High Concept

(In case you don't know what high concept is, here's a working definition: high concept means the story of the movie can be succinctly told in one slambang sentence, such as "A man battles terrorists in a highrise building in order to save his family" or "A cyborg travels from the future to our own time in order to kill the Messiah of the future." Another definition of high concept comes from Harlan Ellison (I think): A movie is high concept when once it is made no other movie can be made from that idea, such as "A man falls in love with a mermaid.")

Class on Tuesday nights is biz class, or, Economic Models of the Entertainment Industry. What we have learned is how to define box office, what film rentals are, who gets gross participation, and how to calculate what the break-even point for a film is. (It's a lot further along the box office spectrum than you might think.)

It's a pretty fun class. The guy who teaches it is a riot. He told us the first or second meetings that he would be using ancient Irish expressions like "meshuge" or "pisher" because film is an international medium of many languages. (Of course, no one else laughed at that joke but me.) In tonight's class he gave away two concepts high enough to give me a nosebleed, and he said he was just throwing them out and didn't expect points. (Ha!)

He calls the people who write the articles that slam Hollywood's so-called creative accounting practices are "bigots." He goes over and over the rules-of-thumb when it comes to figuring out how much money there is, and how much you can plan to get.

This "how much you can get" aspect of Hollywood makes me crazy. Because it doesn't sound like you get much. No, seriously. Let's say you get paid $100,000 for a screenplay. Sounds like party time, right?

        100,000        Screenwriting payment
         40,000        Federal taxes
          9,000        California taxes
         10,000        Agent's fee (10%)
          5,000        Lawyer's fee (5%)
          5,000        Business manager's fee (5%)
          1,500        WGA dues (1.5%)
      ------------
         29,500        What you take home

Now, clearly, there is something wrong here. Or else everyone would be in the poor house. Do you get to deduct the agent's fee, lawyer's fee, biz manager's fee, and WGA dues against your federal taxes? in which case you deduct $21,500 of the $40,000. And what about the CA taxes?

Clearly I'm turning all of my money troubles over to Quicken and skipping the business manager part. Unfortunately, you can't do without the agent and lawyer part.