Yes, it's Part 15 and by now, you should know what this series is all about. Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 can be read here, Part 3 can be read here, Part 4 can be read here, Part 5 can be read here, Part 6 can be read here, Part 7 can be read here, Part 8 can be read here, Part 9 can be read here, Part 10 can be read here, Part 11 can be read here, Part 12 can be read here, Part 13 can be read here and Part 14 can be read here. Part 15 awaits…
We're talking about writers writing "on the come," meaning they don't get paid unless the project succeeds in some way. I believe that one of the main mistakes writers make — and yes, I have made many of them myself — is to invest their work in ventures which have little chance of ever happening. And often if they do happen, they somehow do not pay much (if anything) to the writer who invested in them.
Remember that word — "invest." There's a fiction in the publishing and entertainment industries that "invest" only refers to putting up actual cash money. This is not so. Time is money and your reputation and ideas are worth something, often a lot more than any token up-front money you may have received.
We'll discuss this more in future installments. Right now, we're going down a list of conditions which should make you wary of getting involved in a publishing or producing venture without a decent amount of money paid in advance or guaranteed. Here's my list and I may be adding other items to it before we're through…
- You're writing something which if one particular buyer doesn't buy it, you can't really sell it anywhere else.
- You're writing something for a project that you're not 100% certain will ever happen at all.
- You're writing something and your fee, if they like the work, has yet to be determined.
- You're writing something for people who, if they do like your work, might not have the money to pay you.
- You're writing something where the terms of employment — who'll own it, credits, whether you receive royalties (and if so, how much), how many rewrites they can demand of you, etc. — have yet to be determined.
- You're writing something for people who really aren't sure what they want.
- You're writing something for people who just might not even read what you hand in…or have it read by someone with actual hiring/power in their company.
- You're writing something for people who are soliciting so many auditions and so much spec work that the odds are pretty damned daunting.
We covered the first one last time. This time, let's focus on the second…
- You're writing something for a project that you're not 100% certain will ever happen at all.
I believe that one of the greatest skills a professional writer can master is the ability to smell out the projects that want you to speculate — to "invest" — but which simply are not going to happen, which means they are simply not going to pay. Being properly compensated may not matter to you as much as seeing your book get printed or your script get produced. That's a choice on your part. But if neither happens, there's really nothing in it for you, right?
In some cases, the person doing the offering is of questionable ethics and intent. In other cases, they mean well but simply don't have the ability or resources to make the project happen. You need to learn to smell out the ones that are longshots and unlikely. Here are two stories about times I was offered animation projects and I decided not to gamble. These both happened more than ten years ago and in both cases, the people approaching me worked for real animation studios. We did not have our meetings at a Denny's. I went to their offices which both were adorned with posters and artwork from cartoons they'd actually produced.
Story #1: I got a call from an exec with a firm we'll call Sacco Productions, a fairly large, well established producer of animation. I was asked in to discuss a project for which they were seeking a writer. They showed me characters, sketches, outlines and such for what seemed to me like a pretty good idea. What it needed was a writer to flesh things out, develop the characters more fully, figure out how everyone interacted and, finally, write a bible and a pilot for a weekly cartoon series. (A "bible" in this small-b context is an overview of the series that explains who everyone is, how they function, etc.)
They thought I could be the one to do all that and I thought so, too…and I liked the people I'd be working with but I sure got the sense in the meeting that the money they'd be offering me would be real, real low. Obviously, I would like to be paid well but that alone is not a deal-breaker. I've turned down jobs that paid well in favor of some that paid less because the "less" ones looked like they'd be fun and would turn out well.
Anyway, on my way out of the meeting at their very nice studio, I asked the receptionist to validate my parking ticket and she said they didn't do that. The folks who'd asked me in for the meeting professed great embarrassment as they explained that they couldn't help me either. I had to pay $7.00 to exit the parking garage.
The parking fee and the sense that the money would be low were not the reason I wound up passing on that project. Then a few weeks later, the same people asked me in again to discuss a different project. I went…and it was pretty much the same meeting only about a different property. Again, I had to pay $7.00 when I left and again, I passed on doing the script they wanted me to write.
This time though on my way out I noticed something that hadn't dawned on me the first time. The guy who owned the animation studio also owned the building in which it was housed. His name was on both.
There is no reason why any office you ever go to can't validate your ticket to park in their building other than that the boss just doesn't want to pay to do that. It seemed extra-cheap in an insulting way that the owner of the building was trying to make money off people who came in for meetings.
A few weeks after I passed on that project, the same people called me for a third time. They had acquired the animation rights to a book and they knew that I was the perfect writer to handle its adaptation into a feature film. I was the only guy they were considering, I was told. It was so, so right for me and vice-versa, they said. They were ready to make me an offer on the spot except, of course, that I had to come in for a meeting and chat it up a bit so we'd be sure we were all on the same page. I told them I'd be glad to come in for that meeting…if they gave me $21.00 to do so.
The man who called me was startled. Why $21.00?
"Because," I explained, "I've paid fourteen bucks to park there already and they'll charge me another seven to park this time…"
He interrupted to say the price of parking had been raised in their building. It was now eight dollars.
"Okay," I said. "Fine. So it's twenty-two bucks now. I'll be glad to come in for the meeting if when I do, someone hands me $22.00 — in cash. I do not accept credit cards but I will take a check with two forms of I.D."
"I'll call you back," he said. When he did a few hours later, he told me he was sorry but there was no way they could give me $22.00 to come in for the meeting. "But please don't let that be an obstacle. This is a great book and you're the best possible writer for the feature we want to make out of it…"
I said, "And you're going to let $22.00 prevent you from getting the best possible writer for it? Either you don't really want me that badly or you're having this movie animated by orphans in Bangladesh getting paid fifty cents a day plus all the coal they can eat."
The fellow sighed, told me he understood but said, "I can't pay you the $22.00. I was willing to pay you out of my own pocket but they told me here they don't want to create that precedent. But I'm really sure you'll love this book and that we can make a great movie out of it. Are you sure you want to blow that off over the price of parking?"
I said, "I was going to ask you the same question." And that was darn near the end of that conversation.
I suppose someone could make a case for penny-wise/pound-foolish on my part. Maybe it would have resulted in a great movie. That's possible. Maybe they would have actually paid me well to write it. That's possible but probably less so. Maybe it was a bad idea to (most likely) burn the bridge to that company. I'm sure the next time a writer was needed for something and my name was raised, someone said, "No, he demands to be paid just to come in and take a meeting."
But maybe if I'd gone in for that meeting, it would have led to another meeting and another meeting and another meeting and so on, each costing me several hours of my life and eight bucks. And then if they had ever offered me actual money to write this script, the amount would have been so low I would have turned it down. I do know that they never made that movie.
Here's the other story. A year or three after the events in Story #1, I got a call from a lady at an animation studio we'll call Vanzetti Productions. This also was a real studio that had produced a small number of things, in this case mostly direct-to-video. She was familiar with my reputation and very flattering. She told me her studio had acquired the rights to do one or more direct-to-video animated features of Popeye the Sailor. "Would you be interested?" she asked.
Yes, I was interested. Very interested. I like Popeye. I like Popeye a lot.
Not all Popeye, of course. No one likes all Popeye. There have been many versions of Popeye over the years and some of them were not, to me, Popeye. She asked if I would come in for a meeting with her and her people. I asked her two questions…
- Do you want to do classic Popeye or do you want to reinvent the character?
- If I come to your office, do I get free parking?
She said yes to the free parking. I thought that was a good sign. She also said they wanted to do classic Popeye — the same spinach-guzzling gob from the Elzie Segar comic strip and the Max Fleischer cartoons. Having no desire to participate in the despoiling of a childhood favorite, I thought that was a better sign. (Actually, the Segar Popeye and the Fleischer Popeye were not the same Popeye but either one — or anywhere on the sliding scale between them — was fine by me.)
I went in. The people I met with were very nice and they seemed to me like folks who could do their part of the process very well. It was easy to imagine a great Popeye direct-to-video animated feature resulting from this association…
…until a gentleman who joined us in the meeting said, "Great, great, great. Well, all we need from you, Mark, is a few pages outlining the story you'd like to do…"
A little warning alarm went off in my head. What he should have been saying was, "Well, I guess we need to have a conversation with your agent and then we can get to work on something…"
"A few pages" is what people say when they expect you to work on spec. It roughly translates to: "You do the work and then if we need it, we'll make you an offer for it." This is arguably okay for a beginner who needs to prove his basic competence…but even there, I'd argue it's a bad way for the beginner to work. It is not acceptable when they asked you to come in because they already like your work. If you don't understand why, read previous installments in this series.
I told them, sounding as unmercenary as I could, that all those other shows I'd done — the ones that had caused them to like my work and ask me in — had involved deals made up front for payment. And when I said that, I saw the gent and the lady exchange looks and I knew right then I would not be writing Popeye for Vanzetti Productions.
A bit flustered, the gent told me that if it was up to him, they'd shower me with cash right away but King Features — those are the folks that own Popeye — were insisting on doing it this way. "They have to approve the storyline before they'll allow us to make a deal with a writer."
I thought but did not say, "If your company has the resources to make a direct-to-video Popeye movie, you must have some money. Someone's paying salaries to you two and renting this lovely office to get projects sold. How about paying a writer you claim to like for his time to write up the storyline that's going to advance your project to the next step? And how about making a deal for what you'll pay me if my storyline is approved? It's not fair to me to expect me to gamble my time without knowing that. What if King Features loves it and then I don't want to work for the money you want to pay?"
I didn't say that because there would have been no point in it. Instead, what I said was: "Well, let me think about it." That way, the meeting ended with us still being sociable and sorta friendly. But when I walked out, I knew I wasn't going to go home and write up the "few pages" and I think they also knew I wouldn't be doing that.
At least, they validated my parking. And as I was driving out of the garage there, I noticed another cartoon writer I knew driving in…which probably meant I wasn't the only person they were asking to write "a few pages." As it turned out, there were a lot of us.
That evening, my friend Earl Kress called me. He said, "I've got a career question I need to discuss with someone" and he told me about how that afternoon, he'd had a meeting with some people who wanted him to submit outlines on spec for a direct-to-video Popeye movie…
I told him about my meeting and how we weren't the only ones they were asking. I mentioned the writer I'd seen driving in as I was driving out, and Earl mentioned two more — one he'd seen going out as he went in, plus one more who was in the waiting room when he left his meeting. We later found out about at least five more.
Let's go back to our list above of cautionary signs that you may be getting involved in a bad deal. Here's the list again. How many of these apply to the Popeye project? I'd say most of them…
- You're writing something which if one particular buyer doesn't buy it, you can't really sell it anywhere else. Yep.
- You're writing something for a project that you're not 100% certain will ever happen at all. Definitely.
- You're writing something and your fee, if they like the work, has yet to be determined. Also definitely.
- You're writing something for people who, if they do like your work, might not have the money to pay you. Possibly.
- You're writing something where the terms of employment — who'll own it, credits, whether you receive royalties (and if so, how much), how many rewrites they can demand of you, etc. — have yet to be determined. That applies.
- You're writing something for people who really aren't sure what they want. Maybe.
- You're writing something for people who just might not even read what you hand in…or have it read by someone with actual hiring/power in their company. Another maybe.
- You're writing something for people who are soliciting so many auditions and so much spec work that the odds are pretty damned daunting. Another definitely.
I didn't write a few pages for them and neither did Earl. I don't know about all those other writers.
Six months later, I was at the Licensing Show and I ran into someone I knew from King Features. I asked her how the Popeye project was going with Vanzetti Studios. She told me there was no Popeye project with Vanzetti Studios and there never was one. "They inquired about the rights," she said. "And I think they made some sort of presentation to us to try to get the rights but we weren't interested in them."
Six months earlier when the lady from Vanzetti had phoned me, almost the first thing she said to me was, "We've acquired the rights to do some direct-to-video Popeye animated films." So that was a lie right off. Everything they said to me after that was built on the premise of that lie.
That lie was an example of why it's a bad idea for even a beginner to work on spec. As I keep saying here, writing on spec is a gamble — and there are good gambles and bad gambles. In this case, the gamble was a much worse one than was obvious.
If the situation had been as represented — they had the rights and just had to show King Features an acceptable outline to proceed — I might have thought, "Well, that's about a one-in-four chance. That's not so bad." Of course, I still would have had the problem of negotiating my deal from a position of weakness because I'd already invested time in it and they might still offer money I wouldn't accept. But at least I'd have a good sense of the odds if I did decide to gamble.
But in spec situations, you rarely know the odds. The folks asking you to work without guaranteed compensation are rarely candid with you about the odds…and besides, sometimes they don't even know. Often, they're a bit delusional about the chances of their project reaching fruition. I don't know how many times I've heard "This is definitely going to happen" about TV and movie ventures that never happened.
In the case of the Popeye project, they were trying to get free storylines written so they could maybe use them to help impress King Features and secure the rights. Let's say they got ten plots written. I doubt they submitted all ten as part of their presentation. They probably threw all but three or four away. That's very easy to do with writing that you didn't have to pay for.
So they take those three or four outlines and they use them as part of their pitch to King to try and get the rights. Let's say you and I wrote the ones they included in their pitch. They're using our work to try and advance their company's fortunes and we might even help them get that deal…but they have no obligation to us. They can get the rights, dump us and hire someone else.
Or they might not get that deal for reasons that have nothing to do with our storylines. By that time, King might already have licensed the rights to another firm. Or King might think the folks at Vanzetti are crooks or incompetents…as seems to have been the case. Or King might set a price for the rights which Vanzetti could not meet. A hundred other things might happen and in many of those scenarios, no one at King ever even reads our numerous "few pages." So we spent all that time auditioning for a job that did not exist.
There's no way to to calculate the odds but if the above "clean" version of the arrangement was a one-in-four chance, I'd say the real situation was more like one-in-two-hundred or maybe worse. In other words, a bad gamble.
If you're a writer and you want to wager your time on something, you can probably find much, much better opportunities somewhere else. Wagering on your own project instead of someone else's might yield better odds. At the very least, the person in charge of the project (i.e., you) won't knowingly lie to you. Also, you won't charge yourself for parking.