“I have failed so you are penalized.”

I had several long phone calls this week being leant on by a producer who wanted to pay far less than the going rate for a script by an established client because the producer had used much of his development budget on another writer who failed to deliver a usable script.

Most reasonably experienced writers get hired from time to time to fix failing scripts or to do a page-one rewrite. In some cases there is underlying material and the new writer does not even read the previous draft. If it is an adaptation then there will obviously be some similarities between the two scripts.

Producers tend to use this argument to scale down the fee to the new writer, after all, much of their previously planned budget has been spent, so clearly it is reasonable for the new writer to do the job for far less than the writer who failed? Not.

There are times that writers have to say No. The fee should be based on a percentage of the budget whether it is the first or second go at the script. The percentage should be based on the track record of the writer, perhaps shaved down marginally.

What sadly no longer surprises me is that producers seem to believe that they are entitled to get work done for a lower than normal rate after they (the producer) have failed: they selected the first writer, briefed the writer, presumably provided notes to the writer (one wonders how good or not those notes were and who was responsible for hiring the person who provided the notes)?

When do critics blame producers when they rubbish a film? Not often. But producers should take some responsibility for not coming up with a viable script the first time round and when they hire another writer to get them out of a hole, they should not penalize that writer by offering them less than their going rate.

Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted

Had our first industry screening for INNOCENT (www.innocentthefilm.com), the low-budget film I executive produced, at Twentieth Century Fox today. It was more nerve-wracking than the cast and crew screening at the Odeon in Croydon, because there were serious industry people, journalists and potential investors there.

It went off very well and made me realise how important the big screen is to enhance the viewing experience. It also made me realise that planning the marketing of the film, the festival routes, the sales agent and distributor expectations, the TV sales route, the journalist angles, are all something we should have done well before we shot the film.

The fact that we didn’t but the screening went really well, has made me a happy executive producer because our band of enthusiasts is so committed to the film that we are carrying others with us. The NSPCC and Childline, as well as other childrens’ charities (Act Against Bullying for example) seem to be behind us. We – of course – are definitely behind them and will support them in whatever way we can.

Can a film about bullying have an effect on bullying? I believe that it can and that we will. We got the dramatic interplay of the story right – adults bully each other and also bully children who bully other children. The music in the film is reaching out to teenagers: they seem to respond so well to it. That is something else we got right.

Now to pin down the sales agents, newspapers, investors. The real work starts now!

A client of ours, Ted Allbeury, sadly passed away some years ago, said once that “Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted”. He was a counter-espionage officer. It applies so much to producers before they start shooting the film.

Selling script or shooting script?

Yesterday I had one of those conversations with a client and then with his producer that made me wonder about the manipulative nature of what agents do. Not necessarily bad manipulation, more like the golden oil that ensures that your car starts smoothly.

The writer is anxious the producer won’t understand what he is trying to do in this draft of the script. The producer has issues with the draft. I sit somewhere between them.

I recommend that we get two reports on the script, one from an established script analyst, the other from someone with some knowledge of the history and geography of the location.

I propose that when we have these reports we can all be more dispassionate about deciding how to go forward. What I want is not a script ready to shoot, but a script that will attract a director and start attracting finance. Do they want the same?

My guess is that this is not the script that the writer wants to be shot.

So is there a useful distinction to be made between a selling script and a shooting script? I think so: after all until the director has had some input we cannot have a shooting script. Next week will be interesting.

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.

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!