The Legal Side Of It

The contracts came in the mail today, they're fairly straight forward and since we created a LLC to act as a loan-company the paperwork had to take that into consideration.

Our lawyer negotiated as much as she could with the people at Fox Legal, but they weren't trying to budge on a lot of the points. Mainly the time we get to write the first draft of the script - 8 weeks! Yeah, 8 fucking weeks! Can you believe that??! Which means some strenuous days and nights of hacking away at the keyboard. Also, equally irriating is that Fox plans to have 8 weeks for the "Reading Period," which is the time the bureaucratics masquerading as creative executives have to read the script. This is even more perposterous -- does it really take 8 weeks to read a script and deliver notes on the draft? Sure about 4 execs have to read and weigh in (the studio and the production company), but damn! And I say DAMN, because we don't get our next installment of money until the studio bureaucrats have finished redlining the bad-boy and meeting with us to discuss their notes.

Then the periond between the First Draft and first set of revisions is again 8 weeks, but the reading period is shorter. And then the next set of revisions/polishes is even shorter like 4 weeks, and they have 2 weeks to respond.

The tricky part is that our money is rationed out for each time we're supposed to be writing - so we're on the hook financially until they finish their leisurely reading.

Oh, we also just got a call back from the Exec at the Production company about our beat sheet/outline; she didn't have too many notes, and what she did have was quite good at upping the dramatic tension in the outline (who knows what's going to happen in the script!). Once we address these notes, we send the revised outline back and if it's cool it goes over the Studio's Exec for his approval/notes. At that point, we'll start officially writing -- and the paycheck can come in the mail.

As you can see there's quite a bit of writing that we're doing essentially for "free" just to get in position to cash a paycheck for News Corp.

Initial Stages

Our attorney recevied our LLC paperwork today to submit to Fox business affairs, so when we get paid it goes through our Production Company not directly to us. Why do this? It's very simple -- TAXES! screenwriters do get paid well, but not that well - especially for the first thing you ever do.

However, it's enough for Uncle Sam to bitch-slap you; and here's how: another good friend of ours landed his first writing deal earlier this year to (to adapt the novel "BLING" for Miramax), after his agent and manager each took 10% each, plus lawyer's fees it was time for the IRS to take a bite. And boy did they take a bite! Our friend was getting $80K to write, eventhough he was only actually getting $64Gs, and Uncle Sam taxed him like he was making $80,000 a month; as if he was making $960,000 a year -- putting him in the 45% tax bracket, thus reducing his $64,000 by 36,000. So all he got was 28 thousand and he still had to pay his attorney.

For our deal, we have neither agent nor manager, and are luckily paying our lawyer 5%. Now, we can also claim the attorney money as a business expense when it's tax time (because our corporation is hiring out for outside services).

Our attorney also said, "be very eager to do the work, and don't balk at re-writes." We weren't going to do that in any event, but she just wanted to make sure we knew that bitching as writer gets around Hollywood, a notoriously small community.

The way our deal is supposed to work is that we'll get half our fee to commence writing (which begins once the production company signs off on our outline and we sign the commencement docs), then the next quarter to do 2 revisions and then the final quarter to do two sets of polishes. This is key because this is how we get into the WGA (meaning I can see a dentist and sawbones whenever I need to, not when I'm past the point of knowing somethings wrong).

In the meantime, we knocked out the first crack at the outline, which basically consisted of expanding the document we used to pitch our take. We used a technique that a friend of ours named Joel Viertel inadvertantly taught us, to flesh out the characters and the various acts to give it a visual feel as well as beefing up the interpersonal drama and giving a flavor of what some of the scenes are going to look like.

After completing the outline, we emailed it to Production Company's executive in charge of the production for her notes. That's what were waiting on now.