SKETCH COMEDY

Q. How do I query Saturday Night Live? I've written some sketches for them.

Ideally you'd have an agent, but barring that, I'd guess you contact either the production office, Lorne Michaels' office, or track down the individual writers and ask them politely if you could send them your two best sketches. They're probably always looking for people who can bring the funny.

Ken, what do you think?

AND THAT SNOW JOKE

I'm reading Snow on the Desert, a biography of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, the famous Victorian swordsman, rogue, linguist, sexologist and spy, who sneaked into Mecca disguised as a Moslem, translated the 1001 Nights and the Kama Sutra and found Lake Victoria. He spoke perhaps 25 languages fluently, plus 15 more dialects. He even went to Salt Lake City before there was a film festival nearby.

There are at least 5 superb movies that can be made out of his life, and ample source material: biographies, and his own travelogues and translations. Check him out. I promise to buy a ticket.

ON CONTRACT NEGOTIATION

I'm not negotiating any contracts just now, so it's a good time to talk about my experiences in general over the past 15 years or so.

Contract negotiation is a little dance done between a producer and your agent. Deal points are negotiated. And then a contract comes back.

For some reason, the contract the lawyer sends over almost never matches the negotiated deal points. I don't know why. I guess it's because business affairs people (in-house lawyers for producers) want to prove their worth by getting a better deal than the producer already agreed on with your agent. Do they hope that the agent and writer won't notice that the paper doesn't match the deal? Or, maybe, they hope that it will be so stressful for the writer and their agent that we'll give up some of the deal points that got us working in the first place?

Producers will often try to use your cash flow against you. They offer A up front, but then they delay the paperwork until you're well into the project. When the paperwork shows up, it's A-1, where the minus-one isn't a lower number, but a flock of situations in which they won't have to pay you A after all. They figure that once you've started working, you're not going to walk away. You don't want to look like a diva, after all. You've invested time, which costs money. And you have your creative juices flowing. So you'll just sign.

I imagine a lot of writers do find it hard to keep fighting for what may seem odd eventualities -- closing loopholes, or definitions of profits or royalty revenue that may never come. I spent 10 years as a development exec writing contracts and putting in loopholes; and I have a little money in the bank, so I'm never freaking out about my next check. So I'm a stickler for getting what I was originally offered. Sometimes I think producers have found themselves paying me more than they expected, because they were counting on bait-and-switch, and I'd rather fight than switch.

Doesn't mean I threaten to stop working. I just keep working full out, and let my agents continue the haggling.

The key is to remember that they can't really walk away. They can make you think they can, but they can't. If they're Guild, they will have to show the Guild a contract at the end of the day; they can't hire you, get you working, and then walk away. Even if they're not Guild, the thing to remember is that you actually do HAVE a contract, just not a written and executed one. Contrary to what Sam Goldwyn said ("An oral contract isn't worth the paper it's written on"), when someone offers you terms, and then you accept and start working, that constitutes a contract. (The legal term is that you are operating "in reliance". The fact that your started working constitutes acceptance of their offer.)

If you are fortunate enough to be writing a film going into production, remember that the last thing they need is to set the whole show back by however long you've been working, and then have to find a new writer who can't use any of your material -- which, even if not perfect, almost certainly contains elements of the direction the director and producer want to take it. But even if you're not in production, it will still be awkward for them if they don't have a contract. That means they can't use your work. Any of it. No matter what they say, it is not worth it to them to be in a situation where you can sue to stop the eventual movie because they haven't bought your work. They won't be able to complete their "chain of title" without your signature on a piece of paper, and that means none of the banking will go through.

So, either because of the oral contract, or their need for an eventual chain of title, or out of fear of the Guild, they will ultimately sign. As will you, because you're not a diva and you are not trying to make anyone's life unnecessarily difficult. So if you stick it out for the terms you agreed to, you'll get them.

So I just keep smiling and working full steam ahead and letting my agent repeat, "No, that's not what we agreed on," until it sinks it.

Remember, if they are revising the terms to suit them, you can do the same. You can't raise the original numbers, but if there are aspects of your contract that you haven't negotiated yet, you are now in a position to insist on clearing up the ambiguities in your favor, rather than in the producer's favor. You can get a better net profits definition, or clarify that the number of scripts you are guaranteed do not include the original development order, or whatever.

It's crucial in negotiations to get things written down. If you or your agent gets agreement with the producer on certain terms, I think it's wise to follow it up with an email saying "Here's what I think we agreed to, please confirm." Then if there's so-called "confusion" later on the producer's part, months later, you can point to the email and say, "No, that's not what we agreed on." Even if they don't respond to the email, it's part of the record that this is what you were agreeing to.

I NEED SOME NEW BOOKS!

What should I read? And why?

ARTICLE ON "THE UNIT"

Patrick Moss, who's working on the show with Mr. Mamet, was kind enough to forward this article about The Unit, David Mamet's new TV show. Aside from being informative, it is just a beautifully written article.

MANAGING YOUR AGENT

I have two jobs. One of them is writer. The other is my agents' manager.

I imagine there are people (like John August, say) whose agents only have to field requests for his services, and ask for the right big numbers. For the rest of us, that is what our agents would like to do, but it is not what we would like them to be doing. We want them out beating the bushes to get us jobs and to sell our material.

Any good agent should be willing to go out with your feature spec, if they have faith in the script. "Going out" with your spec, practically, means calling the 30-40 development people who matter -- someone at Morgan Creek, someone at Imagine, someone at 1492, etc. -- and letting them know that your hot new spec is coming out on Tuesday the 13th and do they want it. Then they smack 30-40 copies of your script into envelopes on Monday night and hand them to Go-Between (a messenger service) and wait for calls back. Within 48 hours you either have a big spec sale or a couple of meetings or nothing.

That's not the hard work either. The hard work is getting people to read your unsold feature when it's not part of a hot spec fire sale -- getting it to producers and directors when it's been "exposed" already. The hard work in TV is getting you read by network execs and production companies so that you are considered for staff jobs or, failing that, free lance scripts.

You can trust they'll do that, but trust is not a virtue in showbiz.

Neither, on the other hand, is being a nudge. Managing your agent is not the same as nagging your agent.

The difference is teamwork. I try to work as my agents' teammate. For starters, when I talk about jobs and, especially, money, I say "we." They owe "us" the money. This reminds both my agent and me that we're in the same boat. I get paid, she gets paid.

Then, I try to point her to places she may not have thought of. I'll email or call and say, "Hey, have they read me over at Rhombus?" or "How about sending Medieval to Equinoxe?" Agents hate making cold calls as much as anyone else. They'd rather work with people they know. My job is to track who she's sent my stuff to, and ask around and see if there's anyone she's missed, and ask her about the people she's missed. Then I have to trust her if she says some company is not worth sending material to (going into bankruptcy, pain in the ass to work for, thieves, unreliable, unpleasant, whatever).

I regularly email my agents with a list of outstanding issues: directors I'm hoping to meet, contracts that need negotiating, production companies I need an introduction to. Then I call and go through all the issues, about once a week. Then I send a recap email: okay, I'm going to call these guys, you're going to call these guys.

I make a point of only asking my agents to do those things she can do much better than I. For example, it is not useful for me to call producers out of the blue. It's amateurish. That's what agents do. On the other hand, if I've already met a producer or a development person, I can usefully check in with them. They know who I am.

Do as much as you can do on your own. But hand off the ball to the agent when they've got a better shot. That's the essence of it.

Don't stop selling yourself to your agents. Always be upbeat when you talk to them, even if your career is sucking. Any time you have good news, let your agent know. Never stop telling them positive stories about yourself. When they call producers on your behalf, those positive stories are their ammunition, even if they're not immediately related to the sale. ("You know he has a book coming out in May?")

Finally, never stop letting them know how much you appreciate their work. They're human, y'know. And no one appreciates a compliment more than someone who's always having to give them out for other people.

FINALLY!

Mac has finally made the big leap. OS 10.4 (Intel flavor) can run (actually dual-boot!) on a Windows box. This is what they shoulda done in 1981. If Mac can make the leap from hardware company to a company based on an operating system -- as Microsoft is -- maybe they can win over a much bigger market share. Certainly Windows boxen have always been cheaper than Powerbooks.

TRUTHINESS IN ADVERTISING

[POLITICS] Turns out Oprah and Random House had plenty of warning that James Frey was a big fat liar. Random House swore up and down that they'd investigated. But they hadn't.

Sure, they wanted to sell books. Specifically Frey's editor had a hit. But it's a question of corporate culture. You can bet that if Proctor & Gamble had had the book, they'd've really truly investigated it, and then yanked it out of every bookstore. Or at least sent warning labels that the book should be shelved as fiction.

I'm heartsick at how little people seem to care these days when they're being lied to or secrets are being kept from them. The government apparently feels that it's safe to hide its screwups over Katrina -- to flat out refuse to reveal what happened -- or to hide photographs of Bush with Jack Abramoff -- or to hide which oil execs advised Cheney on oil policy. Then there are the lies about Saddam's involvement with Al Qaeda. But people's attitude seems to be a shrug: "all politicians are liars." Which is of course their tendency, but it is a tendency that they are willing to fight when their constituents insist on it. Jimmy Carter got elected on a platform of "I will never lie to you," and sure enough, he didn't. Wasn't a great president, but at least he told you when he screwed up.

I wonder if this is a temporary aberration, and the voters will demand that the next president, be he John McCain or John Warner, actually inform them what he's doing, and how. If you don't expect truth from your ten-year-old, you won't get it. And politicians are no better.