Chapter 15

You Can Get Paid to Do this

 

Writing for the Entertainment World

The writer is indispensable, yet not always valued—at least in the entertainment world. Sam Goldwyn, in one of his dassic aphorisms, is reported to have called scriptwriters “schmucks with Underwoods.” An Underwood, for those who have no cultural memory about this, was a make of manual typewriter. So you’re a schmuck with a laptop. Robert Altman’s brilliant film The Player (1992) gives you an idea of what life as a writer in Hollywood might be like, even though it is edged with satire and more injokes about the industry than most of the audience would understand. In the movie, a studio executive makes an interesting statement that goes something like, “My studio accepts a thousand submissions a year and puts twelve of them into production.” There are probably no formal statistics to support this, but it sounds reasonably accurate. Multiply that by several studios, and you can estimate the number of screenplay submissions in any given year. Let’s say 10,000 as a round number. That’s a lot of competition. Of those, many are bought or optioned, but few are ever actually produced. So income from writing, as I know from personal experience, does not necessarily lead to screen credits. There is no way of knowing how effective or systematic the selection process is. Most studios and independent producers have readers who read all submissions and write a report that often determines the fate of the particular script. This hidden process causes much heartache and frustration and maybe prevents quite a few brilliant but idiosyncratic scripts from being produced. Every time you see a bad movie, you wonder how it got into production. Although people make mistakes in judgment, we like to assume that overall, the best scripts eventually rise to the top. No one intends to make a bad film although many producers make low-budget product for the video market that never gets a theatrical release.

Script readers and editors need a writing background. Producers who commission writers benefit enormously from having tried to write themselves, as do directors. A director has to work very closely with a scriptwriter especially if the director cannot write. Writing and directing can go hand in hand. Financial backers make decisions about large investments based, in part, on scripts. Other opportunities exist in the corporate world where the stakes are not as high. You still get to write professionally while you work on that screenplay.

In its own right, the corporate world is a highly creative and stimulating place to work. Every job is different. Although some assignments are less exciting than others, my personal experience writing for corporate media has been rewarding. You can perfect your craft and be paid, which might enable you to write your screenplay nights and weekends. As we learned in the chapter on corporate writing, dramatization is one of the devices that work well for certain corporate communication problems. This means writing dialogue, casting talent, and directing. Corporate work also is a good training for documentary because it relies on clear visual exposition.

To get ready to earn a living by writing for media, you should read the work of professionals and read books by professionals about the craft and about the business of writing. There is a selected bibliography at the end of this book. There are also a number of websites dedicated to writing to be found on the website and also listed in the bibliography. Above all, you have to have conviction about your writing. It can be a lonely business. Nobody will recognize you until you have produced work that you can show. So persistence is indispensable. It is difficult to give advice on this matter. What would you say to a basketball player or any athlete who has ambitions to play professionally? You’ll never know if you don’t try. At some point, you realize that even though you have talent, you are not succeeding. So you go to plan B. Or economic necessity drives you to take up some other activity, perhaps related.¹ These choices are intensely personal in nature.

Writing Contracts

If you are hired to write for compensation, make sure you have a contract. A contract can take many forms. The first is a verbal agreement. Surprisingly, many people work on terms negotiated verbally. It is good practice, however, to follow up any verbal agreement with a letter stating the terms under which you are going to proceed with the project. A verbal contract can be legally binding. It’s just hard to enforce it. Hence, writing out the terms in a letter of confirmation saves misunderstanding. I have never used a lawyer or an agent for a corporate job. Agents do very little business in the corporate world because the fees are low. Agents prefer to spend time and energy in the entertainment world where they are indispensable and make more money.

If you have an agent, the agent will negotiate the remuneration and the details of the contract that affect your delivery schedule and responsibilities. Of course, getting an agent to represent you is half the battle. Most studios and producers will not read any submission that does not come from a recognized agent. In the entertainment world, a number of trade union agreements are in force. The Writers Guild of America(East and West) and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, which have reciprocal agreements, have contract models and minimum payment scales for film, television, and radio. The Writers Guild of America recently worked out a contract for the newest field of writing— the Internet. Even if you are not a member of these guilds, their standards are industry models that are mandatory. A signatory studio or producer may not pay less than the minimums set by the unions. You and they are governed by these agreements even if you are not a guild member because the industry producers are signatories to these agreements. Many readers will remember the writers’ strike of 2008, which stopped all production for many months. The writers’ guilds in different countries are strongest in the film and television industry. They have virtually no presence or influence in the corporate field. In my experience, however, the market in corporate video seems to reward competent writers adequately without the need for union representation.

As of 2009, the Writers Guild of America minimum for an original screenplay was $113,626 for films with budgets over $5 million and $60,523 for films budgeted between $1.2 and $5 million, and slightly less for adapted screenplays.² Successful writers with a track record of box office successes earn 10 to 20 times the minimum. A sought-after writer can sell a screenplay for $1 million and up. Some writers are able to negotiate a profit participation position in the producer’s net. Major actors and other talent can negotiate a percentage of the gross, that is, the total revenue collected by the distributor. This is the most desirable position because it is the most transparent and hardest to disguise by creative accounting. The most likely profit participation that a writer can expect is a percentage of the net, the money that the distributor pays to the producer after its commission and expenses are deducted off the top. Whatever revenue comes in after that goes first to the cash investors until their production investment is paid off with interest. If the movie makes a profit, the money is split pari passu (a legal term meaning proportionately to each at each step) according to the original deal with a percentage split between investors and the producer. The producer’s share is known as the producer’s net. If actors, writers, or other creative people have given up money payment up front for a percentage, they get a percentage of this net revenue coming to the producer. Many movies make money but never make a profit, in which case there is no producer’s net. Five percent of zero is zero.

Writing for money means someone is paying you to think creatively and represent that thinking in coherent form on the page. In the entertainment world, this process is well understood in its three stages that we have explained in the preceding chapters. It begins with a concept that expresses the premise and outlines the theme or story idea. This may be what starts the project after pitching. A lot of discussion with producers, directors, and possibly actors who are part of the project precedes the treatment.

The treatment is described in the contract and involves a partial payment of the total fee. A producer is usually entitled to pay for the treatment and then withdraw, depending on how the contract was negotiated. After the treatment has been read, a great deal of discussion ensues that allows the producer to react to the storyline and the vision expressed and, indeed, to ask for changes. Apart from the fact that money is changing hands, there is a strong need to look at story and character issues before committing further time and money to create the screenplay or script.

The first-draft screenplay is the next stage of the contract that involves a delivery date and a payment schedule. This stage involves the most substantial investment of time and money. Most contracts provide for one revision after reading and discussion. After this, the contract is complete. When payment is made in full, the writer no longer owns the work. The producer might pay another writer to rewrite, or an actor or director might want his or her chosen writer to rework and revise the script. The producer then has to raise finance for the production, complete a production deal, and make the script into film or television programming that can be sold. More than one writer often works on a script. I have rewritten scripts and, in turn, my scripts have been rewritten by someone else. This is less common in the corporate world. However, I had to rewrite a corporate video made by for Shell that had been rejected by the client within the Shell group. Television scripts go through many rewrites by teams of writers. The writer is by turns a craftsman, a hack, a professional wordsmith, and an image maker. There are triumphs and disappointments. Live to write another day!

Pitching

In the entertainment world, the process of script development is a serious activity on which all production depends. The name of the game is to get money behind a project at the earliest stage possible, namely, the writing stage. The most desirable situation to be in is to have a multiple-picture development deal. Only successful producers and directors get this kind of speculative backing. Writers and other producers and directors often have to develop scripts to the treatment stage or even first-draft screenplays before seeking financial backing. For the studios, commissioning scripts is like sowing seeds. Some will germinate. Others will not. As mentioned earlier, even those that become fully developed scripts might be bought and paid for and never get into production. Script development is the cheapest part of the process of movie production. Distributors need product. Studios need scripts and story ideas to stay in business. A movie idea begins as something relatively simple—a story premise—which is often presented in meetings to agents, producers, and other principals in a process known as pitching.

We have discussed pitching in other contexts, but we should revisit the issue now. In the entertainment business, a writer must be able to talk about movie concepts as well as write them. A lot of ideas and projects are bought and sold on the basis of meetings at which creative people such as writers, producers, and directors talk their ideas to a production executive. This process is called pitching. It is a skill. A writer should be able to pitch, but it is a skill that does not always accompany writing talent. To some extent, there is an element of salesmanship. You have to carry conviction in your manner, in your voice, and in your language. The pitch has to go beyond the reason why you want to write or do the project. It has to give reasons why someone else should want to get involved. It has to indicate how you see the project. It has to do this in language that makes sense to the executive making the decision to commit funds to your project over all of the other projects vying for the same resources. As we have noted, there is no shortage of scripts and projects, only good scripts and good projects.

Many executives who make decisions about development don’t read. They don’t have time, ability, or inclination. They have readers who cover the standard submissions as we have mentioned earlier. Most writers and their agents want to bypass the readers and get straight to the main decision maker. They do listen to pitches. Pitching must be an efficient way to process proposals. Otherwise, why would major studios and distributors keep doing it. I learned about pitching the hard way failing to do it successfully. I was commissioned to write a movie script for American International Pictures. I was working in London at the time with an executive in the London office. The day came when Samuel Arkoff, president of the company, came to town to decide what to do about this sequel, which the company had commissioned from me, to their remake of Wuthering Heights (1970). He checked into a suite at the Savoy. A meeting was scheduled at the hotel with me and the London executive producer. Sam Arkoff was in his bathrobe and slippers. He ordered a sumptuous lunch of oysters, smoked salmon, and chateau bottled French wine, which was brought to the room. Then the moment came. He asked me what the movie was about. I was stunned. I assumed that if the company had paid me to write the script (it had been sent to the Hollywood office), he would have read it. He hadn’t read it.³

He wanted the premise expressed; he wanted a log line. A log line should not tell the whole story but provide a compelling and concise statement of who the lead character is, what his problem is and how he is going to solve it. This must be expressed in a sentence or two. As we discussed in Chapter 8, it contains the premise of the plot or story. What was the approach? What was the driving idea that would hold audiences and give him the conviction to put money into producing the movie? I made a mess of it. I got bogged down in too much detail. In retrospect, I realize I was being paid to pitch. To get my movie into production and to direct it, I had to pitch to save the project and the London executive. I earned the scriptwriting fee, but the movie was never made and the London executive was let go and the office shut down as the industry hit a crisis of rising debt and falling box office.

The Player (1992), mentioned earlier, was an original screenplay written and produced by Michael Tolkin. This movie provides excellent insight into the art of pitching. Pitching is a brief oral delivery of a summary or key concept of a movie. If the idea is strong, it is somehow seen as a firm anchor for the ensuing work. Sometimes development deals are made on this basis.

In the end, this is a commercial business. Hollywood is in business to make money. Of course, nobody knows for sure what makes money. There are tried-and-true formulas that keep resurfacing. You put money into a movie just like another one that made money or that is going to make money. The me-too syndrome is evident in every season’s releases. Another way to try and minimize risk is to build a project around proven box office elements, usually an “A list” of actors and actresses whose movies have nearly always made money. Of course, their agents know this and push for the highest fee and participation they can. So movies get more expensive. If a project starts to become a package with the elements of stars, director, and so on, it usually affects the script both before and after it is written. William Goldman’s book is the best document from a writer’s point of view of how and why this happens.⁴

Big-time pitching is not a real possibility at the beginning of a writer’s career. There is an amazingly vigorous independent movie sector of low-budget, interesting movies. These movies are made outside the mainstream studio system. There are money finders who work on putting finance deals together for low budget independent productions like The Blair Witch Project (1999) that might make it into release. There are a lot of hungry, ambitious people. You have to become one of them. You have to learn the business. Pitching at this level means finding like-minded people and persuading them that your idea or your script is worth spending time and effort on to move forward. In every generation, new talent arises and old talent retires. Each generation produces a new audience that craves to see its realities reflected in movie and television stories and images. Life is a pitch, as someone once said.

Ideology, Morality, and Content

Broadly speaking, the entertainment industry is an uneasy alliance between expressive storytelling, the box office, and the bottom line. It is a simple fact that no one will back a movie or television project without the belief that there is a large audience for the finished program. And why should they? Hollywood producers and distributors speak of movies as product. “Produce” is the key verb of the industry. Product is the result of production. Product is what generates revenue that allows a company to survive, grow, and pay dividends. More particularly, it allows a producer to stay in business and produce again. To a considerable extent, the same rationale governs the work of writers and directors. If your movies don’t make money—that is, don’t attract an audience large enough to generate a return of at least the cost of production and distribution—your talent will be viewed with suspicion.

The uneasy alliance between art and commerce makes for a permanent tension and a continuing debate. Remember—it is called “the film industry!” The extreme of the Hollywood industrial view is epitomized by the classic bon mot of Samuel Goldwyn, “If you’ve got a message, take it to Western Union.” MGM’s movies were about entertainment, pleasing the public, and supplying it with whatever sensations would make the most money. Movie distributors are often contemptuous of art house movies because they are hard to sell and have smaller audiences and, therefore, less return for the same effort. The predominant mentality seems to be the hunt for the biggest box office rather than the smaller budget films that bring a proportionate return from smaller audiences. In the words of Sam Goldwyn about one of his films, “I don’t care if it doesn’t make a nickel. I just want every man, woman, and child in America to see it.”

The dilemma here lies in the question of what appeals to audiences. If you survey the movies you know and those that are celebrated successes, you could very well argue that large audiences thrive on messages. Some of these messages can be paraphrased:

• Good ultimately triumphs over evil (westerns, police thrillers).

• Life is basically good and worth living (It’s a Wonderful Life).

• Sacrifice for a cause such as your country is noble—the old Roman dictum dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, meaning “It is sweet and proper to die for your country” (most war films).

• Love conquers all (most romantic comedies).

• True love is happiness, or happiness is true love (most love stories).

• Action trumps intellect (most action films celebrate the man of action, not the man of rational thought).

• Revenge is sweet (killing your enemy who has done you wrong is your right).

• The underdog can win (Rocky, 1976 and whole host of films about reversal of fortune).

In Ecclesiastes, “The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong,” but if you are a betting man, as Damon Runyon said, or a movie producer, that’s who you put your money on. To put it simply, most popular movies are stuffed with messages about heroism and myths about love conquering all. The biggest message of all is the happy ending. It is difficult to sell stories without a happy ending, whether it is the triumph of the hero or the proposal of marriage that concludes a romance. There usually has to be a strong message of hope, of overcoming adversity, or at least benefiting the nation or the human race. This is not a bad thing. However, tragedy, loss, and pain have another truth that audiences also recognize.

A number of ideological themes are woven into a lot of movies and television. World War II movies are nearly always patriotic propaganda. Although characters might die, they do not die in vain, and they die heroically. It was noticeable how few movies about Vietnam were filmed because that undeclared war brought humiliation to the United States and discord at home. The movies that were made, like The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), and Full Metal Jacket (1987), had to deal with the dark side of America—the My Lai massacre of civilians, the defoliation of jungles with Agent Orange, the high-altitude bombing of Hanoi with B-52s, and the draft dodging and political protest. Coppola made Apocalypse Now into a parable about moral degeneration based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It was difficult to find redemption in these three movies unless it was the refusal to shoot the noble stag at the end of The Deer Hunter, thereby celebrating life.

We see a constant ambivalence concerning crime and law and order. The movies have always glamorized gangsters even though they may have to die in a hail of bullets in the end. Until then, the audience gets a kind of fantasy outing in which power and invincibility rule. The writer has to make the central characters interesting. The movie and television series literature about the Mafia reveals the greatest ambivalence. The Mafia began as neighborhood protection of poor immigrants but ended up as a cancer corrupting everything it touched. Only the Godfather trilogy made by Francis Ford Coppola really shows the destruction of family, self, and relationships that are the inevitable consequence of the Mafia code of silence, violence, and revenge. Sometimes it seems as if the movies are a propaganda machine for the Mafia itself, showing its power, creating larger-than-life characters, and solidifying its mythic status in American society. The Sopranos became a major television hit. A mass audience could cozy up to a mafia family as if it were a next-door neighbor and just another way to make good in America. Tony Soprano even goes into therapy. Crime is just a psychological adjustment.

Crime makes for more interesting dramatic material than the humdrum life of law-abiding citizens. In films, the police are often the butt of ridicule. Their cruisers are involved in spectacular pileups. The cliché chase sequence makes you root for the fleeing criminal rather than the police. Television, in contrast seems to favor the police and the heroic public service of the keepers of law and order. In either medium and in every script, the depiction of violence is an overwhelming fact of screen entertainment. It began in the modern era with the slow-motion shootout in The Wild Bunch (1969). It becomes a kind of stylized entertainment in kung-fu movies, and it is delivered with clever, almost blasé ruthlessness in Pulp Fiction (1994). The trick seems to be to provide a legitimate excuse for the audience to indulge in a spectacle of violence by setting up a character with a plausible motive for revenge. For a century, the movies have evolved certain cliché set pieces—the fistfìght, the shootout, and the car chase—that each generation seems to reinvent. Although this is not a forum in which these issues can be resolved, it is difficult not to suspect a relationship between the violent themes and images of big and small screen entertainment and the sickening violence that pervades American society. Adolescent kids, the most vulnerable audience, resort to guns and mass killing to express their anger and frustration. Are they acting out what they see on the screen? Movies glamorize violence and sensationalize life on the one hand, while sentimentalizing it on the other with fantasy relationships. Who is responsible? Producers, directors, or writers?

Like an addict who needs larger doses of a drug to get high, modern audiences seem to need more and more graphic violence to get their fix. How do you deal with these issues as a writer? There is a definite pressure to do likewise, or even to up the ante, to go further, and think up a novel way to present violence to the audience so as to sell your work. Whatever you write, you will have to think about whether you are writing imitative scripts or writing something that is authentic. There is no doubt that commercial pressure places the media writer in a moral dilemma.

Emotional Honesty and Sentimentality

Movies and television are about human emotions. People in conflict and under stress react emotionally. Their principles and morals are tested. The spectacle of a character confronting destiny and undergoing evolution through challenges fascinates audiences. Just as the Greeks explored the tragic dilemmas and comic absurdities of their society in their theatre, movies and TV mirror all our cultural dilemmas and moral conflicts. We have a long list of social issues such as drugs, HIV-AIDS, racial discrimination, disabilities, crime, abortion, and so on. It is interesting to speculate whether the program content reflects or leads the cultural consciousness of the day. Many movies and television programs have a distinct cultural bias and a subtle and even not so subtle a political agenda. The story plays to an ideological message as surely as Communist countries used to make films that celebrated the working class hero.

GI Jane (1997) seems to me an example of an agenda-driven storyline. A woman wants to become a Navy SEAL. At a political level, she is the pawn of a woman senator who wants to push the issue of gender equality in the armed services. The heroine is shown going through the training, including being physically beaten up by the master chief—total equality. Her head is shaven. She has to meet the same standards of physical endurance as the male recruits. It ends with a secret raid inside Libya in which she proves her operational skills and gains acceptance as one of the guys. It is easy to fabricate the endurance and the performance in the movies, which in real life would not be likely. It is in a sense exploitation and sensationalism. A star like Demi Moore is always a star. So her character has to be written to succeed.⁵

The feminist agenda is quite prevalent in movies and television today. Although many issues of gender equality are topical and meaningful, men in turn become stereotyped and masculinity pilloried. Sometimes there is a bias that distorts the truth. John Updike’s novel The Witches of Eastwick (1987) was made into a movie that turned it upside down. The three leading ladies, Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer, played the witches who became the victims instead of the persecutors of a new man in the neighborhood who in the movie becomes the Devil incarnate, played by Jack Nicholson. Instead of three women trying to undo the man, who is the victim in the novel, with spells and esoteric practices, it is politically more attractive to play it the other way around. The basic message is female power is good, male power is bad. There used to be a grade-school chant, “What are little boys made of? Slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails—that’s what little boys are made of. What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all that’s nice. That’s what little girls are made of.” It is interesting to note how easily men’s bodies are used as cannon fodder, men’s lives are expendable, and men’s pain allowable. Think how often you see men getting kicked or hit in the genitals. This is often made into a joke. Men kick men. Women kick men. You never see a woman kicked in the genitals or punched in the breast, and it wouldn’t ever be particularly funny. Alert yourself to the amount and the extent of ideological agendas that are built into many scripts.

The most important form of emotional dishonesty is sentimentality. It is the substitution of a lesser emotion for a greater one while trying to achieve the same result. It appeals to the lowest common denominator of emotion. It oversimplifies life, death, and love to perpetuate a comfortable illusion. It is escape versus realism, glossing over the complexities of experience to provide an easy formula for getting a tear, a laugh, or a patriotic swelling of the chest. It turns complexity and subtlety into cartoons. Indeed, the Disney product, whether in movies or in theme parks, has always been larded with great dollops of sentimentality. Disney presents images of innocence and purity with all the nasty bits cleansed away. The projection of human emotions onto animal characters, cuteness as virtue, love without sexuality—it all gets served up as an easy substitute for experience, like processed food with sugar and coloring added to make it more attractive.⁶

Sentimentality drives Pretty Woman (1990)—the fantasy that a hooker is really a lady and gets to marry a millionaire and be treated like a princess. This is betrayed by the tag line “She walked off the street, into his life and stole his heart.” Once Julia Roberts is cast in the role, we know there has to be a romantic triumph of these proportions. None of the sordid reality of this profession is ever revealed. Nor is the psychology of prostitution ever dealt with. It is a fantasy world. Julia Roberts is just playing at being a streetwalker. She is really never anything but an actress and a nice girl in hooker’s clothing, who knows that by the end of the movie she is going to change her costume. The contrast is with her hooker friend, Kit, played by Laura San Giacomo. The movies have glossed over American historical realities such as slavery, genocide, discrimination, lynching, social inequalities, and political corruption. They have even advocated racism. D. W. Griffith, one of the greatest and most inventive pioneers in the medium, made the first feature-length epic, Birth of a Nation (1915), which celebrated the Ku Klux Klan. Then movies have also become a way to change public perception. In the Heat of the Night (1967), with Sidney Poitier, showed how a black detective in the South dealt with prejudice and a Southern sheriff. Sidney Poitier also pioneered in portraying a mixed-race relationship in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). Kevin Costner made a 4-hour movie (director’s cut), Dances with Wolves (1990) that reexamined the racist and genocidal assumptions that lie behind the American folklore of the frontier.

European films have less of the sentimental tradition. However, few of them receive wide distribution. If they do, they often are remade into a softened version for American consumption. Trois Hommes et un Couffin (1985), about three men who get stuck with a baby and have to learn to look after it—a great comic premise—was turned into an American version, Three Men and a Baby (1987), that takes gritty social observation and turns it into sentimentality. The British TV sitcom Until Death Do Us Part was bought, tamed, and turned into All in the Family. Although there are cultural reasons why one country’s humor won’t play in another’s, there is also a Puritanism in American culture that has always restricted the way movies treat many themes.

Reflect about those movies that command attention and hold audiences long after their initial release and the video sales have dwindled! Their success is difficult to predict beforehand. Big box office is sometimes ephemeral, resulting from a fad or a public mood. Some big grossing movies fade into oblivion. Citizen Kane (1941) was not a box office hit, but it is a great movie that is technically brilliant and compelling viewing every time you watch it. Of course, its release was sabotaged by William Randolph Hearst, whose life it paraphrased in an unflattering way. Casablanca (1942) is a great love story that is compelling because it is not sentimental. Rick does not get Ilsa. Although he is bitter about losing her, he deals with the reality. He salvages something from it. They love one another, but they are not going to be together. Rick helps his rival instead of beating him up, as is the custom in American movies of the day.

It is very difficult to write without conviction. Ultimately, you have to write what your gut tells you is true for you and true for the audience. Nevertheless, there are many commercial pressures to create or include elements that are imitative—the car chase, the fight, the love scene with the movie kiss. It is hard to be original. It is hard to be truthful. Many of the best American movies come from the independent sector—interesting, gritty movies that explore out-of-the-way themes. They go to the Sundance Film Festival and get picked up for distribution, and the makers move on to bigger budgets and greater temptations. Complex, subtle movies are difficult to create, such as Sling Blade (1996), which was rewarded with an Oscar. Election (1999) looks at ambition and sexuality in a high school election that hints at the realities of the larger political world in which the heroine ends up. Chasing Amy (1997) deals with youth, gender, and sexuality in a way that is refreshing and funny. Body Shots (1999) is a tightly observed comment on the complexity of the social and sexual behavior of men and women and their different expectations in post feminist Los Angeles at the end of the 1990s. The script uses the theatrical aside in an interesting way so that characters break off and speak to the audience through the camera lens, making comments about the way a man or a woman sees the opposite sex. It recalls the innovation in the 1999 television series Once and Again.

Think about it! Most people experience a lot of pain from the experience of falling in love. Half the time it is with the wrong person, or the love is not requited, or the relationship stagnates into a routine, low-temperature marriage full of compromises and the extinction of passion. Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. Everyday relationships are not often the stuff of movies and television. Passion, lust, and jealousy are. So movies and soaps are seldom about the routine married life unless they satirize it. A television show like Married with Children mocks the state of marriage as daily warfare and endless insults. The Academy Award-winning original screenplay and movie of 2000 was American Beauty (1999), which is a searing exposure of the social and emotional failure of the American family at the turn of the century. So truthfulness without a happy ending can result in commercial success.

There is no easy answer. There is no future in writing scripts that are never produced. You can train yourself to be a journeyman hack and make a living. Despite craft and technique, the animus for your writing has to come from your center, from what you know and believe. That voice of authenticity is what carries the day in the end. It is probably true to say that there is room for so many kinds of writing that you would be foolish to fabricate writing that you cannot sustain and that you do not genuinely want to do.

Writing for the Corporate World

At first, most beginners are ambitious to work in the entertainment side of the industry. Although it is the most lucrative, it is also the hardest to get into. The largest employer, both in terms of salaried jobs and freelance work, is the business world. The need for writers who can design content for corporate communications needs is immense. In every major town across America, wherever businesses are to be found, you will also find production companies and advertising agencies that are in business to solve their communications problems. They need writers. It is not just that this pays the rent while you are waiting for your screenplay to be read and optioned; it is a fascinating and creative field in itself. It is innovative and requires you to be able to think about new media and keep up with what is happening in the industry. Every job exposes you to a new product or service and introduces you to whole new worlds of business activity. Sometimes these are highly technical and about business-to- business products and services that you don’t normally come across. These jobs require a curious and adaptive spirit and someone who is able to assimilate new material quickly and get to the heart of a problem. You have to be able to communicate your ideas to clients and producers that employ you.

How do you start? One way is to write for no pay for a charity or public service organization that usually gets pro bono creative help from the industry. In the corporate chapter, we discussed a public service announcement about addictive gambling. This was produced by Pontes/Buckley Advertising, Inc. and by writers, technicians, and talent from the Boston chapter of the Media Communications Association.

There is a chicken-and-egg problem. You need experience before someone will entrust you with a high-value corporate job. To get experience you need to get a job. Another way would be to write for cable access channels, which exist in every community. You can even produce the program yourself. If the program is successful, it can be played on other cable access channels or even taken up by a commercial cable channel. More important is that you have a “reel” that shows program content for which you have a writing credit. It can become a calling card.

Client Relationships

When you work for a client, you have entered into a business relationship. You are being paid to do a job to your client’s satisfaction. A client pays you for your creative writing talent to solve a communication problem that they cannot solve on their own. A creative service is somewhat of a mystery. I once worked for a management consultant writing training videos. I had to go to Belgium and visit their client’s site—the national steel company. I was given a desk to write at. The manager would come in now and then and wonder what I had produced in the last couple of hours because he was paying for my services by the day. His idea of writing was constant output. My approach was to visit the factory for visual input, read background, and stare out of the window with my feet on the desk until I had thought the problem through and found a solution, somewhat like the seven steps outlined in Chapter 2. Once I knew the answers to the questions and I had the creative concept, I could write quickly. Needless to say, the manager of this consultancy job was getting more and more agitated with me. He just did not understand the writing process. However, he was pleased with the script that resulted.

The point is that clients do not always understand what they are paying a writer for. It is problematic for them to put a value on the work. Are they paying by the hour? The hour that you chew pencils also counts but seems a waste of money to the client. On the whole, writers are paid for piecework. You quote a fee for the whole job, broken down into stages with a schedule of payments. Some people pay by the minute, say, $200 per minute of finished program. These last two methods of payment hide the pencil chewing and the thinking time and deal with a measurable result. The most common mode of payment for corporate work is a flat fee for the finished script. You estimate what time is involved in terms of research, travel, and writing. You multiply that by your notional or daily fee. You come up with a price for the whole job. Your producer or your client either agrees or negotiates. Sometimes you need to be working on more than one job at a time because there is waiting time while your producer/client reads the script or circulates it to others for reading. You need to be productive during this downtime.

Corporate Contracts

The transfer of intellectual property is implicit in all corporate writing. Either you are employed as a writer by a corporation that by virtue of paying you a salary for your work owns your writing output, or you are a freelance writer who is contracted by the corporation or a producer in a production company to create a script. That contract may often be, and usually is, verbal and implicit, governed by custom and practice in the industry. You will not often have a written contract because to provide a written contract usually incurs legal costs. The nature of the contract and its salient features are so well understood that most work is done on trust.

Nevertheless, it is a wise practice to follow up all verbal agreements with a letter confirming the understanding. For instance, when a client signs off on a treatment or a script, I always write a letter saying that following our meeting and discussion on such and such a date, I am now proceeding with the treatment/script/revision based on agreement of the following points. Mentioning delivery dates is also a good idea. The letters have legal value in the event of a dispute or in the event that the client changes his mind. You need to have an agreement about a payment schedule and state what it is in a confirming letter. It is vitally important to get some form of partial payment up front as a sign of good faith. You do not expect to get final payment until the client has signed off on the final draft. Once again, your copyright in your work is assigned to the person who pays you, but only after you’ve been paid. The problem is that if you are not paid, the custom-crafted script is of little value to you as the writer.

Several types of payment agreement are used for corporate writing. You can divide the project into concept/outline, treatment, and shooting script. Each stage is valued at a third of the total and paid for in increments. This method of payment allows producers to pay as they go and protects you, the writer, from not getting paid at the end. In fact, it is a good idea to get one-third up front. Production companies use other formulas also. One way of valuing writing is by the minute of final program. Another is as a percentage of the production budget. A script for a video that costs $100,000 to make might have a script element that is worth a percentage of the production budget, say, $5000. All of these ways of calculating a writing fee are based on experience and history. You can generally work out what it takes to write a minute of script based on research time, outline and treatment work, and final scriptwriting. You express that time and effort as a figure defined by the end result.

Writing involves two elements that both cost money. The first is time. It takes time to think and write. Based on your experience, how long will it take you to write a 10-minute video? You calculate the hours and put a price on your time. You round out the figure. You also have to think about what other writers are charging. If you are experienced and respected in the industry, you have your price and can afford to be choosy. If you are a beginner, you have to be as flexible as you can. There are producers who try to exploit writers by asking for a script at a knockdown price on the promise of other work to come. I have learned that this other work never comes. I usually refuse these kinds of deals or offer to discount the second script. That usually flushes out the dishonest operators.

The second aspect of writing is creativity. Creative work and imagination have a value. It is hard to measure and impossible to cost. When it works, it is priceless. Advertising agencies charge for creative services. Graphic designers charge for creative flair. The writer is in the same business: selling creative ideas. A great creative idea cannot be costed in terms of time. Sometimes I have made it through my seven steps in a flash. I know before I leave the meeting how I will solve the problem. Creative talent has a value. To the extent that the market will bear, you can charge for creative flair and originality. You hope to build a reputation that people will be glad to pay a premium for. Your demonstrated track record and finished work back it up. It takes a lot of work to build this kind of reputation. It also gets you prestige projects to work on rather than run-of-the-mill training videos. So different jobs can be costed and charged differently based on the nature of the product and the client.

Work for Hire

Marketing yourself and your Work

In the business world, you hope for repeat business. You must also build business by introducing yourself to new producers and new corporate clients, usually by showing them some of your work and a résumé. Whenever you are not writing, you should be on the phone trying to make new contacts. You have to sell your talent and your creative services. There are not many agents who represent corporate media writers. There is not enough money in it for the agent, and it is too specialized. This is an advantage because you are not shut out of the game by an agent barrier, which can indeed inhibit your entry into the entertainment world. In addition, you get to keep all the money earned without having to pay a commission.

Copyright

Copyright is an agreement, either in common law or statute, that the original work of a creator of words, images, music, or other media is an intellectual property as opposed to a physical property. The creator has a right in what is created and owns that work until that ownership is assigned to another for payment. The purpose of the contract is to transfer title in the property parallel to the transfer of title in real estate. If you do not copyright your work in the United States, it falls into the public domain. This means anyone can use it. Eventually, all intellectual property falls into the public domain 70 years after the author dies. Copyright law is different in different countries. In Europe, for instance, you do not have to create copyright as you do in the United States. It is deemed to exist de facto because of the act of creation. Copyright therefore inheres in what you write or create. The Berne Convention dating back to 1886 assures the protection of creative work beyond the national borders of its country of origin.

You need to understand that you cannot copyright an idea. You have to create something that has recognizable shape and form and individuality in order to copyright it. This is very important when dealing with scripts and ideas for entertainment program content. An idea or concept for a movie is hard to copyright. A treatment is an expressed idea that has particular characterisitcs and acquires the quality of intellectual property. A screenplay, book manuscript, or play manuscript has clear identity as the output of a particular creator. Because you cannot copyright an idea, it is important not to discuss it before making it into intellectual property. The Writers Guilds provide a service that enables you to register a script. This becomes a strong, dated proof of ownership, although it does not create copyright under U.S. law. You should register your script if you submit your work to any potential buyer.

Copyright and dear title to intellectual property are crudal to the entertainment industry. Whether the source is an original screenplay, a book in the public domain, or existing intellectual property in a book, play, or manuscript of the same, it is essential that at each stage of production and distribution, every element of writing, performance, and sound track has dear title. Any flaw in title puts a huge investment at risk and leaves the producer open to daims for payment from any party who holds title to a part of that intellectual property. All contracts involving the assignment of intellectual property require the grantor of the right to indemnify the grantee against any flaw in title and to assume all liability for any flaw. Investors, studios, and end distributors, right down to the end exhibitor, demand this indemnity.

The integrity of the title is of paramount importance. Lawyers involved in drafting contracts will always demand proof of title or an indemnity against all liability and any future claims resulting from any flaw in that title. Again, there is a parallel to real estate transactions. You cannot acquire title in something the seller does not have title to. This is why you buy title insurance in a real estate transaction. However, it is easier to verify title in the registry office of a town that probably keeps very good records of ownership for reasons of taxation levied on the property. Title in works of imagination expressed in words that anyone can copy, or ideas that anyone can copy, are more difficult to protect.

Students sometimes take plagiarism lightly and are careless about identifying their sources. As a professional writer, you must have a vigorous respect for these issues because you are proposing to sell a piece of intellectual property. You must be able to assert your title to what you have created and what you propose to the buyer. For example, you cannot sell a script or screenplay based on a work that you do not own. You can write it, but it will have no value. Although you have created copyright in writing your screenplay, you will have created a piece of work that has a split copyright. I once optioned a novel through an agent. I wrote a screenplay to set it up as a movie. The option expired before I could get any preproduction going. Of course, I could go back and re-option the book. In the end, it didn’t work out. My screenplay is a work with split copyright. Any producer can buy the underlying work and decouple it from my screenplay and get someone else to write another screenplay based on the same source work. I have no rights. When novels or plays are popular, their media rights have value.

Only major players in the entertainment business can ante up the option money or bid for these rights. For this reason, it is better to adapt work in the public domain. However, there is still a split copyright because anyone else can go to the same source in the public domain and create a new derivative work equal to yours and independent of yours. This happened to me. I wrote an adaptation of Henry James’s Daisy Miller. I approached Peter Bogdanovich, the director, with the idea that it would be a great idea for a movie and a perfect role for Cybill Shepherd, his girlfriend at the time. It just so happened that he had had the same idea and was developing Daisy Miller as his next project. I had no claim, and he had no obligation. For legal protection and to stop a rival production, he bought the screenplay.

Work-Made-for-Hire and Freelance

Writers who are employees of a company, such as a production company or, indeed, journalists working for a publication, are deemed to be offering a service for hire so that the employer who pays the writer’s salary automatically owns what the writer produces. The analogy is to the worker on a shop floor. Ford does not have to pay a worker for creating a car but only for the time on the job. By analogy, a freelance writer who is paid by the hour or by the minute of finished script or for a completed script is governed by a work-made-for-hire principle. If a company pays a writer in this way, it owns the copyright in the work produced completely.

There is another way to govern the contractual relationship. A freelance writer is paid for a piece of work, created by the writer as an independent, imaginative enterprise. It remains the property of the creator until a bargain is struck and terms are set by which the ownership in the creation is transferred. Freelance writers enter into agreements to transfer ownership in their intellectual properties for payment. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to do this. It is sometimes part of the agreement that the writer retains some rights for some media or some territories, especially in journalism, where content can be resold or sold in another medium like a website. So a writer might be paid by the word for a specific publication. In media writing, scripts are usually dedicated to one production and can have no afterlife. Nevertheless, in the entertainment world, new media are springing up all the time. There is some dispute now about whether content that is delivered to cell phones is covered by agreements that did not include those rights. Writers’ guilds try to defend writers’ copyright. Publishers, producers, and employers of writing talent try to word contracts to include all media and those not yet invented because they have been burned so many times by having to renegotiate rights for sales for new media. We take videotape, DVDs, MP3s, and the Internet for granted, but writers want participation in the revenue for sales of content based on their work in new forms of distribution. These issues constituted one of the principal reasons for writers striking in 2008.

Agents and Submissions

Agents have become indispensable in the entertainment business for selling ideas and scripts. To get a start in the entertainment side of the business, you need an agent who can represent you and in turn sell your work to producers and studios. You understand now why producers and studios are extremely prudent about where their material originates. Unsolicited manuscripts and scripts are usually rejected because of negative past experiences of lawsuits and claims by people who submitted work, had it rejected, and then saw a movie that contained what they saw as their idea. By dealing with agents, intellectual property lawyers, and professional intermediaries, studios are protected from frivolous lawsuits and are ensured they are acquiring bona fide intellectual property rights.

Agents work speculatively, of course. They earn no commission until they sell your work. Obviously, they have to be convinced that their work of representing your work and your talent will bear fruit. A relationship with an agent can be good and bad. It can be deceptive. You have to work in good faith. Sometimes you can make assumptions about how well you are being represented that are unfounded. This is a business relationship that is very important and a difficult one to make work well.

A good place to start is the Writers Guild website, which lists agents by state, classified according to their business orientation.⁷ Those agents who will read unsolicited manuscripts are identified, as are those who won’t. A number of agents or script advisors will read and critique your work for a fee. Some of them may be legitimate and give value for money. Some advertise merely to make money from the endless stream of “wannabes” who dream of success. The best advice would be to get a reference or a recommendation from someone you know. Even better, make use of your writing classes. Your writing instructor is a sounding board and is duty-bound to read your work and give you feedback. Any course you take, therefore, provides a structured way to test your writing talent. You will get a clue as to whether it is worth the struggle to go forward and commit the time, energy, and ambition necessary to succeed professionally.

Networking, Conventions, and Seminars

Writers are rather solitary creatures on the whole. For the most part, they work alone. Getting to know other writers is not that easy. That is why going to seminars and attending conventions are good ideas. In a way, it doesn’t matter whether you meet other writers. You want to meet the people who will commission your work—producers, directors, and corporate advertising, and public relations executives. Networking is key. There are social networking tools such as Linkedln through which you can build a network of trustworthiness. Today, having a website is a strong way to market yourself and display your work.

A number of traveling writing seminars are given by scriptwriters and script doctors.⁸ One of them is sure to be coming to a venue near you during the year. That is a good way of getting a fast track to real professional issues. These events are not cheap. They are usually 2- to 3-day affairs and cost about $500. If travel and hotel accommodations are added, attendance can be a costly exercise, but it is worth doing at least once to get professional advice and meet other like-minded people.

Writing seminars and panels are also given at a number of professional conventions. The Media Communications Association International has an annual convention at which there are always some panels devoted to scripting issues and marketing of writing skills in the corporate media marketplace. The National Association of Broadcasters brings most of the people on all sides of the industry together. Again, panels are conducted and papers presented that are of interest to writers, particularly new media and interactive writers. These conventions are quite expensive when you add the costs of registration, travel, and the hotel. If you are making an income as a writer, these expenses become tax deductible, as do independent writing seminars.

Surfing the Web

With the spread of the World Wide Web, writing and scriptwriting have benefited from dedicated websites full of valuable information, such as the one for the Writers Guild and other professional bodies. Sites provide valuable databases of scripts, movies, and television production, as dted throughout this book. You can download or buy copies of scripts from most films and television series. There are chat rooms, script competitions, and websites for current television series and movies in production. There are online writing courses and script services. You have huge resources at your fingertips for research and for professional contacts. There are sites that provide shop windows for scripts looking for a producer, which provide a way for writers to circumvent the problem of finding an agent. In the accompanying website, you will find a long list of active links that will take you directly to the sites. Because you have to use a computer and its browser to explore them, there seems no point in listing URLs in print to be typed into a browser’s search window when you can click on an active link on the website.

Hybrid Careers

Some writers also have knowledge of production. They have, or can develop, skills as a producer or director or both. We have alluded to multitalented figures throughout the book, from Orson Welles to James Cameron. Both in the entertainment world and in the corporate world, a combination of talents can be useful. You have to do whatever it takes. The path of development for each person always involves an element of character and an element of destiny.

Conclusion

Writing is a risky business. It is a bet on your own talent like most artistic pursuits. You can train and develop your talent. There is, however, no guarantee of success. If you are going to try to make a living as a writer of scripts, you have to be professional and disciplined. You have to want to reach audiences. You have to want to move audiences. That is your motivation, not just the money. You have to be the audience as well as the writer. You have to be obsessed with understanding what makes people choke with emotion, laugh, feel outrage, and cheer for a character they identify with. This feeling for the audience must underlie any writing. Even writing a training video for a corporate client requires careful consideration of the people in the audience. You need to think about what they need to know, how they will understand, and whether you have communicated successfully. An audience is an audience, whether for a big-screen movie, a how-to training video, or a website that presents a corporate face to the world.

As you become more adept at creating for one or another media, you will want to explore the works of other professionals who have written more specialized works, as listed in the bibliography at the end of this book. Remember, many write; few are chosen. Whatever you do, whatever you become, this writer wishes you the best possible breaks and the courage to fulfill your creative potential. In this spirit, I hope this book has been a worthwhile learning experience and will provide you with a foundation for your chosen craft.

Exercises