Contracts Panel

You can now download the audio from our WGC-sponsored panel discussion on What Do I Want In My Contract?. It's an exploration of the terms that the WGC's Independent Production Agreement doesn't cover. Many of them apply whether you're in the US or Canada, and whether you have a Guild agreement or you're on your own.

WGC Forum Delegate Election

So, I'm running for a second term as Quebec's Delegate to the WGC National Forum. If you're a member, and have any questions, either about the election or about the upcoming National Forum, please don't hesitate to drop me a line.

What Do I Want in My Contract? A WGC Panel Discussion

I'm moderating a panel for the WGC in February at McGill on "What Do I Want In My Contract?"

What should you ask for when you option a feature film or a TV series? The Writers Guild’s basic contract (the Independent Producer Agreement) covers many basic terms, but others aren’t codified, including lots of ways veteran writers get paid on the back end, your right to write new material, and the crucial “Created by” credit in TV. Plus, what’s all this fine print?

We’ve invited an agent who reps writers to talk about what writers can and should ask for; a producer’s lawyer to talk about what’s easy for producers to give and what’s hard; and a representative of the Writers Guild of Canada to talk about what contract terms end up in disputes. The panel will be moderated by Alex Epstein, who’s worked both sides of the table. Audience members will be able to ask questions.

This event is aimed at professional, emerging and aspiring screenwriters, but filmmakers of all kinds may find it illuminating.

Check out the Facebook Event page.

Also, if you have questions you want me to bring up at the panel, please email me.

Forum is Coming Up

The WGC National Forum is coming up April 10th and 11th. If you're a member of the WGC in Québec, or if you hope to become one, and if you have any concerns you'd like aired, please talk to Anne-Marie Perrotta or me before then. Thanks!

WGC Awards

Hey, congratulations to my many friends who are nominated for WGC Awards. Not least of whom, my beloved wife Lisa, nominated in Shorts and Web Series for her hilarious script for YOU ARE SO UNDEAD.

And the nominees are...

In Animation..

League of Super Evil “All You Can Eat”
Written by Edward Kay

League of Super Evil “Voltina”
Written by Philippe Ivanusic-Vallee & Davila LeBlanc

The Cat In The Hat Knows A Lot About That “The Cat…Knows A Lot About Maps”
Written by Karen Moonah

Total Drama World Tour “Broadway Baby”
Written by Alex Ganetakos

Zeke’s Pad “Fetch a Sketch”
Written by Hugh Duffy

In Children and Youth...

How To be Indie “How To Fight For Your Rights”
Written by Vera Santamaria

The Latest Buzz “The Extreme Shakespeare Issue”
Written by Barbara Haynes

Wingin’ It “She Blinded Me With Science”
Written by Ramona Barckert

Wingin’ It “The Spinner And The Saint”
Written by Conor Casey & Lyndon Casey

In Documentary...

How to Boil a Frog
Written by Jon Cooksey

Outbreak: Anatomy of a Plague
Written by Jefferson Lewis

The Pig Farm
Written by Christine Nielsen

In Movies and Miniseries...

Barney’s Version
Written by Michael Konyves

Grown Up Movie Star
Written by Adriana Maggs

Life, Above All
Written by Dennis Foon

In Shorts and Web Series...

Hot Wheels Battle Force Five “Splashback”
Written by Cole Bastedo & Matt Huether

Ruby Skye P.I. “Caught Ruby Red Handed”
Written by Julie Strassman-Cohn & Jill Golick

You Are So Undead
Written by Lisa Hunter

In TV Comedy...

Kids in the Hall: Death Comes To Town “Cause of Death”
Written by Bruce McCulloch & Mark McKinney

Less Than Kind II “Coming Home”
Written by Chris Sheasgreen

Less Than Kind II “The Deluge”
Written by Garry Campbell & Jen Beasley

Less Than Kind II “Fasto Loves Lebso”
Written by Jenn Engels

In TV Drama...

Durham County “Distance, Hunting and Home”
Written by Laurie Finstad-Knizhnik

Flashpoint “Acceptable Risk”
Written by Pamela Davis

Flashpoint “Jumping at Shadows”
Written by Mark Ellis & Stephanie Morgenstern

Rookie Blue “Girlfriend of the Year”
Written by Tassie Cameron

Rookie Blue “Hot and Bothered”
Written by Russ Cochrane

It's a mystery to me how SPLICE failed to get nominated for Best Movie or Miniseries. Doug Taylor and Vincenzo Natali's script was brilliant and alarming and creepy as all get out. But everyone can't have prizes.

MIGS

If you're a WGC member planning to go to the Montreal International Game Summit next month, we have an association discount ($695 instead of $795). The code should be going up on the WGC website shortly, or if you're a Quebec member, email me.

Congratulations Jill Golick

Jill is the new president of the Writer's Guild of Canada.

Jill is a friend, a dear heart, a mensch, a fine writer, and has made big personal sacrifices to help organize writers. As National Forum delegate for Québec, I'm delighted I'll be working with Jill for the next couple of years (though Jill will be doing most of the working).

Congratulations Jill!

Tune In, Turn On, or be Dropped Out

From the WGC:

Tomorrow, Thursday the 6th of August, the Canadian Television Fund will host a virtual Town Hall to release and discuss initial key policy issues concerning the creation of the Canada Media Fund (CMF). This is the launch of the consultation process that will inform the policies and guidelines of the new program.

From there, stakeholders – that’s you – are invited to write and share their perspectives on the issues. We encourage you to take this opening and run with it – the more Canadian screenwriters voice their perspectives, the more we ensure Canadian voices are represented on our screens.

We’ll know the parameters of the discussion after the 6th, and we’ll tell you more then. We encourage everyone to tune in though and find out first hand. To do so, pre-register at http://www.ctf-fct.ca/ctf_home_en.html. [Important Note: when last we tried, there was some difficulty using Firefox and Safari to register – you may have to be on IE to register and watch the proceedings – so try early to debug and please persevere].

There is scary talk of reducing the restrictions on American writers on Canadian shows. If you think that Canadian culture dollars should go to support Canadian shows, rather than American shows shot on Canadian soil, you might want to participate.

Going to the Awards?

[Canada] As Denis reminds, the WGC Awards are Monday, the 20th. You can buy tickets at the new WGC site.

The WGC Awards is the best schmooze in town. Imagine hundreds of drunken wallflowers. People fly in from Vancouver for it. Network execs will come, along with some of the cooler producers, and Telefilm people, but mostly it's every single Canadian screenwriter who can make it.

And the awards themselves are mercifully brief.

Tickets, if you're a non-member, are $75, which isn't cheap, but you get some awesome catering for that, plus an open bar, and it's a schmoozefest. (And schmoozing is your job.)

I'll be there. You should too.

WWTV: Being Erica

Writers Watching TV is WGC honcho Jill Golick's extremely cool series of get-togethers with showrunners and creators in Toronto. This Wednesday night WWTV invites creator Jana Sinyor to screen her series BEING ERICA and then talk about it. Looks like a big crowd of writers and execs and producers and directors.

And then we drink. Drunken writers = always fun.

I'll be there. If you're in the T-dot, you should too! And come on by and say hi.

Should ISP's Pay for Content?

The WGC wants ISP's to pay to support Canadian creative content:

WGC Launches Facebook Group Calling for Support of Canadian New Media Broadcasting

The Guild launched a new Facebook Group today to spread the word and raise the volume of the discussion coming into the New Media hearings at the CRTC in February. The subtly named group, Make the ISPs Pay to Play, stands behind the principle that ISPs should contribute to help create some of the content that they carry into our homes and from which they benefit.

New Media broadcasting was exempted from regulation in 1999 so that the businesses could grow and find ways to get revenues. Well, last year ISP revenues totalled about $5.7 billion in Canada, so it looks like it’s working.

But the occasion of the CRTC hearing has prompted many in Canada’s Internet-related businesses to issue fearful messages warning of an Internet crushed by government regulations and taxes. In reality, the hearing is looking at the nature of New Media platforms as broadcasters of content, and the extent to which they should support the objectives of the federal Broadcasting Act.

For users, changing the exemption order will not mean restricted portals and limited navigation – and it also will not mean counting the Canadian clips on You-Tube. There is no desire to regulate user-generated content or shape search engine results.

What it can mean is more chances for Canadians to see their stories and their voices reflected in their media. Canadians want and deserve a variety of experiences and a diversity of voices online – a variety that includes professionally produced and accessible Canadian programming.

So please check out the Group, and sign our petition - we'll take the names with us to the CRTC when we appear in February.

If we support Cancon in the music industry and in the TV industry (and we at Crafty do), shouldn't we also support Cancon on the Net?

The point of this kind of support is to create an industry. My problem is there isn't really an "Internet creative content" industry in the sense that there are very few creative things on the Internet (webseries, etc.) that customers are willing to pay to see, or which can support themselves via commercials. Most Internet content is either corporate promotion of some kind, or hobbyists. The Canadian government could throw an unlimited amount of money at writers, say, to train them to write things for the Internet. But would it create an industry? Or would it just create a lot of content that no one wants to see? Or would the money just get hijacked for various kinds of corporate promotions and hobbies?

Does someone want to make an impassioned argument in the other direction? What am I missing?

UPDATE: David Kinahan of the WGC writes:

Our idea is less about training than about content creation – and it is content that will be created in support of conventional broadcast – that additional content that is so prevalent with American shows that helps to engage audiences more fully. We’ve got examples here too – ZoS and Being Erica had/have online content – but it is much more rare, and often less accessible.

And REGENESIS had a whole Alternative Reality Game. Though it was a tad labor intensive -- they had actual humans interacting with the players.

If this is about promoting content on other media, then I'm all for it. Anything that increases the promotion budget for Canadian film and TV is a good idea. Our shows are still tragically under-promoted, with a few shining exceptions.

Freelancers

DMc posts about the reasons why the WGC contract shouldn't mandate a certain number of freelancers. To recap, the WGA contract specifies that a certain small number of scripts on a WGA show must go to free lancers. The idea is to help newbies come up.

Denis's argument is that spreading the scripts around makes it harder for skilled writers to make a living.

I agree. There are some important differences between the way we work in Canada and the American Way.

First of all, in Canada, most of the money is in the scripts. Weekly salaries are not that high. My contract for my series gives me a lower weekly salary than the $6,000+ a junior story editor is entitled to in the States. If my show should go, I'll make that up in production fees. The WGC deal mandates that the writer of an episode be paid around 3% of the budget of the episode. (There's a more complicated formula than that but if the episode budget is a million bucks, the writer's getting a check for over $30,000.)

Normally a free lancer's script has to be heavily rewritten. They're not in the room. They aren't immersed in the show. I've never had a free lancer turn in a script that I didn't have to rewrite at least 50%, and often, in situations where I didn't get to choose the writer myself, we've had to throw the script out and go back to the beat sheet. A freelancer can bring new story ideas and a fresh perspective. They never turn in something you can shoot.

That's awkward because under the WGC rules, the contracted writer -- the free lancer -- is entitled to sole credit and 100% of the production fee no matter how little of their work remains.

In the US this matters less because the story editors are getting paid a whack of cash to rewrite things. That's their job, to rewrite. There is no production fee, either. So the scripts are worth relatively less and the salary is worth relatively more. It is less of an injustice to the writer actually turning in the shootable draft -- whether story editor or showrunner.

Moreover, in the US system a showrunner or story editor who heavily rewrites a free lance script is entitled to credit. So there may be no injustice at all.

There's another difference between the two systems. Shows in the US have bigger staffs. You can go over to Rogers where he's got seven or eight writers for a thirteen episode season -- and that's considered a small room. When you see the writing staff of a Canadian drama on the cover of CANADIAN SCREENWRITER, you'll rarely see more than six people, and often you'll see four. On NAKED JOSH the story room was my co-creator and I.

So if you take away a couple of story editors and turn them into free lancers, you leave the show with one head writer frantically rewriting everyone else's free lance script, working it like the one-legged man at the ass-kicking contest. And that's just nuts.

I'm not a big fan of hiring free lancers. In my experience they don't justify the pay. It's a mitzvah to bring newbies up, but they're not going to learn that much from free lancing anyway. I'd rather pay a few bucks more and have the same newbie writer in the room breaking story and giving notes. If I'm going to throw anyone a bone, it's going to be the writers assistant or script coordinator with a great spec. At least they're around, absorbing the show.

Q. What exactly is the reasons free lancers scripts have to be rewritten so much? I realize that they aren't privilege to information that those in the room would be, but could you give some examples of mistakes that freelancers make that they wouldn't if they were in the room?

Think of all the ways something could be a competent script by itself without being the show. Getting the character's voices wrong. Getting a character's personality wrong. Wrong tone. Not knowing that the set is only 20' long and you can't have a chase scene. Freelancers do all that and more.

To be fair, many of the freelancers I've worked with were not people I chose. In South Africa on CHARLIE JADE we had a bunch of guys who were already contracted when we came on board. Ditto on GALIDOR. Some more or less got the show. Some did not get the show at all. Some were not particularly competent writers. One guy turned in his draft and then went on a weeklong seminar so he wasn't available to write his second draft on schedule. I've had better experiences with people I selected. But still not great experiences. You bring in free lancers for the fresh perspective, but that's really more valuable on the 5th Season of LAW & ORDER -- where the staff is jaded, and the template is easy for a free lancer to copy -- than on the first season of a serial show where you're still finding your feet.

Also, why isn't the freelancer brought in the room for the time he/she is writing the episode? Wouldn't that solve many of the problems?

That's what they did with Rogers on EUREKA, for example. So long as the writer's agent didn't call in and start complaining that the writer was entitled to a weekly salary, that would solve many problems. But at the point where that writer has an office to plug in their laptop, and attends story meetings, what you're doing there is hiring a staff writer without paying them a salary. (Technically in the WGA deal, a "staff writer" in the specific sense is a writer who comes into the office to write their free lance script, but does not rewrite other people's scripts.) On CHARLIE JADE, rather than continue to work with multiple South African free lancers, we brought in Dennis Venter on a less than extravagant salary to write all the remaining South African scripts. (The co-production deal mandated a certain minimum number of SA-scripted episodes.) He did a lot better job for being in the room than he could have done from home.

Sale Days Are On

Seems that US nets are buying Canadian shows THE LISTENER, SOPHIE and THE BORDER. That's after the already-announced sale of FLASHPOINT, which raised a bit of a kerfuffle.

What does this mean? First of all, that the nets are not sure how long the strike will go on, and have realized that even if the strike ends tomorrow (Insha'Allah), it will be a while before they can get new stuff produced.

Second, that US nets have decided that at least some Canadian TV series are good enough to air in the US. At any rate, they're better than US reruns. I hope this opens the door to Canadian TV series continuing to air after the strike it over. THE BORDER is pretty good TV.

More From Today's Outing

Quebec members of the Writer's Guild of Canada joined today with members of SARTEC, the Société des Auteurs de Télévision et Cinéma, our sister organization, in solidarity with the Writer's Guild strike.

Chants we had aplenty, because who knows how to hold a manifestation like the Québecois, unless it's their ancestors the French. "Pas d'auteurs, pas d'histoires! Pas d'auteurs, pas d'ciné! Pas d'auteurs, pas d'télé!" And "So-so-so-solidarité!" We had come prepared with some English cheers too, but in keeping with Law 101, they had to be half as loud, and half as clever.

Mon amie Martine has some video on her blog.

I had a great time, there were lots of reporters there from print, radio and TV, one of whom interviewed me in French -- I hope I wasn't too incoherent...

And then we went to dim sum. All in all, a lovely morning in the crisp, cold Montreal air.

And the best part of it? We got to go back to our paid gigs in the afternoon.

Hats On

I am thinking that the WGC needs a ballcap. Something black, say, with the logo in front, and "Hire a pro" in back.

What do you think? If they were available for $15, would you buy one?