Writing for money or for yourself?

I am doing the research for a book on writing for television and came across this quote (in a tweet): “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." Cyril Connolly

I re-tweeted, commenting that what Cyril Connolly is saying is rubbish. It is simply not true for 95% of the thousands of writers I have met over the last 40 years. It is cute but makes assumptions about the purity of being a writer that suggests pure self-indulgence.

There are some writers who genuinely do not care if no one ever reads what they write. There are mss and scripts in bottom drawers that stay there. There may even be some masterpieces in those drawers, since writers are often not the best judges of what they have written.

The book on writing for television, which I am co-writing with Christopher Walker with whom I set up the MA in Television Scriptwriting at De Montfort University (check it out http://bit.ly/4BTnVd), is intended to be the best guide to actually getting to work for TV producers and broadcasters.

Why set up a post-grad course focused only on television? Because that is the only place where writers can more easily get hired, earn money and (perhaps as important) get the experience of going through the development process so that they can see how what they imagined ends up on screen, as it passes through many hands, from casting directors to script editors, producers, directors, actors and film or tape editors.

This is the coal-face, this is where the real learning is done, rather than in academia where all too often the teaching is done by academics not very experienced practitioners. And in far too many universities the industry guest lecturers are to few and far between.

I have no problem with writers writing for their bottom drawer. But most are desperate to be read and watched; most have something important to say and most want to earn a living from their writing. Quotes like the Connolly one need to be balanced by the famous Samuel Johnson quote "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

Neither are 100% correct, but the Johnson quote is far closer to the reality than the Connolly one.

If you can’t join them, beat them.

The Writers’ Guild blog has an interesting and important debate over the assertion that the BBC Writers’ Academy favours its trainees so that other writers get less of a chance. This blog is partly my response to the debate in the WGGB blog.

http://writersguild.blogspot.com/2009/12/bbc-writersroom-update.html

A couple of years ago I interviewed John Yorke, BBC TV series supremo:

http://www.twelvepoint.com/files/Interview%20John%20Yorke_Julian%20Friedmann.pdf

It was clear then that the Academy made sense from the BBC’s point of view: they would get a better-trained cadre of writers, who would deliver more usable scripts in less time, thus saving time and money.

Other writers (such as my own clients) would probably get less access to slots even though some of them have had many years of diligent service in writing dozens and dozens of soap and series scripts.

There cannot be enough to go round for everyone. As a result of the increase in degree courses for scriptwriters over the last 5 years there are also now many more writers with some experience (even if it is spec academic scripts) trying for the decreasing number of slots. Inevitably there will be fewer writers getting a piece of the pie.

On top of that the BBC like the other broadcasters are having to cut the budgets of their shows. This is a reality they would be negligent not to deal with. Using equally talented writers who have been trained in the in-house hothouse of the Academy is pragmatic and sensible even though the Beeb admits a kind of sadness that they can’t please all the people all the time. But I don't see anyone protesting at the ever-increasing new degree courses in scriptwriting that will turn out hungry and ambitious writers also after those slots.

The key - which I have encouraged through the pages of TwelvePoint.com and as an agent is to be flexible and adapt. There have been several long-running series and soaps cancelled in the last 4 or 5 years: between 500 and 600 episodes have disappeared; add that to the Academy writers and the new graduates and any scriptwriter who assumes that they can behave as they have in the past will end up probably out in the cold for a lot of the time.

Writers have to be more proactive; they have to start partially being like producers; they have to write saleable and commercial spec scripts; they have to consider other formats like novels - I had amazing feedback in Cheltenham on a session about novel writing for scriptwriters.

They way we were has gone. Like the ice shelf at the North Pole. As an agent I have had to make changes to the way I work to deal with the changing business in which we all work: so writers need to make changes. If you are a storyteller and want to earn a living by telling stories then tell stories for people who want to buy them in the format that they want to buy them. Don’t worry so much about the format. I would not recommend novelists start writing scripts (without training and experience); but most scriptwriters I talk to have read more novels than they have read scripts. You see where I am going with this. Watch out for my Cheltenham talk as a forthcoming article in TwelvePoint.

Just when you thought it was safe to go into the water…..

After all the stress of travelling, life returns to normal and problems that seem to be a hill of beans suddenly loom too large to forget them when I leave the office. Today’s was dealing with a producer (producer 1) who commissioned an adaptation, paid the commencement and (eventually) delivery of the first draft, only for us to discover that he didn’t have the rights to the underlying book.

He had warranted in the writer’s agreement that he did have those rights. After lots of discussion with various parties including producer 1 we were no further. He claimed to have an understanding with producer 2 who did own the rights, but producer 2 wouldn’t accept his proposed deal. Unsurprisingly producer 2 said producer 1 wouldn’t accept his deal. Stalemate.

One lawyer came up with the advice that the writer’s agreement wasn’t valid because the writer would not have signed the agreement if she had known that producer 1 did not own the underlying rights, and that clearly fraudulent misrepresentation had taken place.

Another lawyer said that the assignment of rights was actually valid but because of the misrepresentation there was a legal remedy to get the rights back and we could apply to the courts to enforce this.

Before doing that, however, we should send a lawyer’s letter to producer 1 pointing out that he was in breach of his warranties, that there was misrepresentation, that is he agreed to assign the rights back to the writer she would agree that he would be paid back what she had been paid (less the legal fees incurred). If we went to court we would win and producer 1 would end up paying all our costs as well as his own.

Producer 1 would have to warrant that the rights that had been assigned to him were unencumbered so that he could re-assign them, that he had not used them as a charge with his bank or brother-in-law, because without proper re-assignment back of the rights my client could not assign them freely to anyone else, which she dearly wants to do as producer 2 wants to make the movie.

Watch this space. It is good to be back!

What is cinema for?

The suitcase and passport are packed away, I have no travel plans for the rest of the year. This is not really much of an achievement since we are nearly one week into December. But there are no trips planned for January (yet) either. After the Frankfurt Bookfair, the Cheltenham Screenwriters’ Festival, The World Conference of Scriptwriters in Athens, a terrific wedding in the north-west of England and the Black Nights’ Film Festival in Tallinn, all in about 6 weeks, home does not seem to be where you lay your hat.

This is further confounded by December being a short month. We always close the office for a couple of weeks and already demob fever is starting to surface as all the jobs that have been put off for ages jostle on the inevitable list.

The first of these is always reading articles in the papers that I rarely have time for. So I started this weekend to get into training. I wanted to catch up on what has been happening in French cinema as I am due to meet Philippe Carcassonne soon. So I read the interview by Jason Solomons with Jacques Audiard with great interest.

It was full of inspiring thoughts, ones that are repeated by many great teachers but so seldom seen in spec scripts one is forced to wonder what those writing the scripts read or study. “…cinema is all about…monumental figures, icons, male or female, people who are emblematic of their time, who are in their time and who define their time.”

The genius of great writing, in whatever format – film, television, the stage or novel – is that it enables us to experience that which we might not otherwise. Solomons describes Audiard’s films as “…intimate studies that draw the viewer in to the characters until we’re thinking like them, until we almost inhabit their skins, no matter how morally suspect their actions or intentions may be.”

Macbeth immediately comes to mind, as does Lady Macbeth. Audiard says: “The audience must fly with me, must go where the images take them. The film, as all good films should be, is rooted in realism, but you must not ignore the poetry, the fiction, the story. Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.”

No wonder films are hard to write.

The article ends up quoting Audiard again: “…every time you make a film these days, it’s a political gesture, like it or not. Every director must be conscious of the power of this tool we’re using. It’s a very shocking tool, cinema, and you have to ask yourself what you’re using it for.”

I ended last week attending a gathering organized by Amnesty International, focused on stopping the abuses of human rights by corporations. There was an inspiring discussion of real cases fought and won and even a quiet discussion about running a competition for scripts that focus on Amnesty campaigns. “Save the human” is one I am sure Audiard would agree with.

Polish or rewrite?

Sorry the blog has been irregular: the last two of five trips in as many weeks are coming up, then I am around for a while. But interesting things keep happening, the latest of which is repeated every few months as a negotiation takes place or a producer tries to vary elements of a contract after the contract has been signed.

I don’t mean tearing it up, just pushing into an area of semantic ambiguity. This happens when there is no clear definition of the difference between a rewrite and a polish. One is bigger than the other. But rarely is there wording that clearly differentiates one from the other.

What happens when the writer shows say the first Act to the producer and director and they provide notes while the writer is still writing the first draft? In this case it made sense for some of the rewrite to be done before the Second Act. So the writer did it.

When the final pages of the first draft was delivered they were well received and the response included the words (more of less) that perhaps there could be some tidying up prior to the rewrite.

This raised an interesting scenario. If a writer writes such a good first draft that very little work is needed for the ‘rewrite’, so little that it is a matter of a day or two, ie much more like a polish? Should writers perhaps deliberately leave in aspects of the script so that the rewrite is substantial and necessary?

In the end the producer behaved perfectly and even though the notes for the rewrite have still to be delivered, they asked for the rewrite invoice to be sent since some of the rewrite had already been done.