“My Glorious Defeat,” the article I wrote for Men’s Health, is now up at MSN.com ((May 3, 2011 Update: MSN.com is link no longer active, but can be accessed at Men’s Health. )) (No, I don’t get residuals.)
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Do screenwriters get a chunk of foreign TV money?
Do writers ever get a percentage of the substantial profits from the studios’ licensing their films to international TV networks?
— Marilyn Mallory
via imdb
Writers do get a portion of the revenue, in the form of residuals. These payments are roughly analogous to the royalties songwriters and novelists receive, but with some important distinctions. (For clarity, I’m only going to talk about residuals for movies, because residuals for TV shows work a little differently.)
For starters, you don’t get residuals on theatrical release. Whether your movie makes one dollar or one billion at the box office, you don’t get residuals on that. It’s only when the movie shows up in subsequent markets, like home video or television, that you start getting more money.
The formulas for how much money the writer is supposed to get are complicated and contentious, and are often a big issue in negotiations between the WGA (which collects residuals) and the studios (who pay residuals). Even a fraction of a percentage can translate into thousands of dollars for a screenwriter. For example, I’ve made far more money from the residuals on Go than I did for writing and producing it.
Residuals are paid quarterly, and arrive in big green envelopes. It’s always a guessing game how big the checks are going to be: sometimes just a few dollars, sometimes well into six-figures. But it’s always exciting to get money you weren’t quite expecting.
It’s important to explain what residuals aren’t. They’re not “a piece of the back end” in the way that a big movie star gets gross points. Residuals have nothing to how profitable the movie is: you get paid the same per DVD or run on HBO whether the movie is a giant success or a dismal failure. (Of course, a hit movie should sell more DVDs and play more often on television, so in the long run, you’ll come up ahead.)
Corpse Bride article in Script magazine
Yesterday, the WGA [announced plans](http://www.wga.org/subpage_newsevents.aspx?id=493) to begin organizing writers working on reality television shows. Unlike writers working on traditional dramas or sitcoms, these writers haven’t been covered by the guild, which means they receive no health insurance, no residuals, and no set pay minimums. As WGAw president Daniel Petrie put it in the press release: The secret about reality TV isn’t that it’s scripted, which it is; the secret is that reality TV is a 21st-century telecommunications industry sweatshop. Most readers of this site are familiar with one kind of writing when it comes to film and television. It happens on three-holed paper, with uppercase scene headers and neatly indented blocks for dialogue and parentheticals. But the truth is that much of the work a professional writer does in Hollywood takes on other formats: treatments and beat sheets, outlines and season patterns. Even in non-reality shows, a lot of the writing takes place before you type “FADE IN:”. So it’s a mistake to confuse “unscripted” with “unwritten.” Many of the people who the WGA would like to organize are currently called producers — which is the norm in television. Be it [The Simpsons](http://imdb.com/title/tt0096697/combined) or [The Sopranos](http://imdb.com/title/tt0141842/combined), many of the writers in television are called producers of some stripe: Executive Producer, Co-EP, Supervising Producer. Despite the title, there’s no doubt they’re writing. Every episode says “written by” or “teleplay by.” In reality TV, there’s usually no “written by” credit. But it would be a mistake to think there’s no writing. In addition to the obviously-scripted moments (someone has to tell Jeff Probst what to say), every episode needs writers to figure out what the hell the story is. Yes, video crews will capture the action, and a team of editors at Avids will ultimately cut the footage together, but the decisions about what actually happens in a given episode fall upon the writers, who have to tease plot, character development, comedy and tension out of hundreds of hours of “real life” taking place. These people are, in fact, organizing reality. Which is why they deserve to be able to organize under the WGA umbrella. You can read more about the situation [here](http://www.wga.org/organizesub.aspx?id=1088). UPDATE: After reading a note left in the comments section, I don’t want to understate the role editors often have shaping the “what happens” in reality TV. They’re often performing functions that would normally be the purview of writers; the question is, why aren’t they being compensated for it?  has a long-ish article about [Corpse Bride](http://imdb.com/title/tt0121164/maindetails), interviewing both [Pamela Pettler](http://imdb.com/name/nm1017135/maindetails) and yours truly about the story and process. Pamela, [Caroline Thompson](http://imdb.com/name/nm0003031/) and I share writing credit on the movie, but I was never really clear who wrote what and when. From the article, it appears that Caroline wrote a detailed outline, while Pamela wrote the first real script. I was the in-production guy, who did tweaks and fixes, smoothing out rough spots and writing lyrics for a few new songs.</p>
<p>Since it wasn’t a WGA-covered movie — animation often isn’t, [much to the WGA’s chagrin](http://wga.org.master.com/texis/master/redir/?u=http%3A//www.wga.org/negotiations/juris04_1.html) — there wasn’t a normal arbitration process to figure out who got what writing credit for the movie. Fortunately, the final credits as determined by the studio seem right to me. Again, since it’s not WGA, none of us will get residuals. Which blows. But we knew that going in. </p>
<p>The movie, incidentally, is great. </p>
<p>One of the cool/weird things about working on an animated movie (this is my second, after [Titan A.E.](http://imdb.com/title/tt0120913/maindetails)), is that you get to see the entire movie a lot while it’s in production. Every couple of weeks, I’d get a new tape via FedEx from London, showing the newly animated scenes and the pencil storyboards for what was about to shoot, with a mixture of real and temp voices for all the characters. In all, I’ve probably seen the entire film 20 times in various incarnations.</p>
<p>About a month ago, I finally got to see the finished product at a test screening in the Valley. The movie is flat-out gorgeous on the big screen, with the stop-motion animation having a realer-than-real quality. It’s so sharp that it looks 3D.</p>
<p>But what really surprised me is that all the story tweaking we did along the way feels so seamless. You wouldn’t know that characters got added and dropped along the way, or that significant points of backstory were still in discussion midway through shooting. Or that it wasn’t always so musical.</p>
<p>All films, including live-action, go through major changes during editing, but with this kind of animation, there really is no distinction between production and post-production. Once you shoot a frame, it’s finished, forever. So it’s heartening to see that the nail-biting decisions paid off. It feels like it was shot from a locked, finished script. It wasn’t.</p>
<p>The other great lesson you learn from writing animation is surrendering your monopolistic control over every little word, the cinematic [“Not Invented Here”](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Invented_Here) syndrome. Moving from the page to the (miniature) soundstage means going through the storyboard artists, who often find new ways of playing a beat that you never considered. During production, a lot of my job was tweaking dialogue to match new bits of business that the artists had invented. While actors in a live-action movie will improvise, that kind of multiple-voices collaboration doesn’t happen as often. In the case of Corpse Bride, it really helped.</a> </p>
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Organizing reality
[Formatting a reality show proposal](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2004/formatting-a-reality-show-proposal)