Posts Tagged ‘producers’

“I have failed so you are penalized.”

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

I had several long phone calls this week being leant on by a producer who wanted to pay far less than the going rate for a script by an established client because the producer had used much of his development budget on another writer who failed to deliver a usable script.

Most reasonably experienced writers get hired from time to time to fix failing scripts or to do a page-one rewrite. In some cases there is underlying material and the new writer does not even read the previous draft. If it is an adaptation then there will obviously be some similarities between the two scripts.

Producers tend to use this argument to scale down the fee to the new writer, after all, much of their previously planned budget has been spent, so clearly it is reasonable for the new writer to do the job for far less than the writer who failed? Not.

There are times that writers have to say No. The fee should be based on a percentage of the budget whether it is the first or second go at the script. The percentage should be based on the track record of the writer, perhaps shaved down marginally.

What sadly no longer surprises me is that producers seem to believe that they are entitled to get work done for a lower than normal rate after they (the producer) have failed: they selected the first writer, briefed the writer, presumably provided notes to the writer (one wonders how good or not those notes were and who was responsible for hiring the person who provided the notes)?

When do critics blame producers when they rubbish a film? Not often. But producers should take some responsibility for not coming up with a viable script the first time round and when they hire another writer to get them out of a hole, they should not penalize that writer by offering them less than their going rate.

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Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Had our first industry screening for INNOCENT (www.innocentthefilm.com), the low-budget film I executive produced, at Twentieth Century Fox today. It was more nerve-wracking than the cast and crew screening at the Odeon in Croydon, because there were serious industry people, journalists and potential investors there.

It went off very well and made me realise how important the big screen is to enhance the viewing experience. It also made me realise that planning the marketing of the film, the festival routes, the sales agent and distributor expectations, the TV sales route, the journalist angles, are all something we should have done well before we shot the film.

The fact that we didn’t but the screening went really well, has made me a happy executive producer because our band of enthusiasts is so committed to the film that we are carrying others with us. The NSPCC and Childline, as well as other childrens’ charities (Act Against Bullying for example) seem to be behind us. We – of course – are definitely behind them and will support them in whatever way we can.

Can a film about bullying have an effect on bullying? I believe that it can and that we will. We got the dramatic interplay of the story right – adults bully each other and also bully children who bully other children. The music in the film is reaching out to teenagers: they seem to respond so well to it. That is something else we got right.

Now to pin down the sales agents, newspapers, investors. The real work starts now!

A client of ours, Ted Allbeury, sadly passed away some years ago, said once that “Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted”. He was a counter-espionage officer. It applies so much to producers before they start shooting the film.

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Selling script or shooting script?

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Yesterday I had one of those conversations with a client and then with his producer that made me wonder about the manipulative nature of what agents do. Not necessarily bad manipulation, more like the golden oil that ensures that your car starts smoothly.

The writer is anxious the producer won’t understand what he is trying to do in this draft of the script. The producer has issues with the draft. I sit somewhere between them.

I recommend that we get two reports on the script, one from an established script analyst, the other from someone with some knowledge of the history and geography of the location.

I propose that when we have these reports we can all be more dispassionate about deciding how to go forward. What I want is not a script ready to shoot, but a script that will attract a director and start attracting finance. Do they want the same?

My guess is that this is not the script that the writer wants to be shot.

So is there a useful distinction to be made between a selling script and a shooting script? I think so: after all until the director has had some input we cannot have a shooting script. Next week will be interesting.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go into the water…..

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

After all the stress of travelling, life returns to normal and problems that seem to be a hill of beans suddenly loom too large to forget them when I leave the office. Today’s was dealing with a producer (producer 1) who commissioned an adaptation, paid the commencement and (eventually) delivery of the first draft, only for us to discover that he didn’t have the rights to the underlying book.

He had warranted in the writer’s agreement that he did have those rights. After lots of discussion with various parties including producer 1 we were no further. He claimed to have an understanding with producer 2 who did own the rights, but producer 2 wouldn’t accept his proposed deal. Unsurprisingly producer 2 said producer 1 wouldn’t accept his deal. Stalemate.

One lawyer came up with the advice that the writer’s agreement wasn’t valid because the writer would not have signed the agreement if she had known that producer 1 did not own the underlying rights, and that clearly fraudulent misrepresentation had taken place.

Another lawyer said that the assignment of rights was actually valid but because of the misrepresentation there was a legal remedy to get the rights back and we could apply to the courts to enforce this.

Before doing that, however, we should send a lawyer’s letter to producer 1 pointing out that he was in breach of his warranties, that there was misrepresentation, that is he agreed to assign the rights back to the writer she would agree that he would be paid back what she had been paid (less the legal fees incurred). If we went to court we would win and producer 1 would end up paying all our costs as well as his own.

Producer 1 would have to warrant that the rights that had been assigned to him were unencumbered so that he could re-assign them, that he had not used them as a charge with his bank or brother-in-law, because without proper re-assignment back of the rights my client could not assign them freely to anyone else, which she dearly wants to do as producer 2 wants to make the movie.

Watch this space. It is good to be back!

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Why writers feel aggrieved

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

There may be many reasons, some better than others. The Writers Guild has a session this week at BAFTA on the crisis in TV drama that will no doubt air some of these issues.

I am dealing today with a situation in which a writer has worked on a script with the production company for some months and it has got better and better. Then a director comes onboard and all of a sudden the film the director wants to make is at such variance from the film the writer and producer have agreed they are making, that the writer is forced into a corner.

Stand up and argue against the big director, or give in and see the film possibly changed for the worse. The big question is will it be worse? Does the director have a vision that will lift the script, together with the actors, into a higher league than the writer and producer had in mind? Looking at the changes the director wants to make there is little doubt that some will be detrimental.

Did the writer and producer spend too long on the script so that they can only see it the way it is? This reminds me of titles for films and books – the starting title becomes well-worn and comfortable, so that it seems to be good, but to someone who knows nothing about the project, coming in fresh, another title might be better.

I wish I could say that directors always improve matters. They don’t. They sometimes do. So is it a kind of Russian roulette? Must writers lie back and think of England or wherever, just because the film industry is a director-led industry?

The truth is that if directors and producers were really good they would enable there to be calm and detailed discussion about the changes they want. The changes would not be forced upon writers unilaterally, as they sometimes are.

I reall a TV movie written by a client with over 400 hours of top TV drama behind him, including (at that time) the highest rating single on ITV. When an ITV commissioner greenlit the film there was no director; the director was hired after ITV provided all the money and the director promptly fired the writer and brought in another, so in effect even undermining the decision of the ITV commissioner.

So much depends on the management of people, on the diplomacy by all concerned. In my experience writers feel aggrieved often because they are simply not treated with respect but like naughty children who must be told what to do. Because the director might be right there is no reason why what the writer wants must de facto be ignored or rejected. There is every reason for the process to be as collaborative as possible, rather than firing the writer simply because the director thinks they know better. Who will rid me of this meddlesome writer? Unfortunately is is not necessary to get a bunch of mercenaries as producers ensure that is possible to fire the writer in the basic contract.

No wonder writers want to be producers and directors. It is one of the reasons agents also want to produce. The moment that any of the players pull rank rather than behave in an inclusive way, the rot is in danger of setting in and the Writers’ Guild and all writers and agents need to stand up and be counted.

This is another obvious reason why getting several hundred writers together at the Cheltenham Screenwriters’ Festival and why the Guild are so important. We need to build bridges and to work together so that the fragmented freelancers who make up the scriptwriting community can have some cohesiveness. That is exactly why ScriptWriter magazine and TwelvePoint.com were set up.

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We need a rewrite but have run out of money

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

Why do producers, when they have spent their development budget and have no viable script to show for the investment, think it is appropriate to offer the writer they turn to, to rescue them, a very low fee for the rewrite? The unstated reasoning is that ‘We have spent all the money we had built in to our budget so you need to subsidise us and accept less than you would normally be paid.’

This is blatantly unjust. Why should writers subsidise either bad decisions by producers (who may have chosen the wrong writer in the first place) or because a good writer failed to make the script work (which does happen even to good writers).

Surely the writer who does make the script work should be paid the most? But then writers have generally been in a weak negotiating position within the industry, partly because they do need to be paid before they deliver. So producers are wary. After all, in this scenario, a second writer is being hired because the first has failed.

Another reason is to do with supply and demand: there are so many more writers wanted to work than there are jobs, which makes it difficult (in the European market place) to argue fees up. The WGA has more clout in the US so there is more that can be done there.

The WGGB has begun arguing that the writer should be more of a ‘partner’ in the enterprise than a hired gun who has no security of tenure. Personal relationships between writers and producers or script executives become very important in effecting deals that are fairer at the backend even if they are parsimonious upfront.

But in a buyer’s market writers need to be aware of the context in which they are hired to rewrite. They should not be asked to accept less than is fair because of mistakes made by others.

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I write scripts not treatments

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

Good lunch at Patisserie Valerie (why pay for membership of Soho clubs when theirs is free and they do good hamburgers?) with a client and a producer. Discussion good, food good and there were some philosophical questions about how writers get selected.

My client asked about another production company who had sent him a DVD of one of their films to look at while they read his material. We wondered what they would think of the novels (he is being considered as a scriptwriter).The Belgian producer we were lunching with had provided a treatment and seen some films by the writer.

The question that arose in my mind concerned the very unscientific way producers and directors select writers. They read a script and will sometimes go for the writer because of the similarity of subject matter and the fact that they like the way the script is constructed, the dialogue rings true and so on.

Or they see a film written by the writer and they like that.

But they cannot know how many drafts and what other interventions there might have been in turning what could be a lousy draft into a good one, or lousy rushes into a better film.

Similarly we (agents and their clients) look at the work done by the producer and have to decide whether to take a job. Sometimes the work is inspiring and one wants to be part of it; sometimes one needs any deal so it doesn’t really matter.

In all these cases it is fundamentally subjective elements that probably determine the decision. I recall being asked for a woman writer. Why a woman writer in particular. I need the writer to understand sexual abuse against women, said the producer. So (I asked) does the writer need to have been sexually abused? No, not necessarily but it is set in a refuge for battered women and a man would not understand (the producer BTW was a woman). I asked, don’t you just want a really good writer? After all the abuser needs to be understood too, perhaps it is even more important to make the audience understand him and his motivation?

In the end I recommended a very good male writer who in his previous job had been involved in setting up dozens of battered women’s refuges (he was a social worker).

Is the ‘system’ by which writers are selected sufficiently effective? Because contracts (on the old PACT/WGGB agreement) meant the producer paying 20% for a treatment and 40% for the first draft resulted in so many really bad first drafts, we are all working in a situation in which both sides lose out.

60% is too much for delivery of a first draft based on a flimsy treatment; 20% is too little for the treatment which often takes 50% of the total writing time for the entire project.

I believe that there need to be more ‘stages’, starting with a selling treatment that makes sure writer and producer share a vision for the same film, then perhaps a document exploring the characters in greater depth and only then a more conventional treatment before a step outline and then a script. However, some writers, including the one I had lunch with, likes going to script very early.

No one said it was an easy business to work in and ‘development hell’ is well-named. Perhaps agents do earn their commission particularly in being the oil that keeps the different parts of the machine from working against each other?

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Agents moaning?

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Interesting evening at Women in Film and Television last night. Four agents (representing actors, presenters, writers and directors) on the panel, brilliantly chaired by WiFTV ceo Kate Kinninmont, all complained of not really actively looking for clients. All four of us (Vivienne Clore of The Richard Stone Partnership, Maxine Hoffman of Curtis Brown, Matthew Dench of Dench Arnold and me) have fairly settled client lists, take on very few new clients, think many of those who submit showreels or CVs or material do it badly. All of us get too many emails and more applications from prospective clients than we can do justice to.
There wasn’t a great deal of overt optimism but underlying the slight negativeness was a sense that there was still work out there, that training may not be as effective as those who do it assume, that being pro-active was more important than ever, and that writers in particular needed to start behaving like producers (in the early stages of developing a film; see current debate in Shooting people for Writers), that selling an option for peanuts was not necessarily the right thing to do (though I must admit that all writers love to be able to say ‘I have sold a treatment or script…’. Actors could also team up with writers and directors and indie producers since the sum of the parts may be greater the parts individually.
I think we need new business models: there is a democratization taking place where the very few gatekeepers (commissioning editors, producers) should not be a bar to the sensible development of scripts or stories. There are other routes than the conventional – writing a story as a novel enables you to sell it to two separate markets; making a micro-budget film could jumpstart a career faster than selling three options, and so on.
Maybe TwelvePoint should run a course in producing for writers? Now I have said it someone will beat us to it. Good, we are busy enough. As long as writers find ways of moving their careers forward and cease to see making an option sale as the most important thing, things will improve and agents will have less to complain about.

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