I recently read a Peter Miller interview where he talked some about his hollywood business, representing screenplays. He mentioned how much more profitable screenplays are. That made me curious. How does the business look from the screenwriter's perspective? How much would a beginner make, does the movie have to be released, have to be successful, are there royalties, etc?
This is true, but it is only true in a sense.
What Peter is saying (and I get to call him that because he actually managed me for awhile a number of years ago -- by the way he's a manager, not an agent) -- is that the average *professional screenwriter* makes more money selling screenplays than the average *professional novelist* makes, selling novels.
For the average non-professional, sitting in a room somewhere, turning out unsold novels or screenplays, the monetary returns stacks up about the same -- double zero, double zero.
The reason that you should be in a room writing whatever you write is not because you hope to making a lot of money, but because it's what you want to be writing.
If your goal is to make money, there are many, many ways to do it that are much more likely to yield better returns than *either* writing novels or writing screenplays, both of which scan out at the low-probability end of money-making schemes.
As to what the business looks like, from the perspective of a writer, it really depends on how your career hits. First, you can end up as a TV writer or a feature writer. TV writing isn't as lucrative on the short scale -- that is, what you get paid per episode is on the order of mid-five figures for an hour-long. But there are residual payments with repeats that can add up to significantly more over the life of the episode -- and if one becomes a staff writer on a successful series, one can write many episodes.
For a feature writer, one can write "spec" sceenplays -- that is you simply write an original screenplay and try to sell it. Having done that, it may be optioned -- that is, you get a small fee up front and you don't get the full fee unless the project is set up -- that is, they get the financing for actually making the movie. Or they may buy the movie up front, if the demand for the project is high enough.
You can also pitch the idea for a movie, without having written it, in which case you then get paid for writing it in a "step deal" -- so much for a treatment (a kind of detailed outline), so much for the first draft, second draft, polish.
One can also be hired for an "assignment" -- to adapt something from some other medium -- a book, a real-life story, a play. Whatever. And a similar deal to the above. You get paid in steps -- outline, first, draft, revision, polish.
Most producers are guild signatories and have to pay guild minimum, which is, for any movie budgeted above five million dollars, thats $76,000 for the screenplay.
In principle, that's all that they'd have to pay, even if the movie cost a hundred million dollars, but in practice, big budget movies want top-ranked screenwriters, and those guys pull in million-dollar plus fees or higher.
As for "royalties" -- most contracts include what are known as "net points" -- that's a percentage of "producer's gross." These are traditionally known as "monkey points" -- because the definition of net profits as defined in these contracts are so byzantine that, by these definitions, even wildly successful movies never reach profitability by these definitions, and so they never pay off.
Rarely -- and I mean virtually never -- a writer might get "gross points" -- a share of the money that comes in at the box office, which is the kind of profit participation that big stars get. But that almost never happens.
What does happen, on occasion, is that there can be production bonuses -- apart from what you get paid just for writing the movie, you get an additional sum if the movie actually gets made (something which happens only about one time in ten). You can also get profit bonuses -- so that if the movie reports certain box office returns in some public way -- say in Variety, you get a bonus, up to a certain amount.
Beyond that, writers will also get paid a certain percentage for things like airing of the movie on network and cable, DVD sales, and now, thanks to a hundred day strike, releases on the internet.
Working as a screenwriter is a very different way of making a living from writing novels. Novelists, for the most part, depend on actual sales of their work to the public for their income. What money they make up front are advances against those sales.
The primary relationship is "public/novelist."
But that's not the case with screenwriters and the public. You go up to the average person on the street, it's unlikely that he will know the name of a single screenwriter or TV writer, unless that person also happens to be a director (and maybe not even then).
What a novelist writes, he owns. He licenses limited rights for a limited time to the publisher.
What a screenwriter writes, even a spec script, he does not license, but sells. The producer buys all rights, and thus has the right to do with the underlying material whatever he wishes, including demanding whatever changes he wants, bringing in new writers, completely altering the direction of the script -- whatever he wants. Then the director may be hired and change it all again (and the director may have his "favorite writer, who he brings along to rewrite whatever script he happens to be directing). Then the star, if he's big enough, may come in, and do it all again (and the star may have his "favorite writer" that he'll bring in to do the rewrites that he wants done to make the script over the way he wants it done).
And all of those writers? They all get paid. And chances are, on a major Hollywood movie, they're all getting paid six figure sums for their contribution, such as it is. And it sounds like a lot of money, but the fact is, on movies like this, they'll never be spending money more *slowly* than they are during this period *before* pre-production, even though they may be spending five or six million dollars over a couple years to develop the script.
Because once they go into pre-production, and then production, they're going to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a *day.*
It all seems remarkably wasteful -- millions spent on scripts that aren't made. Millions spent on drafts that aren't used.
And it is. It is an industry that is remarkably conservative -- which means that it is very risk averse.
If they don't have something to hang their hats on -- a director, a star, some piece of underlying material -- there's a kind of "critical mass comfort level" that needs to be achieved before a movie happens.
And a screenplay is just the very beginning of that process, like the seed pearl around which that "comfort mass" might conceivable begin to coalesce. Maybe that seed pearl will attract a director, and then attract a star and then attract foreign financing -- oops the star dropped out -- sorry comfort level gone. Bam -- project falls apart.
And that happens -- that things apart -- far more often than that it succeeds.
But without the seed pearls, without the scripts, they have nothing to build on. So we keep writing, they keep buying, and we all keep hoping.
NMS