Monday, October 14, 2013

A job??


Telling anyone that you might have a writing job is risky. 

But I'm close to it.

And no, it's not a huge studio offering me millions of dollars. 

It's almost a freebie.

A popular actor with lots of credits has a story and another friend of mine who's a director got all three of us together. So there you go.

As far as money, it's going under what's called the Writer's Guild "low budget" contract which basically means writers get paid a very basic amount, actually whatever the budget can sustain which usually is around 3% of the total budget.


Thus a $50,000 movie will pay the writer $1500. A $100k movie will pay $3000.  And our budget which is yet to be done, is around $500k, which means $15,000. But there's a bonus here with my beloved WGA.

The catch is this; once the film is made and sold --- the producer(s) have to pay me the full amount. In this instance the script fee is around $36,000 and subtracting the initial $15k, they still owe me $21,000.

The big word here is "Sale".

I would say that roughly 80% of these "indie" films made never get sold. And if they do, it's for very little. There's always the breakout movie; something that takes off and makes back its money and some for everyone else.

But the odds are against you from the beginning. But there are other ways to make money. And that's the variety of markets out there for movies, you know Netflix and Hulu and a dozen others but more and more are coming up. The trick is that you need to know the markets.

Do I want to have a successful screenplay. Of course I do. And I will try my hardest and we'll see what happens. 

In the meantime I'm going to indiegogo (yes, again) to raise some small funding of around $2500 to help edit and publish a short book as well as maybe a bit of a documentary. 

And of course now, it will be jinxed and I'll end up with nothing. Maybe.


 

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