Writing Movies For Fun And Profit! (5 page)

Remember: pitching is a performance; you need your rest! Pitching with a hangover can happen easily, especially if you are a New York writer who’s been flown out to Los Angeles for “meetings.” Be careful. L.A. is a fun town (in very small doses) and you’ll keep thinking: “It’s so early here!
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Sure, I’ll have one more.” Next thing you know, you’re holding on to the table for dear life and staring down a chicken Caesar salad as though it’s your mortal enemy. Sad. And when you’re so hungover that you almost have the shit-n-spins—you probably don’t SMELL that great either! And people in this town already think writers stink, so don’t give ’em any more ammunition, Mr. Faulkner!!! Be sensible. Head back to the hotel room and watch either a hit film on pay-per-view or some of the wonderful, award-winning pornography that our cousins in the San Fernando Valley have assembled!

Yes, there is a Writers Guild of America, East, but as we mentioned—unless you are Woody Allen, you are supposed to be in Los Angeles. You should visit New York in the fall and see it the way it’s supposed to be seen: from the Taipan Suite in the Mandarin Oriental hotel.

So forget about the Writers Guild, East. They’re like our first cousin that we accidentally made out with that one time before we realized why she seemed so familiar.

The Writers Guild of America, West, is the union you’ll need to be in, if you’re not already. They provide, well … protection. Like Tony Soprano protection? You ask. No. Not like that. The Guild will NOT help you get rid of a dead goomar. We asked one time.

But they do protect you from the studios, who—let’s face it, would do away with the creative unions if they could. They’d save a fortune if the Writers Guild wasn’t looking out for us. The Guild has contracts with all the studios, and they protect you with contract minimums, a health and pension fund, and collecting residuals. All kinds of great stuff. And a website where you can look things up easily. And a script library at their offices in Los Angeles. For all of this, you pay a small protection fee: 1.5 percent of your earnings as a writer. A small price to pay, considering you don’t have to be the one who checks to make sure you got paid at the 1.2 percent rate for the network prime-time TV showing of your movie. I don’t even know who you would call to ask about that. So …

“How do I get into this wonderful guild?” you ask.

It was a while ago, so we kind of forgot how we got in. (Might have been selling our pitch of
Let’s Go to Prison
, a decent rental right up until the last ten minutes or so.)

So to answer that question simply, we asked the former president of the Writers Guild, West, and our homey, Patric Verrone.

Hey, Patric, what’s the easiest way to get into the WGA?

Hey, guys, great question. In my opinion, the easiest way to get into the Writers Guild is to write the same exact thing that every one of the over ten thousand writers who already belong to the Guild wrote: something totally original and unique that none of the over ten thousand writers who already belong to the Guild wrote. Not to be facetious, but if you ask one thousand writers how they broke in, you’ll get a thousand different answers. Go ahead, ask. I’ll wait here. And while I’m waiting, I’ll let you know that there are a few other requirements for Writers Guild membership (for both the Writers Guild, East, in New York and the West in Los Angeles). First, your original and unique piece of writing needs to be of an audiovisual nature (film, TV, radio, new media). Second, because the guilds are labor unions under federal law, membership standards are based on actual labor. In other words, you have to do writing that’s considered “work.” (Unfortunately, it can’t just be done for fun, as the title of this book might suggest.) Thus, you have to be paid for your writing (it doesn’t have to be produced; just bought or optioned). Most important, you have to perform the work under a Writers Guild contract for a producer who has signed the WGA Minimum Basic Agreement. Naturally, every writer wants to work under a WGA contract because it means that you get paid a minimum salary; receive residuals when your writing is reused; have your name credited on the finished product; and get health insurance, a pension, and other benefits. But not every producer is willing to meet the standards of a WGA contract (especially in reality TV and animated films), so it’s up to every writer to insist on that contract and its terms. If you do, you’ll be eligible for membership and you’ll get to tell your totally original and unique story about the easiest way to get into the Writers Guild.

—Patric Verrone, former president, WGAW

See, there you go. It’s that easy. If you consider that easy. (Which it’s not, really.) Technically, you need to build up “points” to join, but the
number of points you need can be met with just ONE screenplay sold to a studio. So follow all the other advice in this book, and get yourself into the Guild. Your teeth will thank you for the wonderful dental coverage.

And once you’re in the Guild … the perks just keep on coming. We’re talking about partying your ass off with Patron Gold, luxury boxes, and stone-cold foxes. Because that’s how we roll in the WGAW.
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FREE MOVIE IDEA

Yours Free with the Purchase of This Book
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“WHACKED”

Approximate Budget: $18 Million

Box-Office Gross: $97 Million Worldwide

Awards Potential: Supporting Actor Golden Globe for Michael Caine

Jonah Hill stars as a lovable loser who goes from ZERO to HERO in this hilarious “ball-busting” croquet sports/comedy.

Jonah stars as LUKAS, a twentysomething nerd studying at a community college in New Jersey. To make ends meet, he works at a tacky miniature golf place, where rich kids make fun of him. BUT he’s really good at miniature golf. When Lukas’s brilliant/wealthy/stoner roommate (Chris Mintz-Plasse) DROPS OUT of college and heads to Alaska to “find himself,” Lukas finds himself holding his now “off the grid” room-mate’s ACCEPTANCE LETTER to the Rhodes Scholar program at Oxford University. Lukas decides to accept the scholarship and go to Oxford, England, POSING AS HIS ROOMMATE. Why? Because he has a crush on his classmate (Sienna Miller), who just got accepted to Oxford.

Lukas is a fish out of water right away, which we see in hilarious scenes like one where he LEARNS TO TIE A BOW TIE and how to eat kippers and blood sausage for breakfast. He’ll say funny things like “Watch the hands, Dumbledore,” to his aging ROWING INSTRUCTOR when they’re out punting on the river.

All the OXFORD SNOBS pick on him and knock him down again and again until page 32, where Lukas gets invited by SIMON (Cillian Murphy) to a weekend in the country for a grand croquet tournament (for the SPECIFIC reason of humiliating him).

Now it’s
Rocky
, with croquet—Jonah Hill in the Rocky role and Michael Caine as “Ol’ Squiggs” training him.

Ol’ Squiggs and Lukas hit it off. Squiggs is the aging groundskeeper, and he too is from a humble background. “See a lot of me’self in you, kid … now let’s start whackin’ some balls.”

Act II: They train.

Act III: Lukas KICKS ASS in the tournament, winning Sienna Miller away from Cillian Murphy.

Note: Sound track features all British ska hits from Madness and The Specials.

First off—CONGRATULATIONS.

You just sold a f*%#in’ movie! You are now a Professional Screenwriter. You’re gonna run into a lot of people in Hollywood who say they’re screenwriters. A great majority of those people are Full Of Shit. They’ve never sold anything but lattes. You, however, are a Professional Screen-writer. Take a minute to enjoy that.

Then: breathe in the fact that now—
the pressure is on
.
It is
very easy
to sit around a bong and talk a big game. Actually WRITING SCREENPLAYS for a living, however, takes talent, brains, perseverance, hard work, tact, cunning, and shoe leather.

Okay—so you sold a movie, a pitch, or a spec. Now what?

Well, expect some congratulatory phone calls from your reps and from the studio execs who bought your movie. The studio will say, “We’re all really excited.” But before you get those calls, there will be …

A studio liked your pitch or spec. Here’s what happened after you left their office.

The executive who you pitched to went to their BOSS. Unless you pitched to the BOSS, the president of the studio. That’s rare. Will Smith pitches his movies to the president. Almost everybody else pitches to someone below them.

So the exec you pitched to went down the hall and pitched your movie to their Boss. (That’s a comforting thought, huh? Your fate is in the hands of some dude who heard you describe your movie
once
.) The Boss liked it and said “WE’LL TAKE IT!” Sometimes the Boss says NO.

Sometimes the Boss says, “I like it, but not enough to buy it. I’d like the writer to come in and pitch it to me themselves.” (Maybe so they can ask you a few questions or see if you’re okay with their notes.)

These days, the economy being what it is
(Thanks a lot, [
insert name of current president here!
],
sometimes even if the Boss
wants
to buy it, they have to run it by a few people. They might run it by the MARKETING department, to see if they think they can sell your movie. Sometimes they even have to run the movie past CORPORATE.

So they liked your movie. They want your movie. So they called your reps. They asked for YOUR QUOTE. What’s a QUOTE?
Your QUOTE is the industry term for how much money a major studio paid you for the LAST comparable movie you wrote.
You have a QUOTE for an original script, a QUOTE for a sequel you’ve written, a QUOTE for a week of rewrites, etc. If someone who was NOT a major studio paid you to write a movie, you do not have a quote. If some indie company paid you a billion bucks to write a movie, that is NOT a QUOTE.
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Studios acknowledge only payments made to you by themselves or other major studios.

Which brings us to the big question everyone asks:

How much money am I gonna make?

That depends on a lot of things:

Is this is the first movie you’ve ever sold?

If it is, you DO NOT HAVE A QUOTE. If you don’t have a quote, the WRITERS GUILD has standard minimum payments for writing a screenplay. As of the printing of this book, the minimum payment for an original screenplay is
$109,783.

They
have
to pay you AT LEAST that much.

You get paid in installments, as you do the work:

$43,875 for commencement (to start writing)

$43,875 for turning in the first draft

Then they give you notes, and you get paid.

$22,033 to turn in the FINAL DRAFT.

Guild minimum for a spec script is
$80,427.

But be warned—sometimes it takes MONTHS to get paid. We think the record for us was once eleven months, from getting commenced to getting the check.

The good news is—you’ll get more than Guild minimum when:

MORE than one studio wants to buy your movie. Then you get to hear two of the most wonderful words you can hear as a writer:

Bidding war!

Woo-hoo! Two studios (or, super woo-hoo,
more
than two studios) have to outbid each other for your movie. And that’s superfun. Then who knows—the sky is the limit.

OR—If you DO have a quote:

Your SECOND movie deal will always be bigger than the first. Even if your FIRST MOVIE didn’t get made, it’s usually a 10 percent bump-up. The studio’s (and your reps) figure: you sold one movie, you know how to write—so you’re going to get a raise.