay, no matter what the circumstance, is owned and authored in law by the studio. The difference is, if you have a story credit or screen story credit, or a written by credit, you essentially retain control over this one area of exploitation: dramatic stage rights.

In the case of Big Fish or Legally Blonde, you guys — Lutz & Smith, and in your case on Big Fish — you guys adapted a novel. When we adapt source material, unless we create a story that is uniquely separate from the story in the source material, there is no story credit, and there are no separated rights. You would have to negotiate ahead of time the right to be credited on some stage adaptation of the movie.

It is a weird thing, and since so much of what we do now is adaptation, our separated rights keep getting — there’s just narrower and narrower circumstances where we even get them in the first place. Then when you do get them, as is the case with Jessica and her project, then sometimes still there can be a real dispute.

By the way, I’m going to add another thing that’s really annoying, and God, I wish we could fix this one in negotiations: Let’s say everything goes perfect, you write a script and you do have story credit, and you do get separated rights, and three years later, you mount a stage production. You still have to get permission from the studio to use the title of the movie on your show. Very frustrating.

**John:** Is that part of a WGA agreement or is that a part of the contract that they hired for, or is it —

**Craig:** No. That’s one of the limitations in the MBA — in the minimum basic agreement, which is our collective bargaining agreement — it basically says…actually it’s even worse than I said. I’m going to read you — it says basically, When we decide that we’re going to use this separated right, prior to the first performance of the dramatic work, we are required to submit to the company a copy of the work. Then we will not, without their consent, use the title of the motion picture, or the screenplay, as the case may be, as the title unless they allow us to.

How about this one? But if they insist that we have to, we also have to. So if you decided to change it because you felt it was a better title for the stage play, and the company said, “No, we actually want you to use the title of the movie,” you’re forced to. It’s very restrictive.

**John:** That is restrictive. Now, the individual writer who sold a spec screenplay could theoretically have language in his or her contract that would supersede that, is that correct?

**Craig:** That is correct. We are always free to negotiate better individual terms than the ones that exist. However, I must tell you, it’s very difficult to get the studios to agree to any kind of change to what they call that “core language,” because they hate setting precedent. For instance, you will not find any writer who has ever gotten a better deal on residuals in individual contract. None. Does not exist; they’ll never do it.

**John:** You and I were both behind the writers group that met with all of the studios and ended up getting some, not quite first dollar gross, but a larger piece of the back-end for some projects that we’re now writing over at Fox. That was part of our instinct behind that was it was very hard to get a better back-end percentage as a writer because everyone was loath to do that.

**Craig:** I think it is first dollar gross.

**John:** It’s kind of first dollar gross. It’s a really good definition of back end.

**Craig:** It’s one of the flavors. There’s like a billion flavors of back-end participation; it’s one of the better ones.

**John:** I will say, it’s not Will Smith’s first dollar gross.

**Craig:** No, no. No, it’s not.

**John:** No, no one gets Will Smith money.

**Craig:** No, he gets like zero dollar gross.

**John:** Will Smith, he gets crisp, new dollar bills directly from the mint is how you pay Will Smith. And you know what? He’s worth every one of those crisp, new dollar bills they send to him.

**Craig:** Don’t begrudge the man a dime.

Yeah, you’re right, we sort of made a little mini collective there to break through one of the barriers of getting that kind of participation as a writer. When it comes to these things, separated rights, it’s very difficult to kind of get them to give you a better deal than is already there.

This will continue to happen, because — obviously as you can tell if you just take a walk down Times Square — studios have realized that there’s this pretty decent source of additional revenue. If one of these stage productions really connects, they can do very well. I think this is going to be a battle front for sure. An interesting case to watch with Jessica.

**John:** Yeah, definitely.

Speaking of adaptations, I was lucky to have lunch with Winnie Holzman yesterday; we were talking about Wicked. She is the book writer on Wicked and wrote My So Called Life before that. It’s so fascinating to see what a stage musical looks like in great success. Wicked was a book by Gregory Maguire that was option-purchased with the first instinct of making it into a movie.

They made it into a Broadway musical first. While ultimately you can imagine they will make a movie somewhere down the road, it’s much more lucrative for them to keep that on the stage right now.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** One of the remarkable things about Broadway also is that the reporting is fairly transparent. The writer of a Broadway show has a very good sense of how much money she is bringing in this week because it literally is a percentage of the box office take and that’s a public figure. It’s a very different formula than what we’re used to as screenwriters.

**Craig:** Right. And ultimately, when you mount a Broadway production, if you’re doing it independently of, say, a movie studio that controls rights, you don’t have these layers — these corporate layers that suck up all this revenue through their various vacuum holes.

**John:** The other topic of money related to copyright issues and what we do as screenwriters is the lawsuit that Harlan Ellison is suing over the movie In Time —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** — the Andrew Niccol directed movie, which is interesting. I’ve been involved in cases where a writer, after the fact, a movie’s is in production or a movie has been made,and then a writer steps up and says, “No. That’s based on my idea.” I’ve been involved in litigation over that.

I’ve never been in litigation where someone is trying to stop the movie or file an injunction, arguing before the movie has been released that it is based on his idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is one of those things where I’ve been on both sides of these things. Anybody that writes for a living and gets movies made is going to get the call sooner or later that you so-called “stole someone’s idea.”

First things firs:, ideas are not property. Copyright law is pretty clear about this. An idea in and of itself is not protectable. That’s why body-switching movies can continue to be made. They should stop, but — you can freely make another body-switching movie without being sued by Freaky Friday or any of the other billions of them.

So, what is protectable? Unique expression in fixed form. “Fixed form” is important. It’s not enough to just say the idea or say the specifics out loud that are protectable. In the case of Harlan Ellison, he’s obviously met that test. He’s written a unique expression of fixed form. That’s his story. And what he is alleging is that this movie, which I haven’t seen, clearly infringes on that which is unique to his story.

Ultimately, that’s what the lawsuit will have to determine. That’s what a judge will have to determine or a jury — that depends on how these things get litigated, and uually, they just get settled. — but they have to basically look at the two works and say, “All right. Is this theft or is this one of those hundredth monkey things where two people had similar ideas but it’s not theft?”

For instance, I understand that there is a character in Harlan’s story called “The Timekeeper.” So, in his story time is a precious resource that can be granted or taken away from people as part of reward and punishment. And there’s a Timekeeper who controls that. And apparently, in the movie there is a similar character performing a similar function and he’s also called “The Timekeeper.”

So, on the one hand, Harlan’s going to argue, “Look. That’s unique and he took it.”

On the other hand, the studio is going to say, “The guy who keeps time is called ‘The Timekeeper.’ It’s not that unique at all.”

And that’s how this is going to be fought out. And ultimately, this is why these things are so difficult. I read the Ellison story many years ago. I obviously haven’t seen the Niccol film, it’s not out yet. If it were me, if somehow I were magically in charge of this, I would have to read the story again, watch the movie, and sort of gut check it and say, “Did this guy rip this guy off or not?” Not even intentionally — I don’t have to prove that there was intention; I just have to prove that it looks like material was taken. That just comes down to looking at it. Bottom line.

**John:** The timing of the lawsuit, speaking of time, is interesting too in that I feel like a lesser-known writer would have waited until after the movie came out and was successful before filing a lawsuit. If Harlan Ellison genuinely feels that this is his story, it may have been smart to do this now because it puts pressure on them to reach a decision earlier on and perhaps settle out if they don’t feel like they’re going to win this.

**Craig:** Yeah. We went through this on Hangover 2 with the famous tattoo lawsuit.

**John:** For people who don’t know, this is the concern about Ed Helms’ tattoo in the movie.

**Craig:** Right. Ed Helms wakes up with a tattoo that is remarkably similar to the one on Mike Tyson’s face, and the artist who created the tattoo on Mike Tyson’s face said, “Hey. Wait a second. That’s my tattoo. That’s my original work of art. You have to license that. You misappropriated it.”

The studio said, “A, It’s not exactly his tattoo. And B, we don’t think it is protectable. And C, get out of here.”

And he timed in such a way to try to get an injunction against the release and all the rest of it that in the end, this thing was settled. Again, these things typically are.

I think Harlan went through a similar thing with The Terminator. It ended up with a settlement and some kind of source material credit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a funny thing. He’s an incredibly prolific writer, and he’s also a very litigious writer. [Laughter] He’s like a perfect storm of a guy who has written a lot and can point to similarities frequently. But, if the material was taken, it was taken. It’s not fair.

I want to believe the best of everybody. I think Andrew Niccol is great screenwriter and a terrific filmmaker, and Harlan is a legend. I don’t know — I hope that it was either not intentional or that there was no infringement. But we’ll see.

**John:** But what it has to come back to though is that it feels like an idea that a subsequent writer could come upon and would write something very similar to. Here is where I would come to: if I were thinking about a movie as “What’s a valuable commodity? What if time were a commodity?” With the idea of time being a commodity, I wonder if I would actually come to many of the same conclusions as this story does.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s the challenge for me in thinking about this is: given this premise, these are the reasonable things you would come to. It’s like patent law to me: is it just a natural extension of the idea of what’s out there in the culture versus stealing somebody’s idea for what a graphical mouse will look like?

**Craig:** That’s right. You could say, “Here’s a phrase: Time is money. Now, let’s externalize it and create a story.” One of the things we have to be careful about is when we engage in this kind of litigation there is the law of unintended consequences. There are a thousand producers out there who could do the same thing that I just did.

“‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ What if that’s real? Oh my God.” Now they own that forever? No. It’s ridiculous.

So, you’re right. The concept alone isn’t enough. And even the expected execution elements of that concept wouldn’t be enough. You have to show a real lifting if you are going to actually get a verdict in your favor.

To get a settlement, I think you just have to show that you’ve got a reasonable enough case to cause a real problem and that you deserve some compensation to let that go. Obviously, I don’t know enough about the case to know what the level of evidence is here.

**John:** My concern is that intellectual property in the form of copyright could become the problem that’s become with patent law in the tech industry.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Basically like — oh, Sony is gathering up all these things about science fiction things so they can head off anyone who is trying to make a science fiction movie. I worry about copyright trolling.

**Craig:** Patent trolls becoming copyright trolls — I totally get it. And, you know, look: most of the time studios defend these claims vigorously, as the lawyers say. And 99 times out of 100 they don’t settle. They make them go away. In some cases they actually make the complainants pay them back. If they can show that it was a bologna claim, they’ll go after them for legal fees.

In the case of a guy like Harlan, it’s a little trickier. This is a pretty famous and accomplished guy who has also — and it’s not like a judge is not going to notice is that — he’s been down this road before, and to success. And so this one is a little trickier.

But by and large, I’m with you — I don’t like that everything we write can be held up by some nut who saws that he wrote the same thing in his little journal.

**John:** I think I am going to pitch a new science fiction story to our friend Derek Hass, who runs Popcorn Fiction. So here’s the basic premise: You have a moderately successful writer who invents the time machine, travels back in time, and writes the basic premise of all the future movies, such as Star Wars.

[laughter]

And then years later, sues Lucas and sues everyone, and becomes insanely wealthy. And then somehow gets tripped up in his own thing and dies of an appropriately gruesome science fiction death.

**Craig:** Or he just goes back in time, buys 50 shares of something and that’ll be good too.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that just shorts it and then it’s not good.

**John:** Yeah. You’ve basically shortened my short story down to a paragraph and then it’s not good. It’s not even a short story anymore.

**Craig:** Is there a market for short sentences?

**John:** Yeah. It’s called Twitter.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a great Twitter sentence.

**John:** It’s a very good Twitter sentence.

Well, thank you. I felt this was a good lesson with Professor Mazin.

**Craig:** I hope we didn’t put everyone to sleep. I mean — I just want to say for those of you have mustered your way through this, if you’re not a professional screenwriter and you’re wondering, “Why did I just listen to that?” It’s because you hope to be one. And believe me, it’s going to impact you. You have to know this stuff. Because they know it. So, you should know it too.

**John:** Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you John.

**John:** All right. And we’ll talk again next week.

**Craig:** Awesome.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/pitching-a-take-and-the-wga-elections).

**JOHN AUGUST:** Hello, welcome. My name is John August.

**CRAIG MAZIN:** And I’m Craig Mazin.

**JOHN:** And this is the inaugural edition of something we’re calling Scriptnotes, which is meant to be a podcast talking about things that screenwriters might be interested in.

**CRAIG:** Yeah.

**JOHN:** What would those be?

**CRAIG:** You know, we can cover craft, the business, the union, psychology.

**JOHN:** Like, work habits, too. Sort of like, how you’d actually get stuff written.

**CRAIG:** Yeah, yeah. And topics for people who are working steadily, people who aren’t working steadily, people who want to work steadily.

**JOHN:** Dig deeping.

**CRAIG:** Dig deeping things? You said “dig deeping.”

**JOHN:** “Dig deeping.”

**CRAIG:** Please don’t edit that out.

**JOHN:** I will leave that, I will leave my misspoken terms right in there, unedited.

But I wanted to start with a question, because I figure, you know, answer some questions would be a good thing. And I answer questions on my site, you’ve answered questions on your site in the past, and when we answer questions on our blog, we’re just giving one opinion, and often, there’s more than one opinion.

So, here’s a question we got from a guy named Andrew. “What are execs looking for from working writers who come in and pitch takes on assignments? I’d love to hear more about this and what strategies are important. Do you pitch problems with the script and then solutions? Do you pitch your own version? And how you’d do it from the beginning as though you’re pitching a new movie? Is it a conversation? What are they looking for?”

**CRAIG:** That is a big question with multiple answers, depending on what the project is and who you’re meeting with, but we can certainly give a general sense of how it goes, I guess.

**JOHN:** Great. So, let’s talk about the kind of meeting and sort of, who sets up this meeting and what conversations you’ve had before you even go into those meetings.

So, usually, if you’re coming in to pitch on assignment, there’s some piece of property that the studio already owns. So, they’ve bought a book, they’ve bought another movie that they want to remake. They’ve bought a script, or someone’s been working on a script and they need, they want someone else to come in and rewrite the script. There’s something to look at.

So, before you even start having a conversation with them, they’ve generally sent over some material, you’ve had a chance to look at it, or at least think about it, if it’s something that’s so abstract, like a board game or remaking, like, a classic movie.

So, there’s some sort of basic conversation, or at least, material that you can, like, push off of.

**CRAIG:** That’s right. And your job, essentially, is to help them improve it. I mean, the only reason that these things exist is because, for one reason or another, and often times, the reason has nothing to do with the merit of the script that has been written.

They’re not happy enough. They aren’t at a place where they look at the screenplay that they have and say, yes, we want to commit however many millions of dollars to actually go into production and make this. So, your job, your primary job, first of all, is to figure out how you would do it in such a way that they might want to make it.

**JOHN:** To me, the crucial first step is envisioning what is the ultimate movie that you would make out of this project? And figuring out, like, what movie would you as a screenwriter want to make? What movie would the studio want to make? Or the other film makers involved? What are they looking to make? And if there’s common ground to be found there, that’s great.

A lot of times, those first meetings are not even, sort of, pitching your take on a story, it’s just trying to come to terms with, like, what is it that we’re trying to make here? For the first Charlie’s Angels, there was a pre-existing script that Ed Sullivan and Ryan Row had written. They had a great opening set piece, and everyone loved that set piece, and then the movie went in a very, very different direction.

So, my first meetings with Drew Barrymore and with the studio really weren’t about the story, it was about the tone. It was about, like, what does this movie feel like? And what I got from Drew, I think our point of overlap was that, it was a comedy where the Angels were very good when they were on the job, and they were total dorks when they were off the job. Because comedy is never about cool people, comedy is about dorks.

And that the ultimate tone I was going for was something weird for an action movie, which was, that you want to me kind of weirdly proud of the girls. And so, you know, it was probably three meetings into the project before we actually started talking about the plot, and, sort of, the kinds of things that would happen in the movie. It was more what it would feel like.

**CRAIG:** Well, that’s exactly, that’s what it sort of comes down to, no matter what the project is. I actually never really approach it and think to myself, I always ask the question, of course, is there any input that you have on the studio side for me as I read this material? And I just sort of want to know that, a priori, OK, we want to make this funnier. We don’t think that this works with, we didn’t think that that works.

I listen to that and I take it to heart, but ultimately, I always feel like, the only way to be successful at this is to hear that, acknowledge it, put it aside, read the material, and then have a reaction. What is the movie that I think, if I were running this studio, what would I want, and how, what would I do?

And in the case you just described, a lot of people will ask, well, what is this, people say the word “take” all the time. What’s your take? What the hell does that mean? It means exactly what you just articulated. A gut feeling about what the movie ought to be and some kernel of thematic value or character value or plot value that you can say, this is the direction you should go.

This is a positive place that we can all move toward. And then, if they say, “no, no, no, it’s not very good,” probably the job’s not for you. But if they like it, now you get to go to the next level.

**JOHN:** And there’s some projects here that come in, you’re going to be the very first person they’ve heard from on the project. So, maybe it was a brand new book they bought and they’re listening to see, like, what people would want to do with the material. A lot of cases, you’re coming in, there’s already some scripts available. They’ve already been through this process for a while. And it’s important to remember that you are fresh eyes on things.

So, one of the very first things I tend to say as I talk to people about a rewrite is to point out all the things that are really, really good. Because they’ve forgotten. I mean, all the things that are new and great to you are old to them. And they only sort of see the problems; they don’t recognize what’s working.

I got to work on Hancock, which was a really good script when it was sent my way. And there were problems, there was stuff that wasn’t working in the third act. But, like, it was really good, so I felt like my first phone calls with them was telling them, “By the way, don’t forget you have a really, really good movie. And I know we need to work on this section, but don’t forget all the stuff that’s working really well.”

**CRAIG:** That’s a good point, because as people go through any working relationship with a writer, there’s this strange invisible commodity that’s entirely separate from the quality of the writing. And that is comfort. And when they lose a sense of comfort with the writer, almost like an insecurity that they’re not sure that the writer is taking them to the promised land, they will start to doubt everything, including choices that the writer has made that are good choices.

And when you’re hired to rewrite a project, I think it’s important to always think that there’s this invisible commodity of comfort that you can offer. Almost a sense of, “Look, I’m here now, and it’s going to be OK, because I’m going to be really honest and really specific about what will work and what won’t work.” And if they have that comfort in you, it’s incumbent upon you to both, as you said, defend the stuff that actually is worth defending, and then be really specific about what should change and how.

**JOHN:** What you’re really describing is trust. And trust is a commodity that sort of builds up over time and it’s one of the reasons why the people who are brought in to rewrite scripts at the last minute tend to be the expensive older writers who’ve been doing this for a while. It’s because they have a track record they can point to, like, “Trust me, I know what needs to get fixed here, and I’m not going to go in a crazy, crazy direction. I’m going to take you to this next step you need to do.”

**CRAIG:** Yes, that’s a great point. And that your focus is on the movie, you are going to be less insistent on defending specific things you’ve written. You’re really writing more towards a movie. So, you’re absolutely right.

The trust factor is huge, but even with that trust factor, even if you have that trust factor, more and more, I think, it used to be, I think, that studios were far more willing to have a simple conversation, have a sense in the room that your impulses and instincts were good for this project. And then hire you to deliver on those.

I think those days have given way, to some extent, to a little bit more of, “Look, we do trust you, but in the end, I have to make a much more rigorous case to the people who control the purse strings that we ought to spend all this money on you. So we need more than just that conversation. We need more than just the instinct. We need to, a little more specific about what is it that you’re going to write.”

**JOHN:** Well, let’s talk about the specifics. Let’s talk about that meeting where you first go in and you sort of lay out your take. To me, those cases are always, it’s a process of reminding and helping people forget. You have to remind them of, sort of, the basic ideas of the project.

So, let’s say it’s a book adaptation. Let’s say it’s not a rewrite, but it’s a book adaptation. You’ll go in, you’ll start talking about the world of the book. You’ll talk about, sort of, what kind of movie it is that you’re trying to make, what things are important about this world that they have to keep in mind.

You’ll talk about the characters, and you’ll talk about the characters in terms of how they function in the movie. And you can’t assume that people are going to remember very specifically what they read in the book. You have to be able to just talk about them as movie characters. So, you’ll set up who your hero is, who the important secondary characters are, no more than two or three or four people, even author mentioning in that. Pitch, just sort of, before you get started.

And then, you’re going to get into the story. And you’re going to tell the story the way the movie wants to tell the story, not the way the book wants to tell the story. And so, once you really start pitching what the movie story is, don’t refer back to the book. Be very straightforward about, “This is what we’re seeing on screen; this is how the movie is moving.”

Along the way, people may interrupt you with questions or want to bring in things from the book and it’s, you should be really happy if people are stopping you during your pitch, because it means they’re listening.

**CRAIG:** Right, and that they’re engaged in what you’re saying. I mean, if you are speaking in a way that engenders zero questions, you’re probably just being boring or wrong. So, that part of the conversation’s essential. And that sounds like a really good approach to how to pitch adapting a book.

When you have a script that’s been written, and maybe it’s the sixth in a line of scripts, the way I like to approach that is to sort of say, look, this idea, we love. We all love. If you didn’t love it, you wouldn’t be looking to spend more money on another writer. Here’s, to me, the sort of, the way I like to approach pitching a rewrite is: hero, what is his problem? I like to cut right, what is the theme of this movie? Why does this movie deserve to exist? What’s the philosophical payload of this thing? And express that clearly.

And then say, that is going to, now I’m going to tell you, that will inform how I approach the rest of this material. The story should, essentially, deliver the goods on behalf of the character in his journey toward understanding this theme in the end.

And then, I kind of try and lay out what I think the beginning is. The first 10 pages are the most important. I like to, I can be really specific about those. I always feel like, if I can’t see the first 10 pages of this movie almost instantly, it’s not for me. And then I try and talk about how this thing should resolve in a way that makes thematic sense and would be satisfying.

In terms of what the journey is, I like to at least give three or four tent poles along the way, not tent pole movies, but tent poles that are holding up the second act. That’s sort of our thematic storytelling sign posts that this character’s going to go through, and why those are important for character and plot.

And if I can get those ideas across, what I’ve offered them, essentially, is a shape of a movie to come. And I think that that, frankly, is more valuable, I think, at least, more valuable than sort of, and then, and then, and then, and then.

**JOHN:** One of the challenging things to learn about pitching an original, or a rewrite, or an adaptation, is figuring out how you talk about your hero’s main storyline and how you fold in all the other important details. How do you deal with all the subplots that are actually going to be important to your movie, but don’t feel like the main story? What I was going to say is, at a certain point, let’s just put a pin in that and let me tell you what was happening with those other characters.

You gather up the subplots into a nice little package that you can cut to and show what happened over there, and then you continue on with your main storyline. Where pitches tend to get really frustrating is when you’re constantly ping-ponging it back and forth between multiple storylines. Even if that’s the way it would really work in the movie, that’s not the way that you can really process it as a pitch.

**CRAIG:** That’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely true.

**JOHN:** One of the things about a pitch for an original, or for a remake, or for some sort of adaptation, think about a movie that you just saw that you loved, and you’re trying to convince your very best friend to go see that movie. What would you say to him? You would talk about the characters, the world, the story, but it wouldn’t be exactly the story as it’s presented in the movie.

It would be an optimized version of it that would be very front-loaded with the cool stuff that happens, and then sort of cuts to the very awesome beats along the way. It’s like a teaser for it. It’s not the whole movie itself.

**CRAIG:** Yeah. And then what you start to run into, look, there’s a practical choice that every professional writer has to make when they’re involved in this process of pitching on a rewrite, or just having to pitch their take, so to speak. And that is how to gauge how much pre-work you’re willing to do before you say “Look, you guys have had enough samples of what it is I would deliver. Buy it, or not.”

And meaning “hire me or not.” That is a very difficult thing to adjust, because frankly, the newer you are in the business, the less trust there is in you, and the more they’re going to want to practically see everything. You might have that first great meeting, and their response is “Terrific. You’re our front-runner, we love your ideas, now you do need to come in and pitch us the ‘and then, and then, and then’ version.”

And it’s hard to avoid that. If you are a little further along, you’re in more demand, you may be able to say “Guys, I’ve done this before. I’ve done it a number of times, so you know I know how to do it. If you like what I have to say here, and you’ve read my other work and you like it, we have enough information for you to make a decision about whether you want to proceed with me or not.”

**JOHN:** That’s absolutely true, and the very first projects I was pitching to try to land the assignment, it was the countless meetings and countless… There was pre-writing, which you’re really not supposed to turn in, but you end up sharing so people can have notes to pitch off of. That’s a whole other complicated conversation, but originally there was a lot of that.

And as I had a bigger track record, I could land assignments without going through all those steps and hoops. In a lot of cases there was already a giant director attached who wanted to hire me, so it became more like “Well, that’s what Tim wants”, and that would answer a lot of their questions. The pendulum swings back and forth, and recently I’ve been up for projects and I really had to, I felt like, exhaustively document what I was going to do in a way that’s frustrating.

You’re not going to ask the top level of director, “Show us your storyboards.”

**CRAIG:** Right.

**JOHN:** So, that can get maddening.

**CRAIG:** It can, and this is an area where they can exert far more control than when it comes to hiring a director, because that is always a prospective thing. You just can’t get the film until you hire the guy. When it comes to pitching out the story, ultimately, again, what it really comes down to is that comfort level. And you have to ask yourself “How much work am I willing to do to engender this comfort?” Knowing that you are essentially betting on yourself, because you may not get that job.

You may sweat a lot and have nothing to show for it, and that, frankly, is the standard operating procedure now, more and more than it used to be. And that can be tough, and I should say also, what’s interesting is, we know inherently as writers that the process of coming up with an outline — a full, scene-by-scene step treatment, whatever you call it — is one creative process. Then there’s this other creative process called writing a screenplay, and I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t veer away from that initial plan when they’re actually writing.

It’s inevitable, so from the studio side, I always feel like saying “You know guys, this is a theory”, but in the end, just like a surgeon who takes a look at a patient and says “I’m pretty sure it’s the following things,” once you cut the guy open, who knows? So, it’s always going to involve them having to make a leap of faith, and I think that they try to mitigate that a little bit by demanding more and more work ahead of time.

I’m not sure that there’s anything of greater value than hiring somebody who has a track record, knows what they’re doing, has achieved in the past, and gives you a presentation that you think would make a great movie. At its heart, not necessarily scene by scene, but at its heart. So we don’t always have the choice to just do that short little bullet point presentation, but every now and then somebody goes with their gut and hires you just on that conversation.

**JOHN:** I’ll also say that early on in my writing career, I was pitching on a lot of projects that I didn’t get, and that’s par for the course. My friends Chad and Dara, the Creaseys, they’re pitching on things probably every week. I was like “Oh, that must be so exhausting,” but that’s also incredibly good practice.

**CRAIG:** Huge.

**JOHN:** I have these folders and folders of pitches that I’ve written for myself on projects that I didn’t get. I was going to write the Highlander sequel, and this is my take on the Highlander sequel, and this is really good practice because maybe I spent three days figuring out what this was going to be. It’s a movie I’m never going to write, but I did my Highlander, and I got that out of my system to a degree, and I figured out what kind of sword action movie I would want to do.

It’s not the same as writing, it’s not the same as actually sitting down and writing 120 pages of script. It’s very much a part of the career process of a screenwriter, so it’s not just good practice, but it’s actually part of the craft.

**CRAIG:** Without a doubt.

Well, I hope that answered his question.

**JOHN:** Yeah, I think that was a good start there.

Now, we’re not going to be a generally very news-following kind of podcast, I wouldn’t guess. There’s not going to be a lot of timely news that happens in the world of screenwriting, but we do have something timely happening now, which is that we have the WGA elections coming up.

**CRAIG:** Yeah, there’s an election every year, but every other year there’s an election for officers. So every two years, the Writers Guild elects a President, Vice President, Secretary-Treasurer, and then also eight directors. There are sixteen directors on the board, eight of them are up for election each year. But every two years, there is what we think of as the “big election,” where we’re voting for the leader and we’re saying, “For the next two years, this is who we’re following, and this is who is going to set the agenda for the guild.”

**JOHN:** Now, Craig, were you on the board of directors at some point?

**CRAIG:** Yeah, I ran and was elected in 2004, so I served from 2004 to 2006. I opted to not run again [laughs], in large part because it was very frustrating exercise for me. Although I did get quite a bit done while I was there, and I was very proud of that, but I do have experience as a director on the board of directors and I still chair a committee, so I’m still involved.

**JOHN:** So, talk to us about the board of directors and how when they’re meeting, what their focus is during a non, leading up to a contract.

**CRAIG:** Sure. Almost everything is leading up to a contract in a weird way. Our contracts run three years, so you spend most of those three years getting ready for the next one. It’s an endless, exhausting Sisyphean thing. The board of directors of a union is essentially the governing body of this organization. Unions are Federally chartered organizations; they are created, authorized and have to be responsible to Federal law.

And the board of directors are elected by the membership at large. If you are eligible to vote, and there are certain…you have to occasionally work. You can’t just sell one thing or work once, then expect to vote for the rest of your life. SAG you can, actually, but not in the Writers Guild. And the sixteen members of the board along with the three officers meet once a month, and there’s usually this eight hour marathon awful meeting where you go through all of the issues that the union requires the board to decide.

I mean, the board sets policy for the union. The rest of the month, the staff, led by the executive director, essentially runs the day to day affairs of the union. But the big decisions, what do we want out of negotiations, what should our negotiating stance be, how should we handle the budget, these sort of big questions, that’s the board. Once a month.

**JOHN:** And now, in your experience, is the board leading those discussions, or is it really the President steering those discussions, or does it change based on the personalities involved?

**CRAIG:** Excellent question. The President, the officers set the agenda for each board meeting. So halfway through the month, the officers get on the phone, and they set an agenda. And the board follows that agenda with the proviso that any board member, given enough time, can either introduce an agenda item that can be approved by the officers, or raise new business. New business gets shunted to the end of the meeting, it almost never happens.

If you want to do something as an individual board member, you need to talk to the officers way ahead of time and make sure it gets on the agenda. In practice, the way the union actually runs is this. The Executive Director and the President talk about what they want and what they need to decide at each board meeting, and that’s the agenda.

**JOHN:** OK. So, in looking at the candidates for board of directors, for example, some of these people have very lengthy things like “These are the priorities we need to focus on,” some of them basically have their name and a headshot. How much of an agenda can a candidate list in their goals for the board of directors? How much of that, in your opinion, is really achievable as a director spot?

**CRAIG:** I would love to give you the idealistic answer and say all sorts of achievement is possible, but here’s the truth: you are there as part of a general move towards a general goal, and the general goal for the union is really set by the President. The President and the Executive working together — hopefully working together, it doesn’t always work that way — is going to set a series of priorities for the union. You can, on your own, try and push something through.

If the President isn’t really interested, typically the political realities are that a lot of people on the board have run alongside that President, were supported by that President, were brought into guild politics by that President. They’re simply not going to be interested unless the President is. The President is an extraordinarily powerful position in our union.

They set the tone, and it would behoove you to be on the board with either a President that you support fully, or a President that you don’t support but then there are other allies you have on the board and so you can articulate the loyal opposition. I somehow managed to do both, two years. 2004 I was backing the President, 2005 I was loyal opposition.

**JOHN:** So, some of what the WGA board is focusing on are the external issues of the contract negotiations, how we deal with the studios, things like late payments, the things that effect all writers and are an external focus. Other stuff is the more internal things, like I know you’re on the Credits Committee right now?

**CRAIG:** Right, yeah, I co-chair the Credits Review Committee, which is the committee that tries to improve the rules of the credits process.

**JOHN:** OK. So, looking at the board of directors and at the candidate statements, who are the people who stood out to you, and who are you most excited about being on the board this next year, if you want to name names?

**CRAIG:** Sure. If we have two parties in the union, and these things are very fuzzy, it’s not like Democrat and Republican, I tend towards the pragmatic. I’m less interested in ideology and philosophy and far more interested in money; in the union getting as much money for its members as possible through compensation, residuals, pension and health. So, I always look for the most pragmatic candidates.

In particular, if I had one issue that I like to zero in on, it’s enforcement. Our union tends to get very big and flowery about what we ought to have in our contract. We don’t do a particularly good job of actually getting the things that are in the contract. So we will occasionally strike and bang a loud drum to get a better residuals formula, while we’re doing that, the actual residuals formula that we have, sometimes people just don’t pay.

And the Kafkaesque nightmare that ensues in trying to enforce those terms is incredibly frustrating and alienating for any writer that has the misfortune to go through it. So, I like to concentrate on pragmatic, practical candidates who have an eye on enforcement above all. At the present level, that’s Chris Keyser, who I think is a terrific candidate. He created Party of Five, I believe, so he’s been around for quite some time, worked in screen and television, which is important because we’re kind of weird.

Our union, screenwriters and television writers are rather different kinds of careers, but we’re in it together. So he’s done both, he’s a Harvard Lawyer, as is Patric Verone. So we have two Harvard lawyers running against each other, so they both have the business and real world background, and also Chris, who’s on the board of directors, has been sitting on the board of trustees in the pension health fund for many years, which to me is a big, big deal. That, to me, is sort of the most protectable and important thing that we have as a union. So I’m a big fan of Chris Keyser for President.

Vice President is Howard Rodman against John Aboud. I love John and I love Howard, they’re both great guys. I think that Howard is certainly far more militant and ideological than I am, but he’s a good man and a mensch and he listens, so I think we’d be fine with either one of those guys.

Secretary Treasurer’s a great one, it’s David Weiss, who’s way off in firebrand territory. David loves a good strike. And on the other side we have Carl Gotlieb, the legend.

**JOHN:** Carl Gotlieb, who wrote Jaws?

**CRAIG:** And The Jerk.

**JOHN:** And The Jerk. He was President at some point, wasn’t he?

**CRAIG:** No, he’s never been President. Carl’s never been President, but he’s been on the board, and he’s served as an officer many, many times. He has a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge, which I think is invaluable. There’s no doubt that you need fresh blood and new ideas. The union is particularly susceptible to crusting over and just maintaining status quo, and so you need new people coming in all the time.

The danger, sometimes, as we wipe out so many of the old guard, is that nobody seems to remember. Nobody can say “Oh you know what? We tried. We went down that path twelve years ago, it was a disaster. Don’t try that again.” So, it’s great to have guys like Carl around. Carl has fought many, many times. He spent more time on a picket line than you and I and ten of our friends put together. So I’m a big fan of Carl’s.

On the board end of things, Jeff Lowell is a very strong voice for enforcement. Ian Deitchman, who’s an incumbent, also a very strong voice for enforcement, and Ian was sort of a hero of the strike. He helped run the United Hollywood site along with John Aboud.

**JOHN:** I turn to Ian a lot for insight to things happening inside the guild, because I’ve always found him to be very knowledgeable about why people were saying what they were saying, and what the reality was on the ground. So, that’s one of the reasons why I singled him out in my endorsements.

**CRAIG:** Yeah, Ian, he serves a role that I tried to serve when I was on the board, and that is the member of the board that actually talks to writers. Because most of them don’t, they only talk to each other. A lot of times, I would find myself in this discussion with sixteen people, none of whom had actually spoken to anybody. They just talked to each other and convinced each other what’s best.

Ian actually talks to writers a lot, and so he’s always been open to listening, which is a nice thing. David Goyer is a very accomplished screenwriter, who I think has a terrific attitude. I’m a big believer that it’s best to get people on the board who are feet on the ground right now, who still have a lot of skin in the game and who aren’t afraid to fight for what they have now.

There’s a little bit of a fear that sometimes you have guys who cashed out, they’re done. It’s a lot easier to send other people into battle if there’s no chance you’re going to get hit with a bullet. I like Goyer a lot.

**JOHN:** Yeah, Goyer strikes me as, when I first saw his name there, it’s the kind of name you would expect to see on the negotiating committee, because they tend to bring in the brand names for the negotiating committee so they can sit opposite the studio heads when they do negotiations. But the fact that he was eager to participate in the very, I don’t want to say boring, but the much more day-to-day stuff of the board was interesting to me.

**CRAIG:** Yeah, same with Billy Ray. Billy Ray and David Goyer both have something that I love, which is a… First of all, like so many of us, they are dual members. They’re members of the DGA and the Writer’s Guild, so they’re able to keep their ear to the ground with the directors. You have to remember, the Directors Guild has always negotiated very, very early, but one of the downside results of our previous strike was that we lost our position, our negotiating position.

We used to go first, now we go last. The Directors Guild would try and sneak in ahead of us by negotiating super-duper early. Now, they are actually; I mean technically, I think they may still be after us; but they negotiate so early that they effectively will be the union of first negotiation for the companies. Because of that, we have to talk to them. We don’t have to like the way they go about their business, but we have to talk to them.

One of the issues with Patrick Varrone is that he is loathed by the DGA. I think it’s common knowledge, really. He’s had just a bad time dealing with them. It would be great to get a President who they were a little less antipathetic toward, and guys like Billy and Goyer, I think, will help. I can’t promise that anybody is gonna completely thaw the ice between these two unions, but maybe bring the temperature down a little bit would be nice.

**JOHN:** Yeah, there’s certainly a track record of shared membership between our two guilds, and the degree to which you can leverage that shared membership is only a good thing.

**CRAIG:** Yeah, and it’s a big number too. I can’t remember what the specific stat was, but it was kind of eye opening. Like thirty percent of our members have overlapping affiliations with the guild. It was a lot of writers. A lot.

**JOHN:** I think my endorsements were very much in line with some of the things that people like you singled out as well. For the board of directors, I only mentioned people that I knew personally, who I thought would be fantastic resources on the board, but Howard Rodman I also singled out. Howard, who in addition to being very involved with the guild in every level, is really focusing on bringing guild contract to indies, to independent films, which I think is crucial.

I get frustrated when I see the WGA spending a lot of time and energy trying to organize reality TV production as a sort of strategic goal. It’s not really what the WGA is about. The WGA is about writing film and television, and the film and television that we’re really known for is dramatic dramas and comedies, and that’s indie film. Our next generation of Hollywood writers comes from indie films.

So we’re trying to get them involved as early as possible, and trying to get them protect as early as possible, it feels like a crucial goal.

**CRAIG:** Yeah. I mean, let’s be honest about this reality organizing thing. The impetus to organize reality was always artificial. The intent was to organize reality television to improve our ability to strike. That was entirely what that was about, to the point where I think actually the Barone administration failed to organize reality where they might have been able to, in an incremental basis, because they didn’t care about increments.

What they wanted to say was “When it comes time to strike, all TV goes away. Not just scripted programming, but reality programming.” The problem with that is the companies aren’t dumb. [laughs] They certainly saw the intent there, and they are also hamstrung by certain realities that we can’t avoid. Like, for instance, the fact that a lot of people who work in reality are already represented by IATSE, the stagecraft union which represent all the editors, for instance.

And we tried to organize the editors in a way that, frankly, the companies didn’t even have to bother rebutting that one because there was another union saying that it would be a violation of Federal Labor Law. And it would, it would be as if the Screen Actors Guild suddenly decided to try to represent writers. You can’t do it. The great news is that Howard is exactly, his focus on independent film is exactly the right goal.

Similarly, I think trying to organize scripted cable television. That was the thing where I would sit there and go “What are we doing?” We’re trying to organize the writers on America’s Next Top Model, and maybe even trying to organize the editors, possibly. We have people writing scripted television for cable channels that are owned by the same companies that make the movies you and I write, and we are literally just ignoring them because somehow we don’t think they’re going to bolster our strike threat.

It was just a dumb, dumb time in our union, and counterproductive and bizarre, but Howard’s always been a great beacon of hope for independent film writers and a great guy.

**JOHN:** OK. That’s a half hour. That’s I feel like a good start for our inaugural broadcast. I think I’ve learned a fair amount here.

**CRAIG:** I think I have as well. I didn’t know how Charlie’s Angels came to be, so I feel educated as well.

**JOHN:** Absolutely. So, let’s try this again.

**CRAIG:** Yeah, we’re going to do this fairly regularly, I think.

**JOHN:** That is the hope.

**CRAIG:** That is the hope. And this way I don’t have to blog anymore.

**JOHN:** I know. This is all to save Craig from typing.

**CRAIG:** Really. Thank you. That’s all I can say, is thank you.

**JOHN:** And thank you Craig, and we’ll get this up and see how it goes.

**CRAIG:** See you guys on the podcast.

**JOHN:** Great. Thanks Craig. Bye.