Understanding Contracts

Movie contracts at their basic are about two things; Money and rights. Everything else revolves around these two items. Let's say you just got that phone call (they almost always phone, never email) that someone wants to buy your screenplay. 

You might only sign a "Deal Memo" which is a mini-contract and consists of two or three pages of the basics; names, money, rights and assignments with a formal agreement of maybe ten pages or more to follow and usually covers everything including the universe.

Usually a screenplay is optioned for 10% of it's fee, which if you're in WGA has scale minimum fees. Some writers get a lot more but for most of us, it's WGA (WGC is the Canadian version) minimum which is happening more often than not.

There's also the "scale and ten." This was 10% added to the sale price to cover the agent's commission. But this is disappearing and the 10% comes out of your sale price.

Writers as a whole don't like contracts as most people don't. They're hard to read and much of the terms and names seem to be another language but within that language are several areas where the producer can practically own you. Or dispose you.

I learned how to read contracts when I wrote a Private Offering for Ghostkeeper, my first feature and where I passed the Securities Commission. How did I do it? I didn't know much about Private Offerings but I grabbed a bunch of them and cut and pasted them together. The fact that it passed the Securities Commission indicated to me that nobody really reads these things.

I also have software that can write a contract for a writer to an actor and even overtime for the crew. It's basically a template that all you really need is to fill in some blanks and you have an offering to build a film.

Of course there are a lot of writers don't want to deal with contracts and offerings but for the most part many writers count on their lawyers of agents. For me, I never really needed a lawyer except a few times.

To begin with, the producers will want every possible right there is, even if it doesn't exist. In the U.S., copyrights are sold to the producer whereas the rest of the world allows copyright only to the creator, be it writer or artist to anyone who creates an artistic piece.