Watch Letterman January 2

As you probably know, the WGA has done a side deal with David Letterman's company, Worldwide Pants. WP gets its writers back; the WGA gets everything it was asking the AMPTP for.

Apparently some feature writers are miffed. They feel that if they're out of work, everybody should be out of work, I guess.

This seems selfish and short sighted. The more side deals AMPTP members do, the harder it becomes for the others not to grant the WGA the terms it's asking for. Who wants to be the company sitting at home with the sniffles while the other kids play?

The AMPTP isn't really a monolith, after all. NBC doesn't share revenues with CBS, nor do their parent companies. Putting Letterman back on the air -- not only with writers, but with star guests who may not be willing to cross a picket line for Leno -- doesn't help anyone but CBS.

As I read in the NY Times:

Every host who doesn’t work for CBS — like Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert — will now face the prospect of doing improv while Mr. Letterman is doing a nightly monologue and Top 10 list composed by his usual complement of writers. Beyond those advantages, the two CBS shows are expected to be able to line up far more impressive lists of guests. That’s because the Screen Actors Guild, which is supporting the writers, is explicitly directing its members — including every A-list movie and television star — to appear on the CBS shows. Alan Rosenberg, president of the actors’ union, issued a statement saying that his members “will be happy” to appear on the Letterman and Ferguson shows “with union writers at work and without crossing WGA picket lines.”

I'm not a Letterman fan myself, but you can bet I'll be watching on the 2nd. Now if only Jon Stewart can convince whoever owns his show to do the same deal, I can have my Daily Show back.

It's Thinner

Lisa never liked the hulking 27" cathode ray tube TV that a friend was kind enough to leave with us, because seen sideways it looked like a bunker, and sideways is the view you see coming in. So that was our excuse to upgrade to a 32" Sony Bravia flat panel LCD TV.

I've been a fan of Sony ever since the Sony TV I had in West LA did a face plant off the table during the 1991 Northridge quake... and survived without a problem. They get the details right. The hardware is well designed (down to, thank you, a headphone jack); the software is brilliant.

We fired up the box of BAND OF BROTHERS (Lisa's Chrismukkah prezzie to me), which I've only seen twice before... and I was blown away by the crispness of the details. I'd always liked the opening credits sequence, made up of old photos of the guys in Easy Company. This time I realized that all the old photos are aged, and scratched, and water-spotted, and folded. I'd seen it on my old TV, I guess, but somehow I hadn't really noticed it. Just wasn't enough detail. The blacks are darker, the pixels are invisible (at least till my eyes get used to 720p)... it's spectacularly pretty.

Of course this means I have to think about getting an HD PVR...

Filthy Lucre

Q. I've optioned a book with the goal of turning it into a $10 million animated feature and I had a friend adapt it into a screenplay with the promise that he would be one of the first paid when we actually secured funding. We want to properly compensate him without breaking the budget. Is there a range that we should be looking at?

Okay, I'll bite. Bear in mind, I'm not an agent or a producer, and either of those will have differing opinions about what's "fair." This is a deal I would have felt good offering a first time screenwriter when I was a development exec.

"Funding" can mean two things. There's development funding, and production funding.

I would say $15,000-$20,000 payable out of the first development funding would be fair compensation for a first-time screenwriter who's written for nothing up front.

It should be agreed now that, should you get production financing, the deal will immediately be upgraded to a standard WGA deal. Your friend should get a production bonus of 2% of budget, capped at $250,000, reducible to 1% if your friend shares credit (or 0% if the writer doesn't get any credit). (Credit is arbitrated by the WGA in the case of disputes.) A 5% share of your gross revenues after recoupment of your expenses (5% of producers adjusted gross) would also be fair if your friend is making the project happen and investing his time on the if-come.

You're right to get the numbers negotiated now. Right now you can argue about slices of a hypothetical pie, and no one has cause to get mad. Once there's money coming in, you can destroy a friendship easily if one friend feels the other is taking advantage of a situation; and that can go either way. Maybe a great movie is worth losing a friend over. A development deal never is.

Coming Up With New Pitches

One of the missions we have given ourselves, Lisa and I, is to come up with new show pitches. Particularly procedural pitches, because that's what CTV tells me they want.

It's hard to come up with new pitches, because all of the obvious, fertile territory is already under cultivation. You have to find the strip of creek bottom up in the mountains that has grown over. It is much easier when inspiration just comes to you. But I find myself coming up on a New Year with a bunch of pitches under option, but nothing to pitch. You always want to have something to pitch.

A movie is a story. It's easy enough to come up with a new movie idea; just come up with a new twist on an old story. It's easy enough to come up with the characters: just figure out what characters you need to tell your story.

A TV show is generally a family of characters. Ideally it is a family of characters who spend their time at a venue: a cop shop, a couple of apartments, the White House, NCC 1701. For a procedural show, it is ideally a family of characters who spend their time at a venue where stories regularly walk in the door: a law firm, a hospital, a restaurant, a hotel.

That's why there are so many shows about cops, lawyers and doctors: it is not too hard to come up with new episode pitches so long as people keep committing crimes, going to court and getting sick, in so many different ways. A great episodic episode needs more than a clever new crime, legal situation or ailment. But for a show to reach 100 episodes, you're going to have to hack some episodes out. If you don't have a venue where stories walk in the door, or an ongoing story arc, you're going to really have to work for every springboard.

So we're trying to think of venues where stories walk in the door that are not cop shops, law firms, courtrooms, hospitals, hotels or restaurants...

Don't Be Afraid of Negotiating

Q. A producer says he wants to hire me, but he's being vague about whether he can afford me. Meanwhile, I have an agent who is interested in repping me. I'd like a contract, and I'd like an agent to negotiate for me, but I'm afraid that will scare the producer off.

The only producers who can be "scared off" by contracts are those who plan not to pay you what they promised. And the only producers who will be scared off by a legit agent are those who want to rip you off.

Real producers deal with agents every time they hire a "piece of talent," as they say. Hire a director? Talk to his agent. Hire a writer? Talk to her agent. Hire a cinematographer? Agent. Etc. Of course they don't like it -- they'd rather negotiate against you, hungry inexperienced writer, than an experienced agent who's going to tell them, "C'mon, I know what people get for low budget non-union horror scripts on a $500,000 shooting budget. And that's not it."

(Note: I don't know what people get for non-union horror scripts on a $500,000 shooting budget. But then I'm not an agent.)

Personally I don't think any writer should work without an agent if she can get a legit agent. All an agent has to do is raise your fee 10% and they're free. Moreover, the producer can get mad at your agent, and not at you. I once tried to negotiate a deal myself, and the producer got mad at me and decamped. I don't regret not working with him -- he was trying to rip me off -- but I do regret that I didn't run it through a representative.

What's a legit agent? Any agent who's signatory with the WGA, in the States, or the WGC in Canada. (I imagine it's the same with the WGGB in Great Britain.) You do not need to be in the Guild to have a Guild-signatory agent. I was a non-union writer for years in LA, and all my agents were Guild-signatory. It just means they adhere to a code of conduct -- no "reading fees," etc. I also do not believe that any agent outside of LA or New York in the States, or outside of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal in Canada, is worth the trouble.

Happy Saturnalia!

Screenwriter-in-Residence Opportunity with the Toronto Public Library

The Toronto Public Library invites applications from Canadian screenwriters for a Screenwriter-in-Residence position. The residency is designed to encourage exchanges between the screenwriter and the community and requires 14 hours per week at the library for programming (scope to be determined), evaluation of submitted manuscripts, and one-on-one meetings with writers from the general public. The remaining time is available for the Screenwriter in Residence to work on his or her own project(s). The tenure of the position would be from April 21 to June 14, 2008, and the screenwriter would be located at the North York Central Library. Compensation for the two-month term is $8,000. Applications are due by January 25, 2008. Please see www.wgc.ca for information on how to apply and eligibility criteria.

That's about $70 an hour. Not bad for mentoring, huh? I bet you get an office, too.

Writing Foreign Language Dialogue

Q. When a movie is written primarily in English but certain scenes call for characters to speak in other languages, how is this usually denoted in a script? Assuming the writer and most of the people who would read the script only know English, would the writer just add parenthetical under the character?

Anything that is clear will work. I do one of two things:

When characters are speaking in a foreign language, and we're supposed to know what they're saying, but either (a) I don't know the language and/or (b) the audience won't be able to make anything out from the language, then I just put it in parentheses. For example Japanese.

Where some part of the audience might appreciate the original -- say the foreign language is French or Spanish -- and I can generate it myself, then I create another Final Draft "element" called "Subtitles," based on the Dialogue element. Subtitles is smaller type, sometimes a different color. I write the actual dialog in the foreign language, and put the translation in the subtitles.

That's what we did on BON COP / BAD COP, which was half in very funny French, and meant for both French and English audiences. It is also what I did on MEDIEVAL, my medieval zombie horror comedy. The undead knights were speaking Old Provençal for a bit, until they realized our heros spoke French; then they switched into Old French. Francophone audiences will be able to make some of the Old Provençal out, without really understanding it; they'll probably grasp most of the Old French. Non-francophones can just read the subtitles.

This technique allows for some fun throwaway jokes. In the horror comedy I'm writing right now, I have two French Canadian characters who say incredibly rude things in French to the other characters, who don't speak any French. The incredibly rude things don't get subtitles. Heh. You could do the same thing in the States, where all the Latinos would laugh at your Spanish jokes.

If I don't want the audience to know what the character is saying (unless they speak the language), then I just write the language and don't translate it.

Or you can just go back to the old school technique, where the Germans all speak English, but with posh accents.

Digital Media Blawg

Jonathan Handel has been blogging a lot lately at Digital Media Law about legal issues related to the strike. If you're looking for a relatively neutral point of view, focusing on the legal questions, check it out!