I realized I haven't written about last night's business class, other than the bit at the end. Most of last night's class was about contracts, specifically "options". As soon as you start getting involved with the business side of show business, you immediately hear about "options", particularly.
Let me give the one line low-down on options: all options are bad unless they're short-term and high-price. Otherwise, the optioner has no incentive to push ahead with your project.
If you've been a particularly close reader of The Paperwork you may remember that I had a discussion with Max about free options. We know quite a few people who have taken "free options". Free options are the worst -- as Brooke read through an actual "free option" contract from a production company the students started howling, wondering why anyone would do this.
Free options:
I always make it a rule to ask for dinner before I get screwed.
The horrible thing about this is that I know people who have taken free options and who have gotten very excited when free options have been offered to them. Now that Brooke has gone through it with us, step by step, I know that these option agreements are bullshit designed to fuck the writer over, and anyone who offers me one is going to get precisely what they deserve. But the offer of an option -- even one that gains the writer no money -- is someone telling you that they like your work.
"You like me! You really really like me!"
And that's the hardest thing in the world for a writer. You sit in a room for days, weeks, months on end, typing out something that is a creation of a completely fictional world, something that might be completely ridiculous. Any kind of feedback where someone says, "Gee, this is nice, let me take it out and test the waters," validates this entire experience.
Except they're not saying, "I like this," they're saying, "Well, let me take this and several hundred other projects and see what sticks." You can bet they're not skimping on paying themselves. (One line in the contract actually says something to the effect of, "If we decide to buy this or the principal photography has commenced..." Principal photography commences after weeks or even months of pre-production. And they're just telling you now that they're going to buy it?)
Writers take the short end of the stick because they think that that's what they deserve. What's so hard about what we do, right? After all, everybody knows the alphabet, how hard is it to string a few words together and come up with catchy dialogue?
Well, just read a bad screenplay/story/novel and then answer that question.
(And how annoying is it when you say, "I'm a writer," and someone responds, "I've always wanted to write." So go and do it already, punk.)
To ask for money, to ask to be treated fairly, requires that the writer or singer or actor believe that what they do is worthwhile and valuable. You have to learn to stand up and say, No, this is good stuff and I deserve to be compensated for it.
If they walk away, you've saved yourself a big step, because they weren't going to give you anything anyhow. Read the fine print. And, in standing up for yourself, they might just realize that you view yourself as a professional and may get more serious about you.
You get what you settle for. I think this is the lesson.