You have written a bestselling book. Now imagine sitting at your desk working on the sequel, Lawyers at Play. Your phone rings. It is a big Hollywood producer saying they want to option Lawyers at Work for a movie or TV series. Your next call is to Wayne Alexander .

As a senior entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, Alexander has significant experience in publishing, television, motion pictures, and related industries. He can explain everything you need to know about how the entertainment business operates. This might feel like a fall down a rabbit hole. Nothing is quite straightforward: books are not books—they are brands, video games and theme park attractions; contracts are reinvented at each new negotiation; directors are directors—except when they are producers; and, if you are lucky, you might see a man in a tie enjoying his life.

Alexander has practiced in the entertainment industry since the 1970s and is a founding partner of Alexander, Lawrence, Frumes & Labowitz, LLP. He has significant experience with the development, financing, production, and distribution of independent and studio films, and television movies and series. Clients include writers such as Charles Frazier and James Ellroy, directors such as Bill Condon and Stuart Gordon, producers, visual effects supervisors, executives, and production/distribution companies.

Alexander graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his JD from Yale Law School. He is a member of the California State University Entertainment Industry Advisory Council and plays guitar in a classic rock band called the Greyhounds.

Clare Cosslett: Was your family involved in the entertainment industry?

Wayne Alexander: I didn’t have even a remote contact with the entertainment industry growing up. I was born in East Texas, and my father was an aerospace engineer. He was one of the early rocket scientists working on the civilian side. We went from government contract to government contract when I was a kid. We moved from Texas to California, to Utah, to Colorado, and then back to California when my dad got a job at Jet Propulsion Labs. I went to junior high school and high school in La Crescenta.

Being the child of a rocket engineer means you have a very suburban life. La Crescenta was a small town and there was nothing to do there except go to the bowling alley. I was in a rock band. We would play a fair amount at high school and college dances and we played on and off during college at dances and clubs. I’m still in bands now.

Cosslett: The band you are with now is called the Greyhounds?

Alexander: It’s the Greyhounds because we’re all old. We tend to play boomer-type rock stuff from the sixties and seventies mostly.

Cosslett: You went to Berkeley for undergrad ?

Alexander: I started at Occidental College right after high school and was there for two years. It was a really small school and it all got very claustrophobic, so I tested Berkeley out in summer school after sophomore year. It was nowhere near as small and personal as Occidental, and as far as education, a big school like that is like going to the movies. You’d go into class with three and four hundred people. But Berkeley was beautiful and an interesting place to be.

Cosslett: Then you went on to Yale Law School ?

Alexander: When I got out of Berkeley, I had no real career plans. I wasn’t exactly a hippie, but I hadn’t ever really thought about what I wanted to do after college. At one point, I thought I would be in a band but it didn’t really seem like a valid career path, so I just always kept it as a hobby. I thought, “Well, now what do I want to do?” So I just took a temporary job working for Xerox.

In those days, they would hire people as management trainees and pay you enough to live on. I wasn’t really thinking about law school, but one of my friends bet me $200 he’d beat me on the LSAT. There was not a lot of planning in my early life. I did really well. I always had good grades, so I thought, “Well, okay, I guess I should be applying to law school.”

People nowadays will often decide they want to go to law school, and if they don’t have an aptitude for law school admission tests, they take practice tests and get coached. People that I knew in those days were using these tests more as an aptitude test. If you scored well, you thought, “Huh, that’s a clue. Maybe I’d be good at this sort of thing.” I applied to a handful of schools, and I thought, “If I get into Harvard or Yale, I’ll go there”—because otherwise I wanted to go to Berkeley.

Well, I didn’t get into Berkeley, which shocked me. I had a 3.9 grade-point average. So I went over and asked them why, and they explained that they wanted to be a national school and only took a limited number of people from California and an even more limited number—only about twenty-five—from Berkeley. So why didn’t I make the cut? Test scores?—passed that one. Recommendations?—passed that one. Thought of coming here before last week?—[Buzzer Sound]

Cosslett: Didn’t take the LSAT just to win a bet?—[Buzzer Sound]

Alexander: I clearly hadn’t thought about it because people who had thought of it would have gone over to the law school, maybe as a sophomore, and said, “What do you like to see?” They might have taken constitutional law, and I hadn’t done any of that. I was technically a psychology major—a classical liberal arts guy. I clearly had not thought of law school. So then, shockingly, I didn’t get into Harvard, and then I didn’t get into Yale. Well, actually, I was admitted to Yale but I didn’t know.

Cosslett: They forgot to tell you?

Alexander: They didn’t notify people who were on the waitlist until very late in the summer, and by then I had moved to UC Davis for law school. The post office didn’t forward the letter from Yale. So I went to Davis for a year, and it just happened that the people I was sitting next to took it very, very seriously. I had been a good student, but I’d never been as focused as some of these people were. The people sitting to the left and right of me in the first class I was in were the people who were going to run the Law Review and go on to be famous lawyers. I would be at school for my first class in the morning around eight and I would stay in school until eleven at night because the people I was around did that. There were people who did it another way, but I didn’t know that.

Cosslett: So your future would have been different had you had a different seating assignment?

Alexander: Probably, yes. There was a professor named Carol Bruch who taught our contracts class, and she had been the first female clerk for Justice William O. Douglas. At one point, she said, “You’re good at this. You should consider teaching.” I said maybe I would, because when you don’t have a career aspiration and law school seems interesting, you think, “Hey, maybe I’ll teach.”

She said, “Well, if you’re thinking of doing that, you can’t get there from here. You have to work for the Supreme Court. You need a place with an old boys’ club. If you’re thinking about teaching, go to Yale.” Carol had graduated from Boalt, which did have Supreme Court connections. Davis didn’t, at that time.

So, as a lark, I applied to Yale. I loved UC Davis. I was friends with professors whose classes I hadn’t even taken. It’s a liberal arts colony in a science school, so law students looked to their classmates for social and intellectual companionship more than at some other places. Yale called me in August and said, “You’re in. By the way, you were in before.”

Cosslett: I can’t even believe this.

Alexander: I thought, “Well, I’ve never been to the East Coast other than just to visit.” So I went. I was a little disoriented at first. I think everybody who goes into a school like that has somewhat of an inferiority complex: “Oh, they’re all way smarter than me.”

But the reality was that there were only a handful of students that seemed blazingly more intelligent than all the rest of us. You didn’t have a bottom in the class. In almost every other school I’d been in, there were at least a modest amount of people who weren’t getting it, and maybe a handful who got everything, but they didn’t seem to blaze with the light of intelligence. Yale had only one or two people in our class of one hundred fifty who weren’t just right with it all the time.

After the first year, I started to think about teaching . At that time, if you wanted to teach law, you took at job at a commercial law firm over the summers and then after law school you would try to get to the Supreme Court as a clerk. After the clerkship, you would work at a nationally recognized firm for a few years and then try to write a Law Review article or do something to get noticed. Then you go be a low-level law professor in a place that you don’t want to live in, like Nebraska. You try and excel there and try to get one step closer to the place you would be willing to live, like Houston or Atlanta. It’s probably the third move where you get to live in a city that you would want to be in or a school you like, or both.

Cosslett: What was your experience at a commercial law firm ?

Alexander: I had never had any exposure to a commercial law firm before the summer following my second year. My summer job after my first year at Davis was the kind of thing you do when you think you might want to teach. I was a research assistant for a professor and I did two kinds of research projects. One was running around visiting the police chiefs of various police departments in California to see how they handle stolen bicycles. I then gave them suggestions on how to improve their recordkeeping. And then I helped to write a model victim-compensation law for California. It was research. When I thought about jobs for my second summer, I thought, “Well, I like San Francisco and I like Boston,” and I started interviewing with firms there. I just hated it.

Cosslett: What did you hate about it?

Alexander: Boston just scared me. They did things like municipal bonds. Because I wasn’t invested in this and didn’t want to work for them, I would say, “How can you stand this? This work sounds horribly boring.” Most of them had very nice lives, but I just couldn’t see myself doing that work.

In San Francisco, I interviewed with a guy doing admiralty and that didn’t interest me, and then with someone else who did real estate development and somehow that seemed horrible. I remember one guy who lived in Marin County who had a sailboat. He was in the estates department of a law firm. He said he liked the work because there wasn’t any pressure. Most of the clients were dead.

Wall Street stuff was just confusing. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing and it didn’t seem like something I wanted to do. Even if I had known how much more money they made than the rest of us, it wouldn’t have made a difference. I’ve never been all that motivated by doing things that bore me, even if it makes you the most money.

After a few of the interviews, I met with the dean at Yale responsible for job placements. His name was Henry Thomas. Yale was very much like a family. It’s small. They really care about you. Thomas asked, “Hey, how’s the interviewing going?”

I said, “I don’t think I want to be a lawyer.” I told him some of these stories.

He said, “I don’t think you know who you are.”

I said, “Well, duh. I wouldn’t be in law school if I knew who I was.”

He told me that he had a theory about me. He said that I was a Western kid and, unlike East Coast kids who often knew what they wanted to do because it was what their family had done, I needed to go someplace that was a boomtown where they’d let younger people do more. After ten minutes in his office, he said, “I have an idea. If I set up some interviews for you, will you promise you’ll go?”

I said, “Absolutely. I’m not doing well at this on my own.”

So he set me up to meet with Arthur Greenberg, the head of Greenberg & Glusker. He said, “Go see that guy.”

And I said, “Oh my God. It’s in Los Angeles. It’s the devil’s place”—because I’d been in Berkeley and we all thought LA was a bad place.

He said, “You said you’d go.” It was an on-campus interview and I realized I didn’t have my suit at school for the interview. I went anyway, wearing jeans. I walked into the interview room and there’s Arthur. Now, remember, I’d had very limited exposure to people who wore ties. And I’d certainly never met one who enjoyed his life.

Cosslett: A man in a tie who enjoyed his life?

Alexander: I had not been around lawyers who liked what they were doing. Arthur was different. He said, “I notice you’re not wearing a suit.”

I said, “Oh gee, I hadn’t planned on having this interview today, so I hadn’t brought my suit.”

And he said, “Don’t tell me that. Tell me, ‘If I get a job in your place and there’s a dress code, fine, I’ll deal with that. But it seems kind of stupid to wear a suit for law school interviews. You know what we actually dress like here. It’s cold.’”

And we talked, and he asked why I was interested in his firm, and I told him that I wasn’t. I said, “Henry Thomas made me come in, he thought your firm might be a good choice for me.” Arthur thought that was interesting, and fun.

Arthur invited me to visit the firm in Los Angeles. When I went in for the interview, they had a system where they’d assign you to what they called a “shepherd”—a lawyer who was in charge of you for the day. You would meet several lawyers in the morning and then they’d take you to lunch.

I had interviews in the morning, and then they took me to the Playboy Club, got me legless drunk, stole my glasses and, after lunch, had me interview with a partner wearing a full-head chimpanzee mask. Being drunk, I couldn’t figure out what to do, so I didn’t do anything. I said, “Hello, my name is Wayne. What kind of work do you do?”

And we had a normal interview. After we had spoken for a while, he looked at me and said, “Goddammit, you could play poker with Arabs. You didn’t even blink!” I don’t remember too much about the rest of the afternoon, but here was a group of lawyers who were really smart, who liked each other, and who liked the work they did. I thought, “Wow.” So I went there for the summer job, and it was interesting.

Cosslett: How big a firm was it at the time?

Alexander: Twenty-five lawyers. There were three pieces to their practice. They had litigation, including some appellate work. They also represented some major real estate developers, which bored me, but I did some of the work. And then they had some entertainment industry work, which I had never been exposed to. I didn’t see much of it in the summer because I was assigned litigation-type research projects.

Cosslett: When you graduated, you said, “This is where I want to go.”

Alexander: I loved the place. The real estate guys liked me, and I did some shopping center finance work and that was interesting, but I was really interested in the film and TV work they did. Arthur Greenberg represented Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear. Yorkin and Lear had a company called Tandem Productions , which made All in the Family and the Redd Foxx show, Sanford and Son. They also had a program called What’s Happening? I became the production lawyer for a couple of the TV series. I did the weekly contracts for the new writers, and if they had guest stars, I wrote their contracts. This kind of work just seemed to be more fun than what the real estate guys were doing.

The firm took on a big research project in which they represented the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate with regard to ownership of the rights to about fifty-one Tarzan movies. The estate wanted to figure out what rights they owned because they wanted to make a movie deal. So I was reading movie contracts from all different eras and it was fascinating. No one in the movie business has ever had the same clout as Edgar Rice Burroughs. The way many of his deals worked was that he’d give the producer—Saul Lesser for a number of movies—a seven-year license to make and release a movie. At the end of the seven years, Burroughs owned the movie, the copyright, the whole thing. That never happens now. Not even John Grisham owns the movies they make out of his books. But Burroughs owned the movies. So when television came along needing content, he could license the movies. It wasn’t the studios—he did it.

I was very happy at the firm, but about eighteen months after I started, I got a call from David Altschul . He had been a year or so ahead of me in law school and later went on to become one of the presidents of Warner Records. At this point, he was at a law firm called Hardee Barovick Konecky & Braun . The firm had a New York rock-and-roll presence, and they had opened a branch office in California. David Braun , who was a major record lawyer, was the head. He represented George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, and The Beach Boys. There were a couple of other major record lawyers there as well: Mike Rosenfeld, who represented Keith Moon from The Who, and all of the Irving Azoff bands like Boz Scaggs, Steely Dan, and the Eagles. There was also a lawyer named Al Leonard who represented both Casablanca Records and Donna Summer and Tom Petty.

Cosslett: Why were they recruiting you?

Alexander: They needed a film and TV lawyer to work on the West Coast. Ron Konecky had a client, Smith-Hemion , that was a company that produced a number of variety specials. If you wanted to make a singing and dancing special starring someone like Shirley MacLaine or Ben Vereen, Smith-Hemion would be the one to produce it. I would work on their network deals, deals with the talent, etc.

Cosslett: Was it hard to move from Greenberg after such a short time?

Alexander: The Greenberg people were nice about it. I guess Henry Thomas was right about me: as a Westerner, I was looking for a boomtown where they’d let younger people do more. I know for some of my friends who went into Wall Street firms, it might take six or seven years before they got to lead on anything they were doing. While I loved Greenberg, Hardee Barovick was just too good an opportunity to turn down.

I remember when I went over to have lunch with the guys at Hardee Barovick, I saw Bob Dylan and Tom Petty sitting in one of the conference rooms—I think they were playing poker, waiting for a meeting with one of the lawyers. I just thought, “Oh God, I have to come here.”

Unfortunately, it turned out to be something of an unstable environment be­cause record lawyers didn’t seem to like each other as much as film lawyers did. They were always having wars over who should get credit for signing which client, and if one of them signed a client, another would come in and say, “You’ve got to accept the fact that the only reason you could sign, whoever it was, is that I’m here and they know I’ll fix what you can’t.” This didn’t affect me too much because I was a film guy and they were nice to me because I had a service that they needed for their clients. They didn’t feel the need to belittle me in front of their clients. The junior record lawyers were not treated as well.

Cosslett: That’s unfortunate.

Alexander: The film and TV bar was moderately small in those days, and I knew a lot of the people over at Pollock, Bloom & Dekom and I liked them a lot. Tom Pollock called and said they needed somebody. Tom, at that time, was one of the top two or three movie lawyers practicing. He was a really nice guy and he only owned one suit, which I thought was good. He had a tux because he had a lot of premieres and events to go to.

Cosslett: You appear to have an issue with suits and ties . Didn’t you wear a suit to work?

Alexander: You had to wear a suit when you were in a meeting or if it bothered people that you weren’t wearing a suit, but you could usually wear jeans. Clients didn’t care that lawyers didn’t wear suits. This was a talent firm—it wasn’t so much a company firm, although we did some company business. The clients tended to be actors and writers and directors, and a lot of them were hippie filmmakers like George Lucas and David Lynch and Ivan Reitman.

Cosslett: It’s such a different culture than the East Coast.

Alexander: Well, it’s tightened up a little since then. I loved Pollock, Bloom & Dekom, but I started worrying about having a future. Tom Pollock was so famous that even my own clients would sometimes ask that he make the calls to the studio heads instead of me, and that worried me. And sometimes if you asked my clients who their lawyer was, they’d say Tom.

I did service work for some of his big clients. For example, I did all of Sissy Spacek’s acting deals at the point where she was one of the first women to make a million dollars for Coal Miner’s Daughter, The Missing, and The River. She was a really big deal. I worked on Ivan Reitman’s deals for Ghostbusters. I also had a handful of my own clients. Some of them were a big deal, some weren’t. Peter Bogdanovich was a big deal at the time. But we’re not together anymore.

Cosslett: What was the nature of the work you did for Peter Bogdanovich ?

Alexander: I made his directing deals. I started working with him back at Hardee Barovick. I was introduced to him by a young hustler producer type who was working as his protégé. When I met Peter, he said, “I don’t like my current lawyer.”

I said, “Look, if you go to one of the big guys, they’ll just give you somebody like me anyway.”

He said, “That’s true. Okay, I’ll go with you, but I have to be clear that if I need someone big, you’ve got them.”

I introduced him to David Braun, who was then at Hardee Barovick, and he liked David, and then we had him talk to the other name partners in New York, I think Dick Barovick or Ron Konecky, both of whom had done film/TV work. He said, “Okay, that will work.”

Cosslett: So you were selling yourself, but you were also selling the law firm as a full-service provider for this client?

Alexander: Yes, in case he needed someone who had clout. When I moved over to Pollock, Bloom & Dekom, Peter knew Tom and was fine with that. I did ninety-nine percent of whatever there was to do for Peter, but when we needed a studio head call, and he said, “I want Tom to do it,” Tom would call in with me.

Cosslett: The client thought that Tom would negotiate a bigger fee for him because he was a heavy hitter?

Alexander: No, it’s more a question of whether you are someone the studio talks to a lot. If a studio lawyer talks to a lawyer he knows, that lawyer is going to get things he wouldn’t get if he were someone they didn’t know. Part of the process is knowing what you can get and what you can’t, because overreaching will get you zero. You have to know what range you can push into.

I had a lot of fun working at Pollock Bloom. Tom gave me Don Simpson, who was president of Paramount, and then moved over to start the company that became Simpson-Bruckheimer Productions and made movies like Flashdance and Beverly Hills Cop. Don was great and I did very high-level work for him, like the deal between his company and Paramount.

While the work was great, I started to worry that we didn’t make as much money as some other law firms. Tom would work for love, whereas our competitors were much more money-oriented. It’s not that the firm didn’t do well, but they did nowhere near as well as some other firms at the time.

Tom loved the movie business and would do things that weren’t only motivated by, “I’m going to make the maximum amount of money.” Now, he clearly had some major clients. He had George Lucas , who certainly made a lot of money, and he had Dino Di Laurentis, and he had some very, very high-paying clients, but that wasn’t why he was a lawyer. He just loved the creative process and the people.

I left there in ’84 to go to Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, not because Manatt seemed all that wonderful a fit for my practice at the time, but it was not under Tom’s shadow. I figured I needed to start building up my own practice. Enough business moved with me that it was okay.

Cosslett: When you made the move, was it was the same conversation with your clients that you had with Bogdanovich: “You get me, plus you get the support services”?

Alexander: They didn’t care. I’d been a lawyer for about eight years. There was not too much that I needed help with, at least in the entertainment field. If a TV series had their financing go bankrupt during production, I would need help with that, but as far as deals in the film and TV industry, I knew about as much as a lawyer was going to know.

Cosslett: Moving as a partner in New York generally requires a specific expertise or a significant book of portable business .

Alexander: You didn’t need a million dollars, but if you were trying to move in as a partner somewhere, you either needed to have a particular skill set that the firm needed or you needed to have clients. In the case of entertainment law­yers, you generally have clients, and I had enough. I was not the highest business-­getter by any means at Manatt, but I was holding my own. And I wasn’t working for someone else, which I enjoyed. My clients, however, generally weren’t the kind of people who were used to being at a firm like Manatt . They were there for me as opposed to being there because of the firm.

Cosslett: The reason being that the firm had lawyers wearing suits and ties?

Alexander: It was not the atmosphere my clients were used to, although I liked many of the lawyers. While there was a disconnect with my clients, there was a bigger contrast with the rock-and-roll crowd. The firm had a very big musical practice. Peter Paterno , for example, represented Guns N’ Roses. It was always fun to see the Guns N’ Roses guys sitting in the tenth-floor lobby. The tenth floor had the music lawyers, the film lawyers, and some of the high-level bank lawyers. So you’d see clients there for bank meetings sitting across from Axl Rose . And they’d be looking at each other, and they’d each be thinking, “Who the heck is this guy on the other side of the couch?”

Manatt is a very good firm, but it became clear that their specialties weren’t specialized in the direction that I needed them to be. In my present firm, we only do work in the entertainment industry—so when a client needs a litigator, I’ll help them find someone who’s specialized in the field that they need and I don’t have the pressure to feed the firm’s litigation practice.

Cosslett: So, rather than looking for another firm, you decided to go on your own ?

Alexander: I just stumbled into a situation. I joined up with Mark Halloran and Jay Shanker, and we started our firm and fumbled our way along. You worry at first. “Are we going to bring in enough to survive?” And we did. No one was getting really rich at first, but we stayed open.

We were originally three partners and there have been occasional personnel changes. The firm was bigger at one point when there was more business from independent producers, but as the financing of television and film has evolved over the last twenty years or so, there are less and less standalone indie production companies that can do things like make TV movies or TV series. My former partner, Rob Nau, for example, represented about half of the Aaron Spelling work, and there were several TV series he worked on. Spelling was bought by Paramount and then disappeared, for example.

Cosslett: How many big names are there at the level of Paramount in the film and TV industry now?

Alexander: There are six studios. There’s Columbia, which is Sony, and then Paramount. Universal Pictures is big. Warner is big, and Disney. DreamWorks is a little smaller. MGM is not big anymore. That’s about it. They’ve absorbed what used to be independent production, and it doesn’t work as well.

Take for instance the TV movie: there aren’t as many now, but that was some­thing that used to work really well in independent production. Bob Papazian and Jim Hirsch had a company in the eighties and nineties that made a lot of TV movies—maybe fifty or so. So the economics were this: they’d make a movie for X amount of money. The networks would pay them a license fee. It didn’t cover quite all of it, but most of it, and then they could sell the distribution rights for the rest of it, the parts the network didn’t take, to a syndication company and come away with a fair amount of money.

But when the TV industry changed, the financial interest rule changed and the networks were now allowed to own pieces of the shows. Beforehand, the financial interest rule didn’t allow the networks to own profit interests in outside productions. So that made a big difference, and it allowed indie companies like Aaron Spelling’s to build up a catalog.

Cosslett: If you don’t have relationships with these major studios, is it hard to maintain a practice?

Alexander: It depends what you do. I do more work with studios than some of my partners. They do more independent production. I also do some independent production, and I go through phases where, if my clients are doing it, I do a lot.

One type of work we have done in this area is piecing together a financing package for an independent movie that has a coproduction element with another country, and bank loans against distribution contracts, and deals with investors in a couple of different countries. There is some of that, but generally there’s less independent production of that kind than there used to be. Part of it is just the audience. If you had a movie like Sideways come out now, it probably wouldn’t be the hit it was when it came out.

Cosslett: Why is that?

Alexander: People don’t go to small movies as much as they used to. If you’re a studio, now you’ll make three or four tentpole movies that cost a couple of hundred million dollars. A tentpole movie is something like Avengers, Battleship, Cowboys & Aliens—the really big ones. James Bond movies , things like that. They’ll make three or four of those, and they’ll make two or three things trying to hit a niche audience like the romantic comedies, for instance, and they’re all trying to do things that will turn out to be something like The Hangover.

But if you’re trying to get a movie made like All the Presidents’ Men now, it would be awfully hard. Adult drama about serious subjects, it’s hard. There’s just less of it. The audiences don’t go as much. And the business done by foreign movies in the States is usually much smaller now than it was, so some of the film business that was more prominent a while ago is less prominent now. These movies are still around, though—look at The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The first one did about $10 million at the US box office here, but then the remake that David Fincher made did a lot more.

The studios have become much more about marketing and branding . They look to exploit franchises like Marvel Comics or Batman or Superman. If they can come up with another one of those, they’ll do that over making something original.

Cosslett: Let’s talk about your practice specifically. I know you do a lot of work with authors. Can you describe what that work involves?

Alexander: I do more work with authors than most other West Coast–based lawyers. The first really big deal I did was as Vince Bugliosi’s lawyer. He wrote a book called And the Sea Will Tell, which became a miniseries, and he got a whole lot of money for that. It was actually both a good book and a good miniseries. I like books. I read a lot. I get along with literary agents. My clients who are writers have either come to me directly or through their agents. There are two kinds of book agents. One kind usually deals with the publishers, and the other takes books and sells them to movies and television. I have a handful of agents in both categories that I do a fair amount of work with, and we send each other business back and forth.

Cosslett: When an author or an agent comes to you wanting to sell a book, what do you do?

Alexander: While I usually don’t help to find the buyer, I help to make the deal once a buyer is found. More of my work is in making film and TV deals from books than it is in dealing with the publishers, although we do get involved in publishing contracts as well. It depends when I got the client and how. If, for example, a book agent brings me in when they’re also bringing in a film-to-TV agent, the part I’m working on specifically will be the film and TV sales, although I may look over their shoulders a little bit as they deal with the publishers. I’ll consult with the agents, and we’ll all trade notes about what to go for. It varies about who talks to whom, but I’ll be involved in the early negotiations, and then when it comes to the contract drafting process, I’ll have the heavier load and those can go on for months, depending on what you’re dealing with.

One of the main gratifications I find in being an entertainment lawyer is that I am able to help someone whose stories and writings or work I admire get their stuff done. A real estate lawyer might look back and think, “Okay, that building is there because I was part of it, and there’s a mark on the world even though nobody knows I did it.” I can look back over TV series or movies or books, and it feels good even though I didn’t write them or direct them. It’s nice to know you helped those things happen.

Cosslett: Why does negotiating the contract take such a long time?

Alexander: If you close a deal for, let’s say, a movie based on a book, you’ve negotiated maybe twenty or twenty-five different things, and some of them will be in the contract when you get the first round, and some won’t. This is where experience matters. You need reference points to know, “What are they not giving me that I could get?” And if you ask for the wrong things, you can’t get them, but if you ask for the right things, you can. But they rarely will give you a contract that has everything you can get. They’ll start from scratch. And you have to say, “Wait, wait. In this area, you’ve given me this stock clause. I want this one.” And you go back and forth—some places will make you go through six or seven rounds, which can take months.

Cosslett: They don’t ever show their hand? They make you ask for everything?

Alexander: Well, it depends. Once in a while, you’ll say, “Look, we just did that deal with you last month for this book over here. How about using that contract as a model ?” Sometimes you can get them to do that. It depends. And various studios will do it different ways. Some always play the game very hard, where they start with, “We assume you’re very naïve. We’re giving you a first draft, and hope you don’t know anything.”

There are some that start from that point every time, and others that will give you a partially negotiated contract. Some play the game harder than others, and even when you have a fairly friendly place, it’s usually two or three rounds of negotiation at least. They send out a contract, you send them notes back, you have meetings about it, and you do it again. It’s usually takes several rounds to get a signable agreement in a friendly place. It can be five, six, seven rounds at places that play harder.

Also, you’ll have certain things that you know from long experience are just the way things are done. But then a studio will get a new legal department or a new business affairs policy and say, “Well, we’re not going to do that anymore.” If you have enough clout and enough other options, you might get it anyway, but if you don’t, you won’t. Also, there will be sticking points where the process can take a long time.

There are some studios and networks at which the legal and business affairs philosophy is that they will dig in on certain things and you can’t get it from them, and you try and get these points narrowed down to a small list and eventually go over their heads to the creative people. That’s the way they have institutionalized the process and how they want it to happen.

Cosslett: So it is the creative people who determine the terms of the agreement ?

Alexander: They will come down and say, “We really do have to give them all of this.” The process becomes somewhat scripted. There might be ten things that you need to get for your client, but you can only get three of them because you can’t get the creative people to have that deep an attention span. Ultimately, on some of these points, it is clear that the endgame of the studio is to give the artist or the writer less, so you really have to have the stamina to just hold out to get what you want for your client.

The process is probably about the same for film and TV writers. If you’re negotiating a deal to be a staff writer or a producer on a TV series, that process is about the same. I’ll work with the agents in kicking ideas back and forth about what to go ask for and who should do the asking. Sometimes I make the call to the studio. Sometimes the agents will. Sometimes it’s joint. And when it gets real detailed, it’s kicked over to the lawyers.

Cosslett: Do book authors have more credibility in Hollywood than other writers because they’ve actually produced a book?

Alexander: Sometimes. If you can demonstrate that the book has become a brand—the word “brand” is used a lot—and it has a large audience who bought it, and it has a picture on the cover that people identify with, and it’s got a preassembled demographic that they can look at and recognize, “Oh, girls from this age to this age buy this book.”

Cosslett: So it’s the bookness of it and the brandness of it that makes it attractive. Now, what about representing directors ?

Alexander: To some degree, it’s the same process, although it depends on what the directors are working on. Sometimes, you will have a straightforward situation where a director will be making a deal with a studio to direct a movie, and this is just employment negotiation where you talk about credit and money and back end, and whether your client gets final cut or not, and whether he gets a trailer. And then there are other situations where they are trying to organize and invent movies: “Let’s go option this book”—and then it is like representing an independent producer, where they’re looking around for independent financing and those sorts of things.

Cosslett: I never knew what producing was.

Alexander: Producing can be a lot of things. But, in the classic sense, producers identify a story and decide to option it, or convince the studio to option it for them. Or they find a writer who’s written something they think would work, or they have an idea, or they hear an idea, and they say, “Let’s either get you hired by the studio to write that script or let me find money to have it written.”

You have to work from a script, and once you have that, it’s, “Okay, who can we get to direct and act?” And then you have to get within a studio and assemble a potential group of people: “Gee, let’s think about getting this director and that actor, and working with this script based on this novel.”

Cosslett: They’re putting together the whole production ?

Alexander: Yes. “Can we get you to Universal here? Will you take domestic rights if we get someone to go get foreign sales?” But producers organize movies and they don’t get paid until movies happen, usually. They’re spending money. They’re optioning things. They’re hiring writers or convincing others to. They’re making alliances.

Screenwriters either write on spec or are paid because someone has hired them to write. Directors, if they’re sticking to just the directing thing, get paid for directing. Producers get producing fees out of movies, but only when they get made. To be a producer, you have to be wealthy or somehow be able to survive for many years until you get stuff done. Things don’t happen quickly.

Cosslett: Another practice area in which you have expertise is special effects.

Alexander: There are two aspects. One is representing the companies. A com­pany can have a contract for just certain scenes or certain kinds of work on a movie or TV series, or they can have a contract to do the whole thing. It’s usually one of those two things. As lawyer for the company, your job is making sure the work is defined clearly enough: Who insures what? Is it a flat fee? Is it ­cost-plus-materials? When do they get extra money? What if the production company wants more changes than you’re budgeted for?

And it’s pretty easy when everybody knows how it works. But it can be pretty difficult and it leads into a lot of problems when, say, an effects company is working on something and the people that they’re delivering their stuff to don’t really know how to ask for what they want—they say, “Well, that isn’t it.” And then there’s a whole discussion about who has to pay for what.

The other visual effects work is individual effects supervisors. Studio movies and big indie movies that are going to have a lot of visual effects may hire a person in charge of visual effects to help the director figure out how to accomplish the visual effects he wants. It’s a very big job. They have to stand next to the director while they shoot, to make sure they’re shooting in a way that leaves room for the effects to happen. So it’s a very-long-hours job because they have to be with the director all day and then several hours before or after in order to deal with the effects suppliers to make sure they’re getting what they want.

I have a handful of clients in this area. They’re either freelance supervisors, who are hired by a studio or production company for a single picture, or people who work at big effects houses, which may be Sony Image Works or Industrial Light & Magic. For the company supervisors, I’ll negotiate their executive contracts: X number of years? What is the salary? What is the bonus component? How does their credit work? What is their insurance? ILM¹ has between six and ten big effects supervisors who do much the same work on individual pictures as freelance supervisors would, but their contracts are with their employer.

Cosslett: Clearly, everything revolves around contract negotiation and in order to successfully negotiate terms, you really have to know how the world there operates.

Alexander: I’ve done this a long time, and it’s the one thing that seems to matter. I know how most things work in areas I practice in, and it helps. If you don’t know how the business is done, it’s hard to know what you should be concerned with or asking for. Experience is basically either having screwed up or having seen somebody else screw up over and over. “Oh, when this happens, that happens. So don’t do that.”

Cosslett: It pays to have a depth of experience .

Alexander: It can. I’m one of those people who tend not to take things on that I haven’t done, so I believe I can do a really good job. I know there are lawyers who think, “I can do anything.” Well, maybe I could, but I don’t like to. I think for me to be valuable to my clients, I should work on things where I know what I’m doing.

Cosslett: What sort of work do you do for agents and managers ?

Alexander: I have a handful of clients who are agents or managers in smaller companies, which don’t have in-house legal staffs, and I act as the deal consultant for them. They’ll call up and say, “Hey, we’re doing this. What do you think about this?” Or, “Have you done business with Lionsgate Television? Can we get this?” Or, “This issue has come up. What do we do?” I’m their in-house business affairs consultant.

Cosslett: What sort of work do you do for producers ?

Alexander: I do less of this sort of work now than I used to, but at one time, certain production companies were using us in lieu of in-house lawyers and business affairs people. They’d have us hire the writers. They’d have us do the negotiations for optioning a book. They have us do change-of-title clearance. Actually, we just worked on a change-of-title issue that came up in connection with the sale of rights in a novel. The situation was this: we sold the rights to an old novel in a bidding war for a whole lot of money, and it turned out that the author had died before the copyright renewal, so his widow owned the rights to the novel. The widow was English and we had to hire estate and copyright detectives to go look all over England for the author’s family in order to clear the title. We had to figure out how the English laws played off against the US copyright law and hunt down heirs who didn’t know they owned things and show them that they had something to sell, and then convince a bunch of them they should get along and band together. It was fun, although really time-consuming and annoying at the same time.

We also help producers to deal with the guilds because, when you’ve done this for a while, you know how the Writers Guild, Directors Guild, and Screen Actors Guild work. They don’t work the way you think they would, certainly from the outside. They have a lot of quirks about how credits work, and how you have to behave, and what form contracts have to take, and whether you can hire someone to do one writing step and not have them do others. They’re very specific about how they work and there’s an oral history that overlays their rules. You have to know what they mean by certain things and how they interpret them. A lot of it’s the result of arbitration decisions that aren’t published. You learn how it works over time.

Cosslett: I can’t imagine walking fresh into this business.

Alexander: Well, you can. You just end up over in one little corner and, over time, you gradually gain confidence as you do a wider range of things.

Cosslett: Is there a category of client that you find particularly fun and interesting to work with?

Alexander: Emotionally, it’s the writers and directors. There’s just something about working with the creators that is very gratifying. As far as the complexity, it’s probably the producers. Producers rely more on their lawyers than, say, real estate developers would. Real estate developers know where they’re going to get their financing. They know how it works. They know which lawyers they’re going to hire. And they use the lawyers more to do the papers.

A producer will say, “Hey, I just read this cool book. Go figure out if the rights are available.” And then, if they are, it’s, “Okay, what do you think we can offer for it?” Lawyers have a greater role in the process.

Cosslett: Is there a category of client that you find particularly difficult to work for?

Alexander: I tend to be happier with clients who are rational. Long-term we get along better. In an artistic business, there are people who are more and people who are less rational. That’s not to say they are bad people, but they are people who don’t really look at things logically.

People gravitate to lawyers who behave the way they want. There are clients who want bullies. I’m not really that kind of lawyer usually. That’s not to say I don’t ever get very firm when we need something, especially when my sense of justice is being offended—where someone’s decided to behave in a way that doesn’t feel either fair or right. I’m not really happy about unfair contracts. But there are people who want their lawyers to be bullies. I tend not to be the right lawyer for those people. I have turned down clients who I can tell early on want someone to go after what they want whether it’s right or not. Or at least whether it feels right to me. And we just tend not to have long-term relationships when that happens.

Cosslett: I notice that you don’t identify too many actors as clients.

Alexander: Some of that’s just dumb luck as to who I’ve dealt with, but probably some of it is constitutional. Writers, directors: we get along and we think in similar ways. There are clearly actors that I would get along with, but I just don’t find working on acting deals to be that interesting. They’re being hired to do this job, and you negotiate that. And then they’re hired to do another job. That’s fine, but the work that I tend to love is often a little more complex.

Cosslett: In terms of client development, you are a named partner in your own firm. Is there a social component in terms of attracting clients?

Alexander: There is some. I do less of that than some people do. I’m not out at industry parties all the time. One of my clients called me to relate a conversation. His friend had called him to say, “Gee, I met this great lawyer. He’s always at the right parties.” My client replied, “Why would you want that in a lawyer? I want my lawyer to be right about deals. I don’t want him to be at parties.” I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. I’m just not one of those people who spends a giant amount of time socializing.

Cosslett: How does the reality of being an entertainment lawyer compare to what most people think it’s like?

Alexander: There are so many different kinds of entertainment lawyers. I do a broader range of work than some. There are a number of entertainment lawyers who just work with talent. They mostly represent actors and maybe directors, and most of their dealings are directly with the studios and networks on behalf those clients. That’s both simpler and probably more lucrative than most other areas in entertainment if they can develop high-profile clients. A lot of this work is done on a percentage-of-income basis, and if you represent actors who are box-office stars, they work way more often than writers and directors, because actors can do more than one picture a year. The big ones also make more money than writers or directors, every time they work.

Cosslett: Do entertainment lawyers work on a percentage in areas other than talent?

Alexander: For producers who develop material, there’s nothing to take a percentage of. If your client is a producer in the classic sense, where they identify a book or a screenplay and say, “Hey, that would make a movie,” they have to pay somebody to get the rights, and then pay a screenwriter to write something, and then go hunting around for other elements. Nobody’s paying them for any of this.

And then, in the true indie-type model , once they’ve got enough of the elements together, they have to go find the money. And, again, no one is paying them for that. They have to see if they can do coproduction deals or get distributors or find individual investors who are silly enough to think that it makes sense to invest in movies or TV shows. It’s like representing a real estate developer. No one’s paying them to do it. You have to be overhead. So you have to have some kind of basis where they’re paying you to be their business office as producers—that’s often on a straight hourly basis.

When you get into an individual movie—I don’t do too much of this, but some of my partners do a fair amount more—there’s a production legal line in the budget. So it’s usually a flat-fee discussion: “We’re making this movie and we need you to do our financing and distribution deals with these six people and the actor contracts, director contracts, writer contracts, clear up our chain of title, get our insurance coverages in place”—that sort of stuff. That’s a negotiated fee based on the scope of the work and what the budget is and time pressure and all that.

Cosslett: So it’s not a billable-hours relationship either?

Alexander: It can be, but it usually isn’t—at least for movies in production, or TV series, or TV movies in production. Where they need a lawyer to be the production lawyer for the show, legal fees are usually a negotiated budgeted expense. It’s most often a flat fee of some kind.

Cosslett: Where do you see the industry heading ? Do you think that it’s going to change in terms of the medium?

Alexander: I know people like escapism and they like stories. One trend I see is the diminishment of documentaries, and nonfiction, and news. I presume recent trends will continue as far as the feature films that get into theaters, and there will be a continued emphasis on brand. So it’s likely we’ll see another sequel to Spiderman.

In this regard, being a novelist can be a good thing if a novelist has developed a following. Studios look at Twilight or Hunger Games or Harry Potter and think, “Oh, my! If I make this movie and it works, I not only get to make three or four more movies with the same general cast, but then I might also get a theme park attraction out of it, and toys and video games.” They like the cross-selling.

Also, technology changes everything. I just don’t know how it will change. In fact, I know that I don’t know. There are so many outlets now. Certainly, younger people are willing to watch TV shows and movies on whatever device happens to be handy. I have a Netflix account where if I start watching something and I get interrupted, I can pick it up on my iPad and, if I get interrupted again, I can pick it up on the phone. The Netflix app knows where you were in the show and goes right back to it.

Cosslett: Are there issues of professional responsibility that come up that are specific to an entertainment practice?

Alexander: One thing that comes up for entertainment lawyers of all types is that if you’re good at it, you’re going to get clients working together or your client will bring in somebody as a partner on something, and you’ll end up being their lawyer too.

There can be a conflict of interest that arises when two people are doing something and their interests aren’t exactly the same. The rules say you have to get permission, and we do that. Most of the time it’s okay, but now and again you’ll have a problem. For example, let’s say you represent client numbers one and two, who write a screenplay together. It doesn’t get sold right then. Client number two then goes off and works with person number three, who has written a hit movie, and doesn’t tell number one. A year later, because of number three’s participation and name, the screenplay can be sold. Clients number one and two start feuding. You try and mediate: it’s clear to everyone that you can’t take sides in the dispute. You can lose clients over these types of situations.

Another conflict could present itself when you represent a producer who has made an independent movie, and you also represent the distributor that is going to buy it. That comes up with us now and then. When everybody is professional, issues tend not to arise. People understand they can disagree about deal points without needing to sue their lawyer. But as an entertainment lawyer, you have to be very conscious of these potential conflicts, and stay on top of things, and make sure you don’t try to represent both sides if there is any indication of a real dispute.

If you’re good at what you do, it is not uncommon to represent both a buyer and a seller in a deal, because you know the bottom line for both sides. If people are mature enough, and aware enough of the business, usually it’s not a problem. That’s not to say everybody always agrees on everything. When things turn into real disputes, we have to step back and let everybody get different representatives.

That doesn’t happen all that often in our lives. But, again, you have to be careful who you represent, and what you say to them, and what their expectations are. If you get someone who says, “Yes, yes, I know they’re your client, but you need to be on my side and not tell them that”—that’s going to be a problem. You certainly can’t keep secrets, and the conflict-of-interest waiver letters tell them that there isn’t attorney-client privilege between clients who have the same lawyer.

Cosslett: I’ve talked to so many lawyers who tell me they want to get into entertainment law . How hard is it to break into the practice?

Alexander: There are certainly not thousands of jobs doing what I do right now, but a lawyer wanting to get into this business should look at the bigger law firms with entertainment practices and work there for a while, or at a studio, network, or big agency. He or she can always move on. It depends what someone wants to do ultimately. There is a need for people to do this kind of work, but there certainly aren’t as many opportunities now as thirty years ago or maybe ten or twenty years from now. The industry is regrouping, there’s less production now at studios, and less scripted television production now than at other times, but things always change.

There are too many lawyers now who are doing it already. It’s certainly not as easy and open as it was in the seventies when I stumbled in, because a lot of the people that I stumbled in with are still there. And I’m way better at this now than I was in 1979.

Computers and e-mail have affected what kind of work I do, and how fast it happens, and how much support I need. I do a lot more dealing directly with contract negotiations than I would have fifteen years ago, when we would have had more associates and more time. So efficiency has increased, and the need for support lawyers has decreased, at least in the kind of work I do. If you’re in a production or distribution environment, where you have multiple projects and the work has some kind of structure and routine to it—like inside a studio legal department, for instance—it makes sense to have several layers of lawyers, and that can be a good training ground.

Usually, my clients want me for what I know, and I do such a wide range of stuff that, at this point, it’s very difficult for me to have anybody as a second.

Cosslett: So it’s an industry where seniority and longevity are actually rewarded?

Alexander: It can be, if you have clients who don’t need someone who’s particularly good at parties.

Cosslett: Who’s going to provide your annuity when you want to go and lie on the beach and play your guitar full-time?

Alexander: I don’t think people like me retire.

¹ Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is the motion picture visual effects division of Lucasfilm Ltd.