John August

WGA

M is for Minimum

Episode - 528

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Scriptnotes, Transcribed, WGA

John and Craig define and discuss important terms for writers: backends, profits, scales, floors, ceilings, and minimums. They trace the flow of money from WGA contracts to residuals and the downstream impact on animation writers.

They also take a look at characters ‘finding themselves’ and harsh writing advice. Follow up includes Korean grammar, holiday movies, the phrase ‘fake it till you make it’ and whether you should introduce yourself as a writer.

In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig analyze why movie dialogue has become harder to understand.

Links:

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

UPDATE 1-5-21 The transcript for this episode can now be found here.

Why I changed my mind on end credits

Film Industry, News, WGA

This week, the WGA announced an upcoming referendum on a proposal to create an “Additional Literary Material” end credit for feature films.

I was part of the committee that drafted the proposal, and took the lead in writing up the exhaustive explainer and FAQ.1

Outside of my role on the committee, I want to talk through how and why my thinking about end credits has evolved over my 20+ years as a screenwriter, and why I think members should vote yes on the proposal.

The way it’s always been

Going back decades, the WGA has had a process for determining who gets credit for writing on a movie. These are the familiar “by” credits: written by, screenplay by, story by, etc.

These credits denote authorship. Whether a film uses opening titles or end titles, the writing credit always comes right next to the director. They answer the question, “Who wrote that?”

But they don’t tell the whole story. In many cases, other writers worked on the project. If they didn’t meet the threshold for receiving this “by” credit, all record of their employment is erased.

That’s unique to the film industry. In television, members of a writing staff receive an employment credit (e.g. staff writer, story editor) in addition to a writing credit on episodes they write.

The idea of listing every writer who worked on a movie is not new. It’s always seemed absurd that a catering truck driver who worked one day on a film has their name in the credits, while a screenwriter who spent a year on the project and wrote major scenes goes uncredited.

And yet! Screenwriters are not drivers. Our work is fundamentally different. Authorship means something, both for the individual project and for the status of screenwriters as a profession. That’s why in the case of projects with multiple writers, the Guild has an arbitration process to determine the official writer(s) of the script.

But what about listing the other writers in the end credits, away from the “by” credits?

For at least 20 years, I’ve been able to argue both sides of the end credits question. Pro: Listing all the writers better reflects the reality of who worked on a movie. Con: Listing all the writers undercuts the purpose of the WGA determining credits in the first place. Like a high school debater, I knew the arguments and was ready to engage on either side of the debate.

I didn’t want to pick a side — but of course, I was picking a side. When the status quo is no end credits, doing nothing means perpetuating the current system.

During my year working on the committee, a few things got me to change my mind.

Recognizing survivorship bias

I’ve received credit on films I wrote, and lost credits I thought I deserved. On the whole, it’s worked out. My resume looks pretty full, particularly in those crucial early years of my career (Go, Charlie’s Angels, Big Fish).

Even on movies where I didn’t get credit, “the town” knew I did the work. I kept getting hired and increasing my quote.

Talking with many of my screenwriting peers — writers in their 40s and 50s — that’s largely been their experience as well. It’s not surprising given the phenomenon of survivorship bias. If you’re only looking at the screenwriters who made it, you’re going to assume the system is working well.

But what about the screenwriters who aren’t getting credit? What’s happening to them?

Talking with members currently at the early stages of their screenwriting careers, they describe a very different universe than I experienced, one with month-long writers rooms, simultaneous drafts and cultural sensitivity passes. Their missing credits are not because of bad luck, but rather because of an environment that makes it much less likely they could ever receive credit.

That sense that “the town” knows who really wrote something? There is no town anymore. Instead of six studios, there are countless production entities, many of them not based in LA. Netflix is so giant that one team has no idea what another team is making.

In 2021, when a screenwriter receives no credit on a film, it truly is like they never worked on it.

When thinking about missing screenwriting credits, I mistakenly assumed that my experience in the early 2000s matched screenwriters’ experiences today. It doesn’t.

Comparing imagined harm to actual harm

Most of the status quo arguments I’ve heard for the past twenty years foretell grave consequences if additional writers were listed in the end credits. Some common predictions:

  • It will devalue the worth of the “by” credits
  • Studios or producers will hire friends just to get their names in the end credits
  • It will hurt newer writers if a big-name writer showed up in the end credits

All I can say is, maybe! We’re screenwriters; it’s our job to imagine scenarios.

But it’s also important to check the facts. Earlier this year, the WGA examined over a thousand feature contracts to look at trends in compensation. One finding: credit matters a lot.

Chart showing that a feature writer with no credit earns median $100,000 while one with a single credit earns $140,000

The median guaranteed payment for a screenwriter with no credits was $140,000. The median guaranteed payment for a screenwriter with one credit was $400,000.

A single feature credit more than doubled a screenwriter’s pay.

Would receiving an “Additional Literary Material” credit result in the same bump? Likely not to the same degree. But it would show that a screenwriter worked on a film that got made. I strongly believe that’s going to be worth real dollars to that writer. In my discussions with newer writers, agents and executives, most of them agree.

This impacts quite a few writers. In 2020, 185 participating writers wrote on produced features for which they ultimately received no credit.

I should also note here the Guild’s Inclusion & Equity Group’s concern that the status quo disproportionately affects women and writers of color, for whom these resume gaps can be a substantial barrier to future employment.

When comparing the theoretical harms of end credits to the actual harms of doing nothing, I think it’s better to solve the real problems members are having.

Finding a middle path

Even after acknowledging my survivorship bias and the actual harms screenwriters are facing, I wouldn’t have supported many of the more aggressive proposed changes to the credit system. For example, I don’t believe in changing the thresholds for the “by” credits, expanding the definition to include non-writing roundtable participants, or having all participating writers share in the residuals pool.

Instead, what the committee came up with after a year of sometimes-heated debate was a proposal that narrowly addresses the “resume problem” of missing employment credits without changing anything about the traditional writing credits. The result closely mirrors the system used in television for decades, where writers are credited for both their employment and their authorship.

The term “Additional Literary Material” is incredibly dull, but it’s also accurate. It reflects the reality that the people listed wrote material for the film without passing any judgement. It clearly delineates actual writing — words on paper — from participating in a roundtable.

Rather than diluting the authorship credit of the “by” writers, I’d argue the “Additional Literary Material” credit reinforces it. By definition, any writer listed it this block did not meet the thresholds for receiving “by” credit. (And if a writer chooses not to be included in “Additional Literary Material,” it’s their decision alone.)

In summary, I changed my mind on end credits because I realized I wasn’t looking at the reality experienced by many screenwriters in 2021. This proposal addresses a specific problem with minimal disruption to long-established screen credit processes.

Voting on the referendum begins November 2nd. I urge you to vote yes.

Supporters of the proposal are gathering signatures for a Pro statement. You can read it here.

WGA members can sign on by sending an email to yesonendcredits@gmail.com with the subject line “PLEASE ADD MY NAME TO THE CREDITS PRO STATEMENT. Please include your name and preferred email address.

  1. I beg you, please read the explainer. We really tried to answer every question you might ask. ↩

Recapping the AMBA Campaign

WGA

While there’s already an official timeline of the WGA agency campaign on the Guild website, I’ve put together my own version that fills in some further details based on my own records and notes:1

Timeline of the WGA Agency Campaign

This is largely for historical record; there’s nothing really new here. But it’s helpful to see the whole campaign in context, and to resist oversimplifying the narrative.

To me, there are four main storylines to follow:

  1. WGA membership holding together
  2. The one-by-one signing of agencies 5 through 12, followed by the big four
  3. The lawsuits, and how the trial kept getting pushed back
  4. Internal and external pressures at the big four agencies, including WME’s IPO

I’d rank them in that order of significance, but they all played a part in getting us to the successful conclusion.

One important storyline doesn’t fit on the timeline because there is no associated date: TV staffing. Because of a lot of hard work and scrambling, an assortment of official and unofficial tools helped shows get staffed without agents. The much-feared staffing crisis became a dog that didn’t bark.

The pandemic isn’t listed, even though it’s obviously affected every single event since March 2020. To me, the coronavirus and the resulting shutdown was a wash in terms of its impact on the agency campaign. It curtailed both member meetings and face-to-face negotiations. It had a disproportionately large impact on the big four agencies, and a disproportionately small impact on writer income. But the most pervasive effect was psychological: the pandemic became by far the biggest issue in everyone’s life, followed by the presidential election. For both writers and agents, resolving the AMBA campaign remained a priority, but got pushed further down the list.

It’s important to keep in mind just how much happened in 2018 before the original AMBA expired. There were a lot of member meetings, both to educate writers about the issues involved, and to gauge how much support there would be for the battle. This was a two year fight only if you start the clock in April 2019 and ignore a year’s worth of preparation.

Because it’s my timeline, I’m including some things that were significant to me but may not be meaningful in the final accounting of things. For example, when I signed at Verve, it was newsworthy. But it didn’t break open the floodgates. Most writers at my level waited for the battle to be over so they could go back to their original agents — or made the transition to other agencies quietly.

I honestly have no idea what the equivalent timeline from an agency perspective would look like. We might agree that agency X signed with the WGA on a given date, but which agencies really mattered? How important were the lawsuits? Was internal or external pressure a bigger factor in getting them to sign? In the end, I’m not sure we’ll ever know.

You can find my timeline here.

  1. I served on both the WGA board and the negotiating committee, but everything here has been widely reported. In the timeline, I’ve included links to news articles where available. ↩

Feature Residuals and the Mystery of SVOD

Film Industry, Follow Up, WGA

Following up on my earlier post, here’s an update on Aladdin’s residuals.

Let’s look at the breakdown for 2020 Q3:

Re-Use Market Amount
Basic Cable $1,536
Foreign Free TV $8,071
Home Video/DVD $11,161
Pay TV $76,687
New Media — EST $11,134
New Media — SVOD $222,496
TOTAL $331,086

Note that these are total writer residuals. As Aladdin’s co-writer, I get half, so I’m simply doubling what I see in my individual residuals report.

The first four categories are pretty self-explanatory. You can find more information about them in the WGA’s residuals survival guide.

New Media — EST stands for Electronic Sell-Through. This is when a customer purchases a download, which they then own forever. If you buy a movie for $19.99 on iTunes, that’s an EST. It’s the digital equivalent of someone purchasing a DVD at Target. The residual is calculated as 0.36% of the company’s accountable receipts.

The final category is a little confusing. Even after serving on the negotiating committee for the last MBA, I ended up emailing a colleague at the Guild for clarification.

New Media — SVOD combines very two different ideas. The full title for this category should really be something like New Media — Rental and SVOD.1

Rental is what you think. If you’ve ever paid $1.99 for a movie on iTunes and had 48 hours to watch it, that’s an electronic rental. The residual is calculated at 1.2% of the studio’s accountable receipts.

SVOD stands for Subscription Video on Demand, services like Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu, also referred to as streamers. The residual is calculated as 1.2% of the amount the studio receives for licensing the movie to the service. For example, MGM might license an old James Bond movie to Amazon Prime for 12 months. The screenwriter would get a residual based off the price MGM was able to charge.

In the case of Aladdin, it’s available exclusively on Disney+. Disney is never going to license it to Netflix or Peacock or Amazon Prime. So any fee Disney-the-studio is charging Disney-the-streamer is really just numbers on a spreadsheet. They’re the same company.

Now you’re asking: Wait, if this residual is 1.2% of a made-up number, how do you know it’s a fair price?

Self-dealing is always a concern, and has long been an issue in television. My colleague at the Guild writes:

When that happens the MBA requires the company to impute a license fee based on comparable pictures. This is an issue happening across all the streamers and is one of our most important enforcement efforts.

For 2020 Q3, this lone residual was worth nearly a quarter of million dollars for Aladdin. It’s both hugely important and largely opaque.

I don’t have a breakdown to show how much of this line item came from rental versus the imputed license fee, but it’s something I’ll be watching closely in the years ahead.

  1. And even that’s not complete: this category also includes “Premium VOD,” which hasn’t really been a thing but might become more important. ↩