ANDY BOBROW: Welcome back to the trenches. We want to have a general discussion about money, because so many money issues in our career are unique. The way we get paid, the way we have to amortize our pay over months and often years, the one-sided time commitments in our contracts, free work, and on and on. There’s a lot here to clarify and discuss, so let’s just have a freeform discussion about how the money works. What are your biggest money issues and how do you deal with them?
ERIC TIPTON: Andy, can we contextualize this a bit first? I mean, yes, this is our business, and the way we get paid, how much we get paid, and for what work, is unique to our business, but the perception from a lot of non-writers – let’s say everyone from crew members to people not even in the entertainment industry – is that we’re all rich crybabies. I mean, yes, obviously, there are writers who make literal fortunes, but most writers don’t. And yet, in a world filled with people who work 40+ hour weeks, basically 50 weeks a year in a country where the average American makes about $1051 a week, it’s easy to think of someone taking home a check for $10k a week (which is, I believe, is approximately the weekly minimum for an ESE on a TV series), as “rich”. However, there are a lot of things that view doesn’t take into account. For instance, that TV writer likely isn’t working anything close to 50 weeks, might not even be working for 20, and has no idea when they might land their next gig, or how long they will have to stretch that seemingly enormous weekly check (and even THAT isn’t taking into account commissions paid out of that check and taxes, etc). The bigger thing though – for us – is this notion that we know we create value for the companies that pay us. We read about their earnings calls and their profits, too, and yet, increasingly, while this value is clearly recognized in the compensation of top actors, show creators, and show runners, it doesn’t seem to make it to the rank and file who are – and this is becoming old news now, I guess – finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a career. And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the various pay issues feature writers have to deal with. So what does “fair” look like?
CHAP TAYLOR: This is an enormously important issue and one that most people outside the business don’t grasp. It’s particularly relevant as we head into negotiations for a new contract, which many Guild members consider existential.
I’ve worked in both television and features, mostly features in the first half of my career, mostly television over the last five or six years. I’ve been in the writer’s room of a network series for one season and done a bunch of development. I’ve had a couple of movies made. Here’s what it looks like for me:
I’ve been a professional writer since 1997. For 22 of those 26 years, I made low-to-high six figures. In four of those years I made nothing. I have been very fortunate and probably rank in a fairly high percentile of working writers (who aren’t rich). But those four years with no income almost broke me. As Eric pointed out, it isn’t just the unpredictability of your income, it’s the fact that every single job might be your last. I’ve been paid to write or rewrite several dozen feature screenplays and television pilots, but the longer you stay in this business, the harder it gets. And over the course of my career, the business of being a working writer has changed dramatically. I spent the first half of my career booking Open Writing Assignments for studios. But studios today make fewer movies, so they develop fewer projects. They need far less writers. And after the 2008 strike, the “quote” system was unilaterally abolished by the studios, meaning every single job is a salary negotiation from scratch, regardless of what you may have been paid previously.
When you do get paid - in television or features - you are at the mercy of studio business affairs. As we’ve written in previous Substacks, just closing a deal doesn’t mean you will get your money. It takes forever to close a deal and then it takes an indeterminate amount of time to get paid, largely depending on how popular you are in the marketplace or how badly the studio needs the script. And the process of winning one of the few remaining OWA’s, or selling a TV pitch, will have involved months of free work for producers or studio executives. In television, as Eric pointed out, you may work for 10 or 20 weeks at a large weekly salary, but then you may be unemployed for months or years. And with the proliferation of mini-rooms and years-long delays between writing a season’s scripts and actually producing a series, you may go years with no new credits to attract attention in the marketplace. On top of all this, Guild members receive health insurance from the WGA so long as they meet a certain threshold of annual earnings. If you fall below that threshold - even if you are technically employed by a company but haven’t actually been paid - your family loses its health insurance.
To sum up my experience, being a working writer can mean lucrative paydays but those paydays are unpredictable, far fewer than they used to be, and require an increasing amount of free work to even compete. When you do find employment, those paydays have gotten smaller and slower. And finally, writers must pay commissions to agents, managers and lawyers on their income. Along with taxes, you can assume you will take home only half of what you manage to make.
Writing in the entertainment business has always been unpredictable and extremely competitive. There are more professional basketball players in the NBA than there are regularly-employed feature screenwriters. But if you did manage to get a foothold in the industry in previous years, there was at least a potential career path that might allow you to support a middle-class family. That path has almost disappeared. Preserving even the possibility of a career is what we are about to negotiate with the AMPTP.
FLINT WAINESS: In terms of fair pay, let’s start with the obvious: winner-take-all capitalism is a disaster. As Ari Emanuel said the other day, “When they say they’re going to cut back…they’re not not paying Keanu Reeves or Mark Wahlberg or Matt Damon or Ben Affleck or Marty Scorsese…they have to figure out their cost-savings someplace else.” The people running the companies that pay us get exorbitant paydays by serving one master above all else: Wall Street. They’re not all the same - some care about the arts, some don’t - but ultimately the CEOs appear to see their jobs as propping up the quarterly share price. And how are they going to do that? By making smarter choices? Taking chances on interesting projects? Finding the next surprise hit from a first time creator? Of course not! Netflix is still going to make that 130 million Nancy Meyers movie. The Russo brothers are still going to get a blank check. Reese is still going to get whatever she wants. A small group of writers, some of whom are truly phoning it in, are still going to get paid hundreds of thousands for weekly punch ups while the originator of the script gets paid that much for writing the whole damn thing. So it’s gotta come from you and me!
I don’t think this is a smart way to run a business in the longer term, but I don’t think the companies are dying to hear my thoughts about this.
AB: They don’t call me for advice either. So I guess you’re saying whenever we talk about “fair pay,” we’re talking about a distorted system.
FW: Right, so, let me drill down a bit on the question of how to define fair pay in television (features is a whole different kind of sense).
In TV the lowest entry level position is staff writer. These are extremely hard jobs to get so the pay should be decent…and guess what? It is! Minimum for staff writers is over five grand a week, the next rung up is over seven grand a week. These are really solid wages for an entry level position. Try telling a writer’s assistant or a production assistant that what lower level writers get is not a fair wage and I think they’ll laugh you out the door.
HOWEVER, these jobs are harder to get than they ever have been, and often when you get them they’re now for 10 to 20 week rooms on short order shows. There are tremendous creative benefits to short order shows, but even a fair weekly wage doesn’t equal a sustainable living if you’re only getting one job a year on a short order show. So is that a fair pay issue, or a different issue? Because there are people getting three of these jobs a year, and they’re thriving. It’s just a small pool.
It’s actually mid and non A list upper levels that are getting squeezed in the world of streaming. You can be running a show and making not that much more than your story editor. If you’re a writing team, you can be making less. Of course, the most in demand creators and showrunners are still getting big overalls and making a killing, but even they aren’t getting profit participation or residuals that match the value they’re bringing to the companies.
So what do you do when the companies are willing to give so much to a few, even if it makes little business sense, while squeezing everyone else? When the leads of many streaming shows are getting 500K and above per episode IN THE FIRST SEASON, before it’s clear if anyone even wants to watch this show, while most working writers will be lucky to see that salary over the course of two years?
Do we focus on the areas where writer pay has been gutted - residuals, profit participation, etc. - or try to Rube Goldberg this whole crazy system back to life through a series of asks focusing on lower level minimums in an attempt to also raise overscale minimums?
AB: I totally agree, with one little quibble about staff jobs being harder to get, because statistically they’re easier. Or at least there are way more of them than there were before the streaming wars. I’ll pull up my favorite chart I made by going through the WGA Annual Reports that shows the number of writers who reported earnings in a given year.
So that’s essentially a report on the number of gigs in every year, and it looks almost like those hockey stick charts about global warming. And I’ve tried to figure this out with other writers because you’re right in the sense that jobs feel harder to get. I think there are a few possible explanations for that.
One is that no one ever remembers the ‘good old days' accurately. Ten, twenty years ago, ninety percent of working writers were white guys from elite universities, or at least decent suburbs. So if you weren’t in the demo, you probably wouldn’t have even moved to Los Angeles 20 years ago. Which brings up the next possible explanation, which is, to whatever extent it might be harder to get a staff job now, I think it’s in large part because the application pool has grown right alongside the job pool. And I think the third big explanation is I hear so many people comparing the plight of someone trying to get in today against the plight of someone who did get in in the good old days. You meet someone (like me) who was working 20 years ago and you think “well that guy’s entry was so much easier than mine,” when the reality is, yeah because 20 years ago I won a lottery. I came up in improv classes with 100 equally qualified people who didn’t get the break I got. So you can’t tell those people that writing jobs used to be easier to get. It would be insulting to them and not accurate. Also believe me, it’s not lost on me how my demographics helped my odds, but luck was still a big factor. Probably the most accurate thing you can say is that the prize in the lottery used to be bigger. I think that’s what everyone is feeling. If I won a SuperLotto Plus, today’s writers are winning scratchers. Lots of winners getting five bucks.
One other thing I’ll say about that chart is I wish we all had more information like this, and that’s something I would like to see our union to do a better job of finding and sharing, I mean after the negotiation of course. We should all know how many writers work more than one job in a year, and if it’s gone up; How many shows are in production? How many total hours of scripted content get made every year? How many episodes total? How many pilot scripts get sold every year? What percentage go to series? What’s the average room size? How many writers wash out after one job? What does the age-out process look like? We owe ourselves a clearer picture of what this career actually looks like. Every conversation we have about what’s happening in the business, every news story I hear about what’s happening in the business, all of them are really about what it seems like is happening in the business. And there’s no reason for that. On an Ankler podcast recently, they quoted some writer saying, “In the past, someone at my level would have been given an overall deal.” I yelled in my car, “that’s a feeling!” We’re all comparing our careers to assumptions about careers. That’s my rant.
FW: Yeah, the lack of data makes me nuts. You’re right to correct me, though, there are MORE lower level jobs than there have ever been, though the current contraction likely changes that for awhile. Maybe it’s just because there are so many more people competing for those jobs that people feel like it’s tougher.
ET: That chart makes me feel the need to say something that will be ugly and unpopular – and no, Flint, it isn’t coming for you or your ideas (which you know I LIVE to do) – because I think you’re spot on. No, the chart says something else to me and it isn’t about odds or who is getting shots and who isn’t. What it tells me is that this number of working writers isn’t any more sustainable than the drunken sailor spending of Peak TV (Netflix in ‘22 anyone?). The number of working writers – yes, largely in TV (movies have always been a lottery ticket unless you get to be one of those very few top in-demand screenwriters Chap mentioned). The number of working TV writers grew significantly as the number of produced shows increased. If we are in a contraction in terms of content spend by the companies, that will mean fewer shows produced and that will immediately mean fewer writing jobs for fewer writers. And mandating that content spend is NOT something the WGA can do via the MBA or any other mechanism. That comes down to corporate strategy and each company will do what they do regardless of our wishes and hopes and dreams. It sucks but I don’t see any way around that. I think, in the next couple of years, unless something starts trending in the other direction again, we’re going to end up back in that place on the chart from roughly the late-’90s to the mid-’00s where the number of working writers was hovering a bit below 5000. The people who ARE working will be paid well – or at least “fairly” based on the MBA and perhaps, at least among the lucky writers who are able to hang in there and remain part of that 5000, a functioning middle-class rank-and-file will return – along with the relative stability that comes with that – rather than the sort of “Musical chairs/gold rush” mentality that accompanied Peak TV.
Okay – and now that I’ve addressed what might be the giant elephant not only in the room but hanging over the upcoming negotiations and the future of our profession – I’d like to get back to the “fair pay” of it all, but not in terms of how much we make relative to how much we USED to make. Instead, I want to touch again on something Chap mentioned, which applies to both features and TV (at least to TV development which is the only TV I’ve done) – and that is to talk about just how much work we’re expected to do for the money we are paid. If it’s an outline and a draft of a feature or a pilot, those steps are spelled out in our contract, but there is a LOT more that goes into it – work we are expected to do like good soldiers without complaint both upfront to get the job in the first place, and then once we have it to get the outline or the script or whatever, to a place where various parties are happy with it before triggering that next payment or step. Frequently these things happen to the point of becoming straight-up abuse – not just of the system, but of the writer, their time, their ideas. How does “fair pay” factor into that?
AB: I think (and hope) the contraction isn’t that bad. I’m hoping the number settles somewhere in the mid or upper 5000s. Once again, it would be so great to correlate the number of jobs to the number of shows and movies, because I bet someone could get pretty accurate with a prediction if we had that info.
FW: Yeah, I think this contraction is going to be bad, and if there’s a strike hoo-boy I don’t know where things land on the other side. To switch gears, though, another fair pay issue that affects both feature writers and creators (and I think the WGA has a good proposal on this) is free work. Specifically free work relating to producer passes. You sold something. Congratulations! You’re one of the lucky ones! But to get paid for your steps you have to get the producer to agree to turn in your work. Sometimes that’s two drafts, sometimes that’s nine drafts. Sometimes you don’t mind - you love your producer and you think they’re pushing you to make it better and get a better chance at a green-light - and sometimes they’re destroying your life/vision/chances of both getting it green-lit and getting paid.
Tiffany Yeager (Romigh): The thing that I can’t get around with regard to something like free feature script passes is: in a world where the people lining up for your job will write for free, how do you say “no” and still have faith that you’ll have work? My self esteem has hardly been strong enough as a writer to put my foot down. And even when it has, and I have, and I’ve gotten paid to write a draft that they wanted me to do for free — now all the subsequent changes are expected for nada. A draft I demanded to get paid for now has a hot actor attached. So how do I see it through and honor the work, while honoring myself?
AB: That’s a great question, because this is a big game and you have to have a sense of when and how to make yourself difficult. There’s this fear that if you demand money, they might just lose interest. It’s such a strange market because there often is wisdom in waiting. We’re all small business owners basically, and we’re talking to producers because we think they can do something for us, and they think we can do something for them. And until you know which way the value is flowing, you don’t want to stop this organic process from playing out. I have this animated pitch I’ve been working on - I just went back and checked - I originally pitched it to an exec at a production company 3 years ago. We went through some back and forth, pitched it to her bosses, did another couple rounds with them, then pitched it to their studio. They “snapped it up” with an if-come deal (this is funny if you know what an if-come deal is). And we decided to find a designer to do characters. That took several months to play out and get approvals. Then just as we were about to pitch it, the streamers all hit the breaks, so we postponed our pitches and are just now starting to ramp it up again. Three years and counting. And the thing is, for me, I’m happy to play this game with them. I have a day job on a Fox show (thank God), and a feature project (thank God). So only because of that, I get to indulge this 3-year process. My gut doesn’t often let me down, and my gut tells me I’m playing this the right way. But I can only afford to do that because I have other income. If I were just starting out, I would have to have a very indulgent spouse, or family wealth, or I would still be doing my copywriting job and tv would be my hobby.
MARC GUGGENHEIM: Sadly, I think that’s exactly right. Personally – and I say this as a white man with all the privilege that entails – I’ve always taken things on a case-by-case basis. I consider a certain amount of free work to be just good business. The ugly truth is that in features, not every round of notes is tantamount – at least, in my estimation – to a full rewrite that triggers a contractual step. And I leave it to my own judgment as to which is which.
To put this another way, let’s say you’re fortunate enough to actually make a multi-step feature deal. Let’s further say that said deal includes a first draft, a set of revisions, and a polish. What constitutes enough of a “revision” to trigger that second step? For that matter, what if, after that, they want bigger changes than those which would constitute a “polish”?
To further complicate matters, say that you’re writing your script for an independent studio. You don’t want to get taken advantage of – but on the other hand, you don’t want to charge them more than they can reasonably afford. Because if you do, there’s a chance your movie won’t get made.
And on the opposite end of the spectrum is what I’ve seen happening in television. In TV, there aren’t any contractual steps once you reach the script stage. Which, in reality, means that every new draft – and lord knows there are a lot of them – represents the definition of free work. I’d say that’s something that needs to be addressed in the upcoming MBA negotiation, but we have other fish to fry. (Which is a lot like saying that we can’t treat the brain tumor because we’re focused on the gunshot to the chest.)
SARAH CONRADT: One of the toughest things for me to get used to on this odyssey (other than how ridiculously hard it is to actually get a film made) has been the pay aspect. Not only the amount of unpaid work that’s required every step of the way, but the whole payment structure and timing, too. I wish I’d known a bit more going into it, so I could’ve prepared myself for the disappointing shock of not seeing the money that’s in my contract for months, or even years. And sometimes, never seeing it at all.
I’m sort of repeating what others have said here in places, but the volatile nature of feature writing pay is just so flummoxing, maybe things beg to be stated more than once.
Other than three spec projects, my paying gigs have all been OWAs that came to me after producers and/or studios had read me or met with me. Most of them required months of unpaid pitching and story-breaking to get to the offer, and then a month or more to sign the deal. When you win the job and the deal closes, all the time spent up to that point usually feels worth it. When you don’t, you’re faced with having just invested months of your writing life on something you’ll never get paid for. Then you have to start all over again on something else. That’s been a tough pill to swallow. At least once if not twice, I’ve gone a whole year pitching on half a dozen or more OWAs to ultimately not land a single one. And this is usually after incorporating notes. But I’m not sure there’s any way around that. Pitching is an interview process. Does any industry pay interviewees? Actually, I believe engineers sometimes get paid to prepare in-depth proposals…
One thing I really didn’t anticipate was all the negotiating that happens even after the contract has been signed. I even once had to negotiate to hold onto at least part of the money on a “guaranteed” second step in my contract because after the first draft, the studio head changed and no longer wanted to pursue the project and their BA wanted to get out of paying me for a draft they didn’t want. Even though my contract stated they had to pay me regardless of whether they had me write the draft, they pushed me to accept less than the full amount. Since I needed health insurance for my family and the studio was pressing me to tell them the minimum I would accept (I repeat: the full amount was GUARANTEED in my contract!), I asked for at least enough to secure another year of health insurance. And that’s what they paid me, and not one penny more. Literally down to the dollar. So I only received a percentage of my “guaranteed” pay. That one still stumps me.
I’ve now been pressed to write more than one unpaid production polish on more than one flat broke production. I obliged because, ultimately, I want that movie to be everything I imagined and if I don’t do it, somebody else is going to, and they most likely won’t be a writer. So that’s a lot of what drives the free writing for me. I want a say in the final outcome.
But maybe the most rattling demonstration of a never-count-your-chickens-before-they-hatch scenario was when I was asked to defer my credit bonus—again, something that was guaranteed in my contract. Something I was counting on, with a daughter in college and the tuition bill looming. I was put on the spot, and this was a week before filming began. I was told “everyone is deferring” and the pressure was significant. If I didn’t defer, they weren’t going to be able to make this movie and so on. I’ll be honest, there were some desperate tears shed over that one. But fortunately, it wasn’t entirely true. Because they did make the movie and thankfully, they backed off on having me defer. However, almost a year later, I’m still waiting for that credit bonus to make its way into my bank account. According to WGA terms, I should’ve seen it months ago.
Here’s what I feel strongly about—I think all OWA contracts should include a guaranteed treatment step. As many projects as I’ve been hired to write, I can’t think of a single one that was commenced to first draft until I had provided at least some kind of outline or treatment based on producer or studio brainstorming or notes off my pitch. And all but once, I’ve had to provide those for free because I was told by someone in my circle that “nobody gets paid for treatments”. That’s not true. And since sometimes treatments take months, that’s months of free work on what is supposed to be a paying job.
I also believe producers’ passes are a given, but they can go on longer than is fair. Because you don’t get paid for delivery of the draft until it’s been officially handed off to the studio. At some point, every writer has to draw her own line—but nobody wants to be considered “difficult”. I had a Guild department head tell me once that I should go with my gut on free-writes—do them if I think they improve the script, and if it makes me more of a team player. I was surprised by that… I thought he would’ve told me that free-writes are against Guild policy, period. But honestly, everything falls into a grey area. And I do want those scripts to be the best they can be so, for me, I start sounding the alarm to my reps only when I feel the producer notes are no longer improving the script or the notes are coming in from too many different sources and contradicting one another. Fortunately, I haven’t had to sound that alarm too often. But it was hard to get used to the expectation of free-writes.
If I’m being honest, I feel we as a guild could do a better job of managing expectations by pointing out to members that there are grey areas. Rules will be bent, even under signed contract, and even if you shouldn’t have to, you’re going to have to fight sometimes for the pay you were promised. If I’d known I wasn’t alone in having to do this, that everyone goes through it, oh the stress that would have relieved! And sometimes, you bend because it’s the best thing for the project. Sometimes, you refuse to bend because your livelihood (and your kids’ college tuition and your mortgage…) depends on that income right now as promised. But nothing is writ in stone. Weigh it all.
And I just have to mention this last thing about fair pay… Loan Outs (or S Corps) are the only way for a feature writer. This should be broadcast far and wide. The first half-dozen or so years I was a working screenwriter, I didn’t have a Loan Out company. I didn’t even know what a Loan Out was. I was hired by the studios on OWAs as an individual. This was disastrous! Because when you don’t have a Loan Out and you receive your commencement pay for the first draft of the script (or your delivery pay or your second draft commencement or delivery, etc), you go on studio payroll as a “salaried employee” and they tax the hell out of that single payment as if it’s your biweekly pay. I’m not kidding when I say the taxes they withheld were bigger than the check I received! My reps got their full percentage of the total amount, but I would end up with a check for about 1/3 of what I was actually owed because payroll had taken the taxes out like I was making that amount x26 weeks (every 2 weeks for a year). I wish! More than once, my check was about the same amount as my reps’ checks. We went round and round on this for those years, calling BA and writing letters and calling the guild, and nothing could be done about it. My reps had never seen this happen because all their clients had always had Loan Outs. So I would have to wait until the following April to file my taxes, and then in June, I’d receive a huge refund check from the IRS for all the erroneously withheld “taxes”, long past when that tuition bill was due. If I started the job early in the year, like January, and was paid my commencement check, that meant I would have to wait almost a year and a half to get the total commencement amount I was owed. That was painful. So as complicated as it is to run an S Corp Loan Out, it’s crucial.
CT: I guess the takeaway (for me) is that there is no longer any such thing as “fair pay” for most writers. You get exactly as much as your employer is willing to pay, when they are willing to pay it. This will be dictated by any number of factors beyond your control, but mostly by how little corporations think they can get away with paying, regardless of effort, value created or contractual language.
Screenwriting has always been extremely competitive. It has always been subject to strange quirks unique to the entertainment business. But over the last few years, with the exception of a handful of names everyone knows, writers have come to be treated as disposable. The people who run this business no longer care what used to constitute acceptable behavior in the entertainment community. If you don’t like it, they assume they can get someone else who will. And in that environment, the only real way a writer can get what they think is fair is to control their own material. Or just say no.
AB: That’s a perfect wrap-up, so I’ll just say thank you all for joining. If you’re reading this and would like to participate in any future discussions, just respond to this email, or write us at writerscollectivesubstack@gmail.com.