Why does everything take for-fucking-ever these days?

Closing deals, buying projects, doing business... seems like we're in a bizarro world where no one is in a hurry to do anything anymore.

ANDY BOBROW: Welcome to the blogcast. This week, it’s about time we talked about time. Specifically, how little the studios respect our time. Have you guys noticed that it’s now taking far longer to close deals and get paid? Let’s start with horror stories, maybe get into why we think it’s changed so dramatically, and how to address it.

ERIC TIPTON: The companies have never respected our time. While I think they all understand that they really do need us, they wish they didn’t and are constantly looking for ways to edge us out and the time thing is just one way that manifests. I do think the increase in the amount of time it takes to close deals and get paid is a fairly recent development. 

When I started in features back in the 90s, the norm seemed to be around ninety days to formally close what were frequently two-step deals. Signing was immediately followed by official commencement, at which point Guild rules gave the companies something like one normal pay period to get you your first check, so figure two additional weeks. 

Now it is ridiculous. Now the norm seems to be about six months and can go far longer. But it’s not just the length of time a deal takes. It’s also the amount of work we do to reach the point where we can get the opportunity to make a deal in the first place. 

The worst I’ve personally had it involved a book that was brought to me by a friend who was also the manager of a very well-liked and very well-known actor who had been in supporting roles on major series for a million years but had never carried his own show. This actor and his manager wanted to change this and this book was their chance. 

I really loved the book and had always been a huge fan of the actor, who was also just an all-around great guy, and amazing to work with. He was the perfect partner to bring the character from the book to life. It really seemed like a dream project. 

So, the three of us worked up a take and shopped it. And this is the normal part, right? We ALL do some version of this on spec to land a big POD or what have you, so technically, this doesn’t even count, but it was still two or three months worth of work.

When the pitch was ready, we took a bunch of meetings all over town and landed it at the POD of a massive star who wasn’t going to act in the show, but who also had a strong track record as a producer. Their home studio was eager to buy for them. It had all the hallmarks of being a slam-dunk project.

With the POD, we dug back into the pitch, which was now shaping up to be a thirty minute dramedy although we had started out as a one-hour thriller with some humor. Because I’m an hour drama guy who really doesn’t do “funny”, I partnered up with a comedy writer to inject the right amount of levity. All of those changes took about a year, and they were all still on spec at that point. 

We took the pitch to the POD’s home studio and quickly got an offer – which was a great feeling. We – including the POD – really thought this was going to be a great, even potentially groundbreaking show and we were on our way.

Unfortunately, by this point, Covid was in full-swing. Production had shut down. Companies suddenly found themselves with a bunch of unproducable material from the current season and no idea when things would ramp up again. Now, the POD obviously already had a deal, but my co-writer and I, the lead actor and his manager – who having originated the project were both EPs, and the author of the book – also customarily an EP – did not. 

And so, because all of those deals were tied together – if one fell apart, they all would fall apart – we entered into a very time consuming dance, complicated a bit more by what seemed to be the studio’s desire to treat the author of the book as basically an unknown first-timer when in reality, not only was this not his first book but, he had actually been a showrunner in the 90s and knew exactly what he should be getting as an EP so, he very correctly put up a fight to get what he deserved.

It’s bad, I know, but I always tend to think the worst of BA attorneys when it comes to writer deals, and this delay was getting so bad I had convinced myself they were slow-walking us maybe in hopes we’d pull the plug and walk away. I get that’s just a writer insecurity on my part, but I repeatedly asked my reps what was taking so long. The answers I got covered everything from the complexities of the multiple deals in play, the workload of the studio’s BA lawyers who, thanks to recent acquisitions and staffing consolidations, were now handling a huge number of deals across multiple entities, burnout, exhaustion from Covid lockdowns and WFH, the re-examination by some of their life priorities and the classic, “They’re just slow.”

AB: Yeah until now I hadn’t really considered how all the additional players adds to the wait. My first few pilot contracts were just me and a studio. Then it was me and a POD and a studio, but even those things aren’t terribly complicated compared to when there are actor/producers attached. Not to mention your manager if they produce.

ET: The punchline here is that it took about eight months to close the deal. Because of timing, the vagaries of Hollywood, and Covid, it was eight months during which I wasn’t getting paid on anything else. It was my first deal since the ATA action. 

We had been told throughout the process that it was going to be an expensive show – lots of action, lots of locations, big names. I can’t be certain the cost was the reason, but, between that, the continuation of the production pause caused by Covid, and the resulting slowdown in buying new shows in general across the board, we ended up pitching to a single streamer. 

They took two weeks to pass. The studio pulled the plug, and then ghosted us. That happened a year ago this month. I’ve still never been told it’s officially dead. I guess it is still possible it could come back to life at some point, but I’m not holding my breath.

Worst of all, despite our reps’ best efforts to get us a guarantee, the studio refused and everything was ultimately if/come. So, between the time spent developing our initial take, the added development with the POD, and the eight-ish months it took to close our various deals, we essentially put in TWO YEARS of work and stress… for free.  

SARAH CONRADT: I can sure relate. And while I’m incredibly frustrated for you, Eric - selfishly, I’m glad I’m not alone in spending an inordinate amount of unpaid time on projects that promised pay. I have many similar delayed-pay/zero-pay stories.

One at the top of the list happened with a major streamer who picked up my script in turnaround from a major studio in 2019. At the time, I was especially hungry and it was a huge gift to know this project was getting another life. The studio made it easy by keeping the whole deal simple and straight-forward, no added costs or markup. I believe the streamer only had to pay what the studio had paid me plus pension and health fringes in order to acquire the project, which was great. But man, did the transfer of ownership ever get bogged down in the streamer’s BA. Then the producers’ deals. So bogged down, it took a year and a half for them to even make me an offer. By this time, I wasn’t just hungry, I was starving.  

The process dragged on, and took so long, that in that time, one of my agents moved on to another agency, and ultimately and reluctantly, so did I—since all this was happening during the WGA agency action. 

Finally, two years from initial interest, the offer came in from the streamer and we made my deal. Thankfully, it was a fair two-step offer so it wasn’t complex, but it was so long coming, I now had other writing obligations on my plate. I managed to juggle, but here’s the ironic part—since it took so long to get the deal in place and get me writing, in that time the streamer’s mandate changed and the division that had been shepherding my project suddenly had to move on to other genres. So I never even got to write my guaranteed second step. All in all, 3 years total, and no film to show for it.

AB: I think that last part, where the ground shifts in the middle of the project, those are way more common in the last 5 years or so. I had an animated pitch, producers and a studio, and we had dates scheduled to go selling. A week before sales week, the big shakeup at Netflix happened. My manager said “Yeah right now I wouldn’t even know who to call over there.” And while we were waiting for that situation to sort itself out, the development team at the studio were let go. In that sense, we’re all living in a literal and figurative earthquake zone right now, hopefully at least the figurative earthquakes will subside.

SC: Ah yes, that Netflix shakeup. One of my specs was set up there with director attached and I’d done the first rewrite, then my exec was gone on a 6-month leave while we waited—and waited. When they returned, they were laid off. And that was it for that project at Netflix. I have so many stories on this topic, but I don’t want to monopolize the conversation, so just this one more… Summer 2019, a prolific and visionary producer read another one of my spec scripts and decided he wanted to take it on as his directorial debut. I was over the moon! I was willing to do whatever it took to make this project move forward because yes, I am that enamored with this guy’s produced projects. Plus, he’s a lovely human. So I did a couple of revision drafts for him over the course of the next year, free of charge. Then in late 2020 or early 2021, we got our promise of financing—which was complicated as it was set up as a negative pickup through a major studio. We landed our actress and our location—which happened to be overseas as opposed to the US urban setting I’d written it for… So yet another draft was needed in order to authenticate the story for that setting. In the spirit of collaboration, I did that free of charge, too. 

Then after many months of negotiating the actress’s deal, we suddenly lost her. All that time for naught. It took months to find her replacement—then that deal had to be negotiated. Which took more months. Since this is a negative pickup, there’s no studio money up front, but the time had come to option the script. This is now almost 3 years in. At long last, I’m paid my first penny on this project—and it wasn’t much more than that. It was but a tiny token option payment out of the producer/director’s own pocket. In 3 years, I’ve received enough on this project to pay about two months’ mortgage. Rumor has it, we’re greenlit to shoot in 2023, at which time I should receive the script’s modest purchase price. I’m trying to keep the faith. I know the long timeline hasn’t been a cakewalk for the director, either.

I’ve noticed, my current deals are more creatively constructed than previous ones. I don’t think I have any right now that are straight-forward. I’m not sure why that is…

But I will say, it often feels like it’s just assumed that writers have a reservoir of income to draw from when a particular deal takes forever or a particular project needs to be worked on unpaid for a period of time. For some, that may be true. For me, it never has been. 

KAMRAN PASHA:  Getting paid by studios has always been a drag, and it’s only getting worse.  Back in 2003, I sold a feature spec to a major film studio.  It took me over six months to get paid after signing the contract.  During that time, I diligently worked on the studio notes and handed in the revised script.  Still no money.  I reached the point where I wasn’t going to be able to pay my rent and my lawyer had to call Business Affairs and threaten to sue them.  They paid later that day.

More recently, I sold a TV project to a television studio in 2019, based on that very same feature spec.  It was a good deal, six figures to write a pilot and a series bible.  Contract signed.  But they spent months saying they would pay me "soon."  So 2020 rolls around.  Lockdowns hit.  First week of April -- they declared force majeure per Covid and canceled the deal.  All the money I expected to have (and needed) during the pandemic vanished in an instant.

On another project, I sold a spec pilot to a TV studio, who then made a deal with a premium cable buyer.  The two entities had never worked together before, so there was no template for how they would share revenues.  Months of haggling between the two Business Affairs units led to a stalemate.  Finally the top executives at both companies got involved and came to an understanding and closed.  It took nearly a year for them to reach a deal – a year that I wasn’t paid.  And then getting paid on that project after that was like pulling teeth.  My agents would send invoices and be reassured “we’ve processed it.”  Weeks went by and no money.  My agents would reach out again.  “Don’t worry, we processed it.”  A few more weeks went by.  Eventually, my bills were stacking up and my creditors were calling.  My agents phoned again and got aggressive with Business Affairs, and finally they wired me the money.  We’re not talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here – it was the commencement fee which was only 10% of the full deal.  A few thousand dollars which meant nothing to this studio, but was money I desperately needed to stay afloat and actually, you know, commence writing.

The reality is that unless you are a top screenwriter with prestige and perhaps an overall deal, Business Affairs sees you as a nuisance.  There is no empathy whatsoever for our plight as artists, where getting paid often means basic survival.  Perhaps that comes out of just being low on the totem pole in terms of priorities for BA.  Or perhaps there is a little bit of resentment that everyone in the system kinda has toward those of us who can actually write (you know that the BA people all have a script they’ve written that never went anywhere, just like everybody else in this town).

I don’t think there is any way to change this systemic problem.  But young writers starting out need to be aware that they cannot bank on getting paid in a timely fashion.  You have to be prepared for the worst case scenario, which tends to happen more often than not.  And your greatest ally in this battle against the dark forces of “Screw You, I Won’t Pay” are your agents.  It is almost as if Business Affairs waits for that angry call from your reps to release the money, like it’s in the instruction manual for their job.

So the advice I always give young writers is to be good to their agents.  Dealing with your reps may be frustrating at times.  But nobody else is looking out for you in this town.

SC: I second that. 

ANGELA WORKMAN: Oh yes, be good to your agents. Thirded from me. All of my career I’ve been an outlier; I broke in a little late, after a brief theater career, and have made a beautiful life writing and selling historical epics. I’ve never been cynical or bitter about my experiences, I’m just so grateful for this work, this freedom and this life. And until recently, deals have gone pretty smoothly and I’ve usually been paid on time. I believe this has as much to do with my agent/ally as it does with my talent as a writer. If ever there was even a whiff of lateness, or if anyone decided I needed to do more work after I’d delivered, she’d be on the phone insistently pressing them to pay up. And they did. (Even the Weinstein Company paid on time, and I didn’t even have to meet Harvey, thank the gods.) But something has shifted in the business, at least for me.

Three years ago, pre-pandemic, I was approached by producers who had set up an intriguing pilot at a huge, US-based global streamer. They flew me to meet them, it went swimmingly, I was offered a paid deal for pilot and format, and we were all delighted. But my deal (which was not complicated) took a long time to close, six or seven months. That was odd, for me. And then once it did, I was asked to delay two months, for reasons that were never made clear. I had a feature offer on the table and decided to take that instead. (A great decision, as it turns out, and I was paid my quote, and quickly –  that deal closed in three days. As I say, an outlier. And just very lucky.)

A year later, and three feature drafts done, I returned to the pilot’s producers, just to see where they were with that project. There was a year-long pin in that deal, again, for unclear reasons. But everyone was very happy to reopen. And now time has passed, and I’ve lost track of how long it’s been this time. It just hangs and hangs, like a moon in the mist. All in all it’s been three years. I’ve been told that the studio’s BA office lost some people. And IP issues are slowing it down. And despite the friendship between studio chief and producing partner, it’s just not really on the radar. They’re asked all the time if they’re still in and the answer is always the same: “YES! OH YES! WE WANT THIS!!” And then the thing doesn’t close. I’ve never been in this situation before. It’s like a bad boyfriend. The writing’s on the wall, right? But I still can’t quit them.

MATT NIX: I've thought a lot about the length of time it takes to get deals done. It strikes me that there's a disconnect between how deals theoretically work and how they actually work. Theoretically, a deal goes to business affairs and they negotiate it and come to terms. That's often how it goes if there's a boilerplate - those deals generally DON'T take that long. If there isn't a boilerplate, though, and they're setting new precedents, there's a huge institutional incentive for lawyers to NOT close a deal. They have to show that they're tough, that they are holding firm on non-negotiable, precedent-setting deal points. How do they show that they're doing that? By demanding terms that the other side will not willingly give and grinding negotiations to a halt. The logjam is broken only when someone the lawyer is working for gets involved and declares the deal important enough to give up on those "non-negotiable" deal points. I think part of the reason that deals are taking so long is that the business is changing so quickly right now that nearly everything is seen as precedent-setting. And often an executive has to make a very tough call, like "Is doing this deal so important that it's worth making this concession, possibly for all shows forever?" That can be true even down to the level of a deal done for an individual writer. The more "new" and "precedent-setting" aspects of a deal there are, the more BA absolutely MUST slow-roll the negotiations. They don't want to make the big decisions and own the consequences and risk getting fired. Better that big concession be made by the top-level executive who initiated the deal.

AB: Totally. In fact I went and talked to a few people who are close to the issue on the Business Affairs and law firm side of things, and they’ve more or less confirmed what you’re saying: By far, the biggest driver of contract slowdowns is the complexity of deals. Not just the complexity of having so many players involved, but the complexity of deal points. In particular the fact that exclusivity and span are now part of every deal, and the templates for those issues are in flux. One lawyer told me it used to be, a deal would have maybe 6 moving parts. Now that same deal will have 20-25 moving parts. Like there isn’t even a consensus on the definition of the word ‘season’ anymore.

Along with that, I was reminded that the corporatization of studios has created layers of approval. The BA person who writes the offer doesn’t often have the authority to move a deal point outside certain parameters. Or even if they do, they still want to cover their ass by getting approvals up the chain. Because if you work in BA, there’s a very real concern that a performance review could lead to a layoff when your new parent company decides to trim the fat. 

Of course everyone confirmed that a higher priority deal moves much quicker. If your deal is important to the studio, both lawyers move to the top of each other’s call list. But those deals aren’t easy either, so the complexity just affects the less-important deals even more.

CHAP TAYLOR: This has gone from a blogcast to a horror movie but I second (and third) everything that’s been shared. Screenwriting is an unpredictable business in the best of times and in the last five years, it has become exponentially worse. The difficulties in finding work are amplified by the unimaginably long time it takes to make a deal and get paid. The question now is, what to do about it?

I honestly have no idea how to speed up the deal process. As we all know, the more important you are to the studio, either because of the status of the project or your own reputation, the faster the process works. Length of time is often an indication of your place on the totem pole. Here’s one thing I can suggest; you just have to have a lot of irons in the fire. No matter how promising a project seems, how big the names that are involved or the potential payday, you can’t count on any one project to pay your bills. Every writer I know is juggling a minimum of five different projects in various stages. And the reality is four of them will not produce income, and hopefully the fifth will.

SC: A thousand percent what Chap just said. I’m seldom pursuing fewer than five potential projects at a time—some OWAs, some specs, and constantly reading available books and articles and short stories for that possible spark that could lead to fireworks. It can be exhausting to jump from story to story, but since you can’t count on anything actually moving forward, you have to reach in all directions at all times hoping at least one of them will. 

ET: For sure, multiple irons is the only way forward. Even if you aren’t officially a volume producer with a POD, who is actively bringing outside projects to the studio in addition to your own, you have to act like you ARE a volume producer – which goes back to our IP issue where I said I spend about 70% of my time looking for IP and 30% on straight originals. I’m looking at the white board on my office wall, and right now, there is an audio drama I’m doing that’s in-process, four – no, sorry, FIVE – separate feature things. Two are IP I’ve been approached with, and three are originals. One has been written, has a couple of attachments, and will hopefully go out to buyers early in the new year, another is being written but has producers attached, and the third is still in my head. That’s on the feature side of the board. On the TV side there are another two pieces of IP I was approached with. Both are in very early stages. One is an original but there’s a script and it’s all packaged up and ready when (if) the producers and studio say “go”, and then there are a couple of other originals that are still baking. And that’s just a snapshot of a random Wednesday. I obviously have zero way of knowing how many of the things on my board will ever turn into deals I can complain about it taking eight months to close, let alone become real money. Maybe one of them? Two if I’m extremely lucky? So things keep getting added to the board as other things fall off for whatever reason. Luckily, people still bring me stuff, my agents and manager are always out looking, and I’m always generating new ideas, even they don’t all ultimately end up on the board. There is no way to do this, especially in this climate, and only have your eggs in one basket.

AB: I have hope that things will get at least a little better as these newer deal points will become more standardized. “Template” was a word I hadn’t heard in this context before, but now I’m hearing it a lot from producers and studios, i.e. “we don’t have a template that works with that streamer yet.” So hopefully at least some templates start getting solidified.

But with this blogcast, we’ve been trying to make sure we talk about solutions, so I’ll ask: How do you deal with it? I’ll confess (or brag I guess) I haven’t had to deal with this issue as much as feature writers do. But what we’re all talking about here is how sporadic the work can be. And how much unpaid work is involved, and how much waiting is involved. And when I think about the early years of my career, where I always felt like it was going to dry up with no notice, I have to admit, one thing that made it possible for me to get through it, emotionally and financially, is a working spouse. I hate to make it about money, but I wonder, is this a career that you can only have if you have some sort of financial safety net? Whether it’s a working spouse or family wealth?

SC: This has been such a major issue for me my whole career, but the delay in closing deals and getting paid to commence does seem to be getting worse. I’m the family breadwinner (married to an artist), which required a secondary career until just recently. Fortunately, I liked my “day job” as a graphic designer, while writing many scripts late nights, weekends, paid holidays, and a smattering of paid sick days. I left a secure position as lead graphic designer at a university to live the precarious life of a freelancer, running my own small graphic design business out of my home so I could be my own boss and have more time to write. I can’t even begin to tell you how scary and difficult the uncertainty has been. Especially when the little ones arrived. 

My starving artist husband and I have always been on our own to make it all work financially, and somehow we did. Which is one very big reason we stayed in Seattle and didn’t move to LA, since I had design clients in Seattle and he has a gallery. 

ET: Yeah, I absolutely 100% could not be doing what I’m doing if my wife’s income weren’t able to carry us through the lean spots, and until this movie I wrote recently started shooting, things had been pretty lean since the beginning of the ATA action in 2019. I know we were initially talking about time we put into projects on spec and the time it takes to make deals and get paid, but time is money, so I think it’s really important, especially for any new writers who might be reading this, to know that, really, unless you become a name brand cottage industry (and seriously, who among us wouldn’t LOVE to be one of those?), it’s always a battle. Financial security is a rare thing and means different things for different people. It’s not, “Oh, hey, I got my first staffing job. I’m set!” I’m reminded of three quotes. The first was told to me by a very famous comedy writer, “You can make a fortune writing for Hollywood, but you can’t make a living.” The second, by another writer with a name you’d know who has had a very long career and who actually has a very popular show in its second season on a big streamer right now (and who said this even after the first season was already running), “I’ve done everything I’ve done and yet I still live paycheck to paycheck. Granted, they are bigger paychecks, but the stress is still there.” And finally, (and I don’t remember who first said this), “You don’t get paid for the work, you get paid for the waiting.”

CT: My experience in this business has been the reverse of many people’s. Instead of a slow climb to the top, I hit the ground running off of a feature I wrote and worked non-stop for ten years. It was a different time in the business and very lucrative. The decade since then has been about gravity reasserting itself. Under the right circumstance, writing for film and television can make you a lot of money, but mostly it’s about getting a modestly large payday and then looking for another one before the money runs out. Given the realities of the business today, I don’t think it’s something people can do unless they have a partner with a steady job, and/or a family of origin with significant financial resources.

AB: All right, well I now realize we should do a bigger discussion about ‘how the hell do you make this career work financially?’ But for now I’ll just say thank you all for joining.

If you’re reading this and you’d like to take part in one of our upcoming discussions, just let us know. If you’re reading this by email, you can just reply. Otherwise, contact us at writerscollectivesubstack@gmail.com. Have a great Thanksgiving break and we’ll be back with more From the Trenches.