Piracy is a Hydra

I went to a workshop on copyright the other night. It was extremely informative, but even the lawyer giving the lecture acknowledged that something major needed to be done to address the current situation of massive pirated downloads. Having worked as counsel for Tower Records, she represented them in that famous lawsuit against Napster because Napster had been dumb enough to specify in their business plan, "We're going to put companies like Tower Records out of business." Well, Napster went under, but then so did Tower Records. Ironically, Napster was reincarnated under a subscription-based model.

One attendee mentioned The Pirate Bay, which is an anti-copyright organization run out of Stockholm, Sweden. The Pirate Bay hosts a server indexing all BitTorrent files currently available, which means that if you go to their web site, you can find an "index" link to any film, movie, or song they have. When you use BitTorrent on that index link, it finds all the people who have a small fraction of that song on their computers and assembles all those parts into a complete file for you to watch or listen to. This is called, "hyperdistribution". As an American, by using BitTorrent, you have almost certainly infringed the copyright of the artists and their producers... but that doesn't seem to stop anyone from doing it. The Pirate Bay has gotten a lot of heat from the MPAA and record companies, and their offices were even raided by Swedish police in 2006. After that raid, however, The Pirate Bay was up and running again only three days later.

A few months ago, I discovered a site that goes a step farther—Watch-Movies.net. You don't even need BitTorrent to use this site. All you do is go to their site, type in the movie you want to see, and find the file that works the best for you. Invariably, these files are made from illegal camcorders in movie theatres, so you can see films still in general release. The quality is not always high, but if you're willing to sacrifice quality, then you can see practically any movie you want, for free, as long as you have access to the internet. Even though watch-movies.net stopped working quite suddenly (due to someone complaining, no doubt), Watch-movies-links.net Watch-Movies-online.tv Watchmovieslinksonline.com was started up not long thereafter.

A Whois lookup on Watch-movies-links.net returned this:

Registrant:
Name: Private Protection Co.LTD
Organization: Private Protection Co.LTD.
Address: NO.1111 Chaoyang Road, Beijing
City: Beijing
Province/state: BJ
Country: CN
Postal Code: 100000

Administrative Contact:
Name: Private Protection Co.LTD. Zhuhai Branch
Organization: Private Protection Co.LTD.
Address: NO.1 Meihua Road
City: Zhuhai
Province/state: GD
Country: CN
Postal Code: 519000
Email: ad9ad10c6983b7ffe00bb2a6fac1fdf4@domain-private.com

Dispute Contact:
Name: Todaynic.com,Inc.
Organization: Todaynic.com,Inc.
Address: 6B XIHAI Building, No.221 Renmin E Road, Xiangzhou District,
City: Zhuhai
Province/state: GD
Country: CN
Postal Code: 519000
Phone: +86.756-2281763
Nameserver Information:
ns3.01isp.com
ns4.01isp.net

As expected, Watch-Movies-Links.net is based in China, one of the largest violators of copyright. In doing research for my movie business plan, I learned China permits only 20 foreign movies to be shown annually in their country. If the tables were turned, and the best movies were always made in China, and the American government said I could only see 20 foreign movies per year—of which only a fraction were Chinese—I'm sure that I, too, would be a pirate without any ethical reservations. Since China is still under the yolk of communism, an ideology which divorces the individual from private property, I'm unsurprised when I hear Chinese citizens (proudly) call their country, "The nation of fake."

The ability for companies to brazenly violate copyright reminds me of the Hydra from Ancient Greek mythology. Hercules' Second Labor was to kill the Hydra, but "upon cutting off each of its heads, he found two grew back, an expression of the hopelessness of such a struggle". In this case, the MPAA, music companies, and the world's police are Hercules, and the Hydra is both the Pirates and the consumers who use BitTorrent. Try as they might, authorities can't seem to kill hyperdistribution. Shut down Napster? Here's BitTorrent. Shut down The Pirate Bay? They're up three days later. Shut down Watch-Movies.net? They switch domains. Sue consumers? You get a consumer backlash.

Why does piracy continue to flourish despite the continued assault from authorities? Because piracy at its core isn't a legal or technical matter, and thus cannot be solved with legal or technical tools. Piracy is in its essence a social problem only catalyzed by an unenforceable (and thus unrealistic) legal code and an astonishingly efficient delivery system. Rampant piracy is really just a symptom of users who want to consume content, and who aren't particularly interested in the hassle of paying for it. Sure, if it's easier to find content and pay for it than to download it over BitTorrent, they'll pay (thus the success of iTunes). But here's the bitter pill nobody wants to swallow: if a user goes out of their way to watch a pirated copy, they probably weren't a paying customer to begin with. Far from being a curse, users who watch pirated shows and movies and listen to pirated songs possess one unique benefit—a user who watches or listens to a pirated copy might like it enough to buy it on CD or DVD and/or recommend it to others... which is impossible if they never even watched or listened to it.

Sites like Hulu.com and ABC.com with its own media viewer show how the entertainment industry is evolving to come to viewers. Instead of not showing content online and "forcing" viewers into downloading episodes illegally, they're creating user-friendly parameters to make it easier for people to get the content they want, whenever they want it. The theory goes something like, if they're going to dally about with a mistress, at least we want to control who and where that mistress is... because we can make money off of that.

Lawrence Lessig makes an excellent point about copyright. The way the law is currently set up makes it too hard for providers to let users share, remix or use content. In an internet digital culture where sharing is the norm, copyright law is so restrictive that it's now stifling creativity. That's why I've become a fan of the Lessig's Creative Commons License.

My friend Nik said it best when talking about the pervasiveness of spam: "As long as you have a backwater country that doesn't crack down on spammers, you're always going to have spam. The only way to really fight spam is to manage it." Maybe one day, every country in the world will indeed have a police authority able and willing to protect the rights of every content producer around the world. I fear, though, that such a day will be long after my children have already grown up... and during that time, our culture will have since become accustomed to violating copyright as the norm.

Joining The Conversation

I heard about The Conversation this summer and immediately bought a ticket:

[P]ioneers at the forefront of change in cinema, video, games, media and technology are coming together to share ideas, insights, and innovations. Our focus is on new tools, new distribution channels, and new rules.... The format of the gathering will be experimental: rather than a traditional conference, short talks and demos, "fireside chats," and roundtables will spark a dynamic series of overlapping conversations.

Their guest list is enough to make any independent filmmaker salivate—Peter Broderick, for instance. His recent article in Indiewire about the New World of Distribution for indie filmmakers is germane to how (I think) digital entertainment will be distributed. Hunter Weeks is another gem on the list—he's one of the co-creators of 10 MPH, a documentary about two guys crossing the United States on a segway. Week's movie home page is an exquisite example of how to use the internet to market your own movies. Other notable invitees hail from Netflix, Createspace, Filmbaby, JibJab, Lucasfilm, ILM, The Webby Awards, and YouTube. See the complete list of speakers at the bottom.

One really appealing part of The Conversation—you can throw out your own ideas. I thought about it for awhile and this forum seems ideal to mention some of my own predictions on the future of digital entertainment. Frankly, in one form or another, I've been observing, discussing, and molling over the movie industry for three years and have a pretty well-informed opinion about it. So I decided to make a presentation of my own about license-based entertainment which will be a riff on a recent article I wrote about iTunes' Death Knell. My ardent hope is that my presentation isn't eclipsed by someone else's brilliant 90 minute lecture. I do hate redundancy.

The Conversation takes place all day this Friday and Saturday. Tickets are still on sale, but a little steep now at $150. But if you have nothing to do, come be my own peanut gallery!

COMPLETE LIST OF SPEAKERS

• Alex Afterman, Founder, Heretic Films
  
• Alex Lindsay, Founder, Pixel Corps
  
• Arin Crumley, Director, As the Dust Settles and Four Eyed Monsters
  
• Barbara Robertson, Journalist, CGSociety, Computer Graphics World, Digital Production
  
• Chris Thilk, Director of Marketing, Spout LLC
  
• Cliff Plumer, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Domain
  
• Dan Gregoire, Founder, Halon Entertainment
  
• Dana LoPiccolo-Giles, Co-founder, CreateSpace (formerly CustomFlix)
  
• Danae Ringelmann, Co-Founder, IndieGoGo
  
• Dean Valentine, CEO, Comedy.com and Founder, Symbolic Action; former CEO of UPN and President of Walt Disney Television
  
• Diana Barrett, Founder, The Fledgling Fund
  
• Evan Spiridellis, Head Art Guy, JibJab Media
  
• George Strompolos, Content Partnerships Manager, YouTube
  
• Graham Leggat, Executive Director, San Francisco Film Society (Moderator)
  
• Gregg Spiridellis, CEO Guy, JibJab Media
  
• Hunter Weeks, Director, 10 Yards and 10 MPH
  
• James LeBrecht, Berkeley Sound Artists
  
• Jason Harris, President, Mekanism
  
• Jeremiah Birnbaum, CEO, SF School of Digital Filmmaking
  
• Jesse Keane, Chief Technology Officer, CinemaNow
  
• Jim Sommers, Senior Vice President, ITVS
  
• John Batter, Co-President of Production, DreamWorks Animation SKG; former Group Studio General Manager, Electronic Arts
  
• John Gaeta, Visual Effects Designer, Speed Racer and the Matrix trilogy
  
• John Knoll, Visual Effects Supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic
  
• Jonathan Marlow, Executive Director, San Francisco Cinematheque; formerly at Vudu and GreenCine
  
• Josh Wiggins, Senior Director of Global Strategic Sales, Ascent Media
  
• KC Blake, Anywhere/Anytime Content Lab, Entertainment Technology Center@USC
  
• Ken Eklund, Writer & Creative Director, "World Without Oil"
  
• Ken Goldberg, Director, Berkeley Center for New Media
  
• Lance Weiler, Filmmaker & Editor, The Workbook Project
  
• Michael Ferris Gibson, Director, 24 Hours on Craigslist & Producer, Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story
  
• Michealene Cristini Risley, Independent filmmaker, Tapestries of Hope
  
• Mike Curtis, HD for Indies
  
• Mike Shiley, Director, Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories & Dark Water Rising
  
• Nick Braccia, Creative Director, Deep Focus
  
• Peggy Weil, Artist & Game Developer, "Gone Gitmo" and "The Redistricting Game"
  
• Pete Ludé, SVP, Sony Electronics
  
• Peter Broderick, President, Paradigm Consulting
  
• Phil Tippett, Founder, Tippett Studio
  
• Reed Hastings, CEO & Founder, Netflix
  
• Rich Bradway, Associate Dir. of E-Commerce & New Media, Boston Symphony Orchestra
  
• Richard Kerris, Chief Technology Officer, Lucasfilm Ltd.
  
• Scilla Andreen, CEO, IndieFlix
  
• Scott Kirsner, Editor, CinemaTech
  
• Ted Hope, Co-Founder, This is That
  
• Tiffany Shlain, Filmmaker & Founder, The Webby Awards
  
• Tim Napoleon, Chief Strategist for Digital Media, Akamai
  
• Wendy Levy, Director of Creative Programming, Bay Area Video Coalition
  
• Woody Benson, Managing Partner, Prism VentureWorks

Zak Penn's 8 lessons

Some useful movie tips from a guy I sat next to in 6th grade English class:

Zak Penn's Incredible Journey
by Zak Penn | Published June 13, 2008

Sure Zak Penn can write you a surefire blockbuster. He has proven that time and again with X-Men, Elektra, Fantastic Four. But that’s not all he can do. The Grand, an improvisational comedy set in the world of competitive poker that he wrote and directed, contains neither a superhero nor a highfalutin special effect, and is on DVD now. And with his long-awaited adaptation of The Incredible Hulk in theaters now, MM asked the in-demand scribe to share the “things he’s learned” in the business.

1. On the blockbuster summer movies, writing subplots that intersect with the main plot in the third act can be the difference between a good script and a bad one.

2. One of the most important qualities a director needs to have is stamina. Physical and mental stamina. Someone who knows him once commented that Peter Jackson’s ability to work effectively 16 hours a day is what separates him from his contemporaries. All the skill and intelligence in the world won’t help you if you are sick or asleep when the production needs you.

3. Comedic actors need not know they are funny in order to be funny.

4. Always stop arguing when someone says “yes.”

5. Directors are often better at taking notes than writers are. “That’s a good idea, I’ll do my best to address it” is a far more effective response than arguing.

6. Having a respected director on your set as an actor helps keep the cast and crew in line.

7. Directors should be good at firing people quicker. The faster you can pull the trigger on someone that’s not working out, the better off you’ll be.

8. The first 30 pages are the most important part of a screenplay, but the last 30 minutes are the most important part of a movie.

To compete or not to compete?

Here is Matt Mason's keynote speech at The Medici Summit last month in Scottsdale, Arizona, and one of the best videos I've ever seen on piracy. It's a good primer on his book, The Pirate's Dilemma, which deals with how to compete with and/or fight a swiftly emerging business model.

Highlights:

• If the average person were sued for the maximum amount they were liable every day for copyright infringment—meaning photocopying, backing up CDs to your computer, remixing tapes, etc.—they would be liable for $12.4 million. Every day.


• American foreign policy during the Industrial Revolution was to completely ignore international copyright and patent laws... which allowed America to industrialize quickly and cheaply.
  
• Initially, innovators are branded pirates by their peers—Thomas Edison created the phonograph, which musicians hated because they thought it jeopardized their income. Since then, musicians have made more money off the record industry they could have ever made by only playing live.
  
• When Thomas Edison first created his film projector, he charged a license fee to use it. Many filmmakers thought Edison's licence fee was too high, so they ignored the law and set up their own film community far away from Edison's lawyers on the West Coast... that film community we now know as Hollywood. (The leader of these rogue filmmakers was William Fox, of 20th Century Fox.)
  
• To compete with Chinese software pirates, Microsoft offers their software for only $3.
  
• When pirates encroach on your market, the question is: do they add value? If they do, then you must then ask yourself, what business are you really in? What is your product? For example, Apple doesn't sell music or movies—they sell convenience.

Producers suing consumers

I've been having an on-again, off-again discussion with Dave about J. K. Rowling's lawsuit against a fan who is publishing his own Harry Potter encyclopedia. The fan runs a Harry Potter fan web site with over a million visitors, and the site includes an online encyclopedia detailing everything in the Harry Potter Universe—an encyclopedia which Rowling herself has admitted using—but the moment the fan converts that encyclopedia into a book format, Rowling sues him over copyright infringement.

Surely the fan had already been making money from his web site's advertisers... so why didn't Rowling sue him then? When the same content hops from one format to another, suddenly the content is a financial threat to Rowling?

Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney conceded in 2006 that "piracy is a business model", not a war on its own customers: “We understand now that piracy is a business model. It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do—through quality, price and availability. We don’t like the model but we realize it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward.”

Tomorrow, I'll be posting a superb video on piracy which really shows how current copyright laws are no longer applicable to the modern world. For now, here's the full article on the Rowling lawsuit:

Rowling suing fan over new Potter book
NEW YORK (AP) -- Best-selling author J.K. Rowling said Monday that her efforts to halt a publisher's "Harry Potter" encyclopedia have been crushing her creativity.

Rowling told a New York court that she had stopped work on a new novel because the federal lawsuit had "decimated my creative work over the last month."

Rowling is suing RDR Books to stop publication of Steven Vander Ark's "Harry Potter Lexicon" on the grounds that her copyrights are being violated.

"This book constitutes wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work," she testified Monday.

RDR's lawyer, Anthony Falzone, has defended the lexicon as a reference guide. Falzone called it a legal effort "to organize and discuss the complicated and very elaborate world of Harry Potter."

When Rowling's lawyer asked how she felt about Harry, she replied: "I really don't want to cry." But she looked like she was about to do just that.

A smiling Rowling, who brought the lawsuit last year, earlier arrived at the lower Manhattan courthouse wearing a gray pinstriped jacket and a gray knee-length skirt, but did not speak as she entered the building.

She says her copyrights are being violated by a fan who plans to publish a "Harry Potter" encyclopedia.

The showdown between Rowling and Vander Ark is scheduled to last most of the week in U.S. District Court. The writer will spend her breaks in the seclusion of a jury room -- away from any die-hard Potter fans.

The trial comes eight months after Rowling published her seventh and final book in the series. The books have been published in 64 languages, sold more than 400 million copies and spawned a film franchise that has pulled in $4.5 billion at the worldwide box office.

Rowling is a fan of the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site that Vander Ark runs. But she draws the line when it comes to publishing the book and charging $24.95. She also says it fails to include any of the commentary and discussion that enrich the Web site and calls it "nothing more than a rearrangement" of her own material.

One of her lawyers, Dan Shallman, on Friday told Judge Robert P. Patterson, who is hearing the trial without a jury, that Rowling "feels like her words were stolen."

He said the author felt so personally violated that she made her own comparisons among her seven best-selling novels and the lexicon and was ready to testify about the similarities in dozens of instances.

David Saul Hammer, a lawyer for RDR Books, said the publisher would not challenge the claim by Rowling that much of the material in the lexicon infringed her copyrights.

But the judge will decide whether the use of the material by the small Muskegon, Michigan, publisher was legal because it was used for some greater purpose, such as a scholarly pursuit.

In court papers filed prior to the trial, Rowling said she was "deeply troubled" by the book.

"If RDR's position is accepted, it will undoubtedly have a significant, negative impact on the freedoms enjoyed by genuine fans on the Internet," she said. "Authors everywhere will be forced to protect their creations much more rigorously, which could mean denying well-meaning fans permission to pursue legitimate creative activities."

In court papers, Vander Ark, 50, said he was a teacher and school librarian in Byron Center, Mich., before recently moving to London to begin a career as a writer.

He said he joined an adult online discussion group devoted to the Harry Potter books in 1999 before launching his own Web site as a hobby a year later. Since then, neither Rowling nor her publisher had ever complained about anything on it, he said.

In May 2004, he said, Rowling mentioned his Web site on her own, writing, "This is such a great site that I have been known to sneak into an Internet cafe while out writing and check a fact rather than go into a bookshop and buy a copy of Harry Potter (which is embarrassing). A Web site for the dangerously obsessive; my natural home."

The Web site attracts about 1.5 million page views per month and contributions from people all over the world, Vander Ark said.

He said he initially declined proposals to convert the Web site into an encyclopedia, in part because he believed until last August that in book form, it would represent a copyright violation.

After Rowling released the final chapter in the Harry Potter series that same month, Vander Ark was contacted by an RDR Books employee, who told him that publication of the lexicon would not violate copyright law, he said.

Still, to protect himself, Vander Ark said he insisted that RDR Books include a clause in his contract that the publisher would defend and pay any damages that might result from claims against him.

He said it was decided that the lexicon would include sections from the Lexicon Web site that give descriptions and commentary on individual names, places, spells and creatures from Harry Potter stories.

In his court statement, Vander Ark still sounds like a fan, saying the lexicon "enhances the pleasure of readers of the Potter novels, and deepens their appreciation of Ms. Rowling's achievement."

But the affection no longer seems a shared experience.

In court Friday, Hammer said Rowling's lawyers did not want Vander Ark in the courtroom while Rowling testified.

The book's the thing

While looking over my the two and a half years of blogging about the film industry, it occurred to me that I write a lot about the form of digital entertainment, i.e., how digital content is delivered to consumers. For example, I was early to note how Netflix was developing downloadable movies through their site, how Universal was offering download-to-own DVDs, and how Steven Soderbergh tried to combat piracy by releasing his film Bubble in theatres and DVDs simulatenously.

A number of my readers have been after me to do a book, citing that many of my posts are entertaining and informative about the film business. Between my own projects and other work, I've thought about it. Indeed, a man cannot live on blog alone. Given my inordinate fascination about The Shape Of Things To Come for digital entertainment, a book about piracy in the entertainment industry seemed like the next natural step.

However, I've been testing the winds to see which direction I should set sail. Filmmakers in the mini DV world live in perpetual anxst, one foot in each camp: I'd like to get a sweet studio distribution deal, but will I fare better if I offer up my film for a $1 download? If I'm going to write a book on music and movie piracy, I have to figure out exactly how I feel about it, and why.

Over the last two months, I've started to see the entertainment industry in a different light. I used to get violently angry when I saw movies getting copied. "It's immoral and illegal!" I used to say. "Why does everyone keep doing it? Don't they know they're destroying the entertainment industry?"

However, after hearing about how pervasive piracy is in India, China, Brazil and Eastern Europe, I changed my mind about it... a lot.

The world has changed. People treat digital content much more differently than they would a car or a house. And digital content is different. You can't duplicate a car 1,000 times and give those duplicates away for free. So why are we applying the rules of car ownership to something so inherently different? The fact is, the world is deciding on its own how it wants to pay money for this new kind of object—we can steadfastly enforce our car ownership rules on it and watch people steal anyway, or we can listen to what the world is telling us and find a way to work within that framework.

Anyway, here's a section of the book I started writing, which will probably end up in the introduction somewhere:

Let's say you owned a shop selling pastries in a small town somewhere. Every morning at 8:00 sharp, you unlock the front door, turn off the alarm, get ready for business. Your doors open at 9:00 and you serve your customers as they come in. One pastry costs you $1 to make, and $5 to sell, leaving you with a nice revenue of $4. Kids in the neighborhood stare longingly at your yummy pastries through your shopfront window, and while you're busy serving customers, they might try palm a pastry or two without you seeing, but you almost always catch them. Once you've caught them, you might call the cops and have them prosecuted, or you might dismiss it as a harmless nuisance. At 5:00 that evening, you close your doors, turn on your alarm, and go home. This is perfectly sensible approach to doing business and making a living. In fact, you could do this your whole life, and even teach your children to do it, if they wanted to. There is enough profit in it to allow your business to continue well into the future.

Now let's say your shop selling pastries suddenly had some alterations to it, some real and some magical. Let's imagine that anyone could buy one of your pastries and duplicate it perfectly... which they gleefully do, and pass along these duplications to everyone they know. Additionally, your shop now has no windows so anyone can lean in and take a pastry from your storefront before you even know what's happened. Your business still has an alarm, but now it has a 24 hour delay before going off so by the time the cops come, the thieves would be long gone. On top of that, everyone in this small town is constantly awake so you can't possibly stand guard all day long to ward off thieves. Even if you could successfully jail all the offenders, the local jail is nowhere near large enough to hold all the offenders. Worst of all, many of the thieves don't think what they're doing is fundamentally wrong; for years, they've been grumbling that $5 per pastry is really too high a price to pay, and they're finally "balancing the scales" by taking back what is owed them. Your revenues plummet, and you shout at anyone who will listen, how could everything have become so unfair to your once idyllic lifestyle?

This is the state of the movie industry now. Where once a small town business thrived under the buying and selling of the commodity business model, it now exists in a different game with different rules. The Old Pastry Shop existed under a capitalist framework derived from an Industrial Age, and the New Pastry Shop functions within a new economic model forged from the Information Age.

As with all evolutionary processes, only the animals who adapt to their new environment will thrive, while the others clinging to their old traditions will starve over time and, with venomous hissing, eventually self-extinguish. When DVDs are priced at $35 and CDs are priced at $20, movie and music producers have only themselves to blame for seeing their customers rationalize pastry theft.

Our world is smack in the middle of a war over how to most effectively monetize the distribution of digital content. We've already seen some successful business models emerge, but only time will tell if these new approaches have any stamina. In a global market of the Information Age where digital content is no longer bought and sold under the old storefront paradigm, piracy is the genie that won't go back in the bottle. Thus, the question movie and music producers—and even software developers—must ask themselves now is, how do we make money off this new model?

Because the alternative is death by a thousand cuts.

Portman goes from "E" to "B"

I've always said so—if you really want control over your life, you have to start thinking and acting like a business owner, and not like an employee.

It's not enough to be a well-paid employee... since your career is still run by others' decisions, which can frequently become frustrating. Evidently, Natalie Portman has learned that lesson the hard way:

Impatient Portman Turns Producer
Actress Natalie Portman formed her own production company after growing tired of waiting around for movie offers to land in her mail box. The 26-year-old actress found the process frustrating and that scripts being offered to her were inconsistent—so she decided to take her career into her own hands and form HandsomeCharlie Films. Portman says, "It is proactive. It gives you more control over creating things, as opposed to having to get hired every single time. After you've worked for so long, it's kind of annoying to have to be dependent in that way. I've been working 15 years and I know some years I get everything first and some years I read only uninteresting parts. I didn't want to be at the mercy of whoever is making those decisions. Having your own company is a nice way to concentrate your ideas and make the kinds of movies you want to see."

Title Credits, Part 1

Most indie filmmakers make some common mistakes... maybe they don't spend money to color correct, or pay for a good soundtrack, or tweak the sound enough. Maybe they don't even spend money getting good sound to begin with.

Yet the most common misstep for indies is treating credits like an afterthought. Most indies resort to printing credits in 30 point white courier font on a black background. Oh no no no no no no no. Credits are a wonderful and special opportunity to set the stage for whatever shall follow, and all low-budget indie filmmakers should try hard to take advantage of that opportunity.

I suppose indie filmmakers see title credits as "merely" the ribbon one ties on a gift, and thus not as important as the gift itself. The truth of it is that the ribbon, the wrapping, even the fluffy bow... all of it is part of the gift. One might even argue that, because the ribbon and gift-wrap and fluffy bows all happen before the gift, they are as important, or even more important, than the gift itself. First impressions last.

In my mind, opening and closing credit sequences are like an appetizer and digestive at a sit down dinner: at the start, a credit sequence whets the palate by setting the tone and pace of the story, by introducing the setting—and in a best case, also sets up the characters and sketches out the backstory—and at the end of the film, a closing title sequence leaves the viewer with an lasting aftertaste.

How do you make good credits? What consists of a "good" credit? The answer is simple: integration. Find the core element of your film, whether it be comedy or horror or sci-fi, and use that to make your credits so unique that the title credits could only introduce your film. Look to the story's subject for inspiration. For example, if you're making a movie about a cleaning lady, draw title credits on a wall with crayons and have them get "cleaned away". I'm merely thinking off the top of my head, but if you think long enough, you will probably find something so unique for your story that's it's probably not been done yet.

Here are some of my favorite title credit sequences, with a few comments about each.

Delicatessen

Delicatessen -movie titles from DoYouReadMe?! on Vimeo.

Jeunet and Caro do some great titles with all their movies, but this is perhaps their best. If you're a fan of Delicatessen, check out the simple credits for their brilliant short film Foutaises.


Se7en

David Fincher hired Kyle Cooper to do these credits as a "mini-film", and the results speak for themselves. Following Se7en, Cooper went on to do over 150 movie credits sequences.


Thank You For Smoking

These are not my favorite, but they do capture the spirit of the film.


Dawn of The Dead

By splicing real news, fake news, and chaotic shots of zombies, these credits set a perfect tone for the film. Not to mention that the title sequence bridges the time gap from when the lead character goes to sleep and wakes up the following morning. Credits again by Kyle Cooper.


Serenity

Serenity's first 15 minutes are more than just title credits—they deftly outline a complicated backstory, introduce you to the Firefly ship, all of the Firefly's passengers, the story's villain, and finally hint at where the story is headed. This part of the title sequence starts with the main title and ends halfway through the credits. I challenge you to remember how many names you see on the screen.


Firefly

I put these in not because they're my favorite credits, but because they contrast so much with Serenity's credits, the movie version of the Firefly TV series; these credits introduce the series' characters and clearly set the tone of the series as half sci-fi and half Western.


Six Feet Under

Genius imagry set to music by Thomas Newman. If you knew nothing about this series, you'd get a pretty damned good idea after watching these credits.


Drive

From a cancelled series, but still fun to watch. You get a sense of the kinetic when watching these credits.


Battlestar Galactica

This is a clever 3 part mix: 1st part tells you what you need to know about the Cylons, 2nd part sketches out the backstory of how they Cylons are chasing humans, and the 3rd part shows lightning flash clips of the show for that episode.


Mission Impossible
(TV show, 60s)

Battlestar: Galactica got their 3rd part technique from an old 1960s show. Sure, this dates a lot now, but it still captures a feel for the action spy genre. And remember that these kinds of clips were done on film, not video, so you can just imagine how hard it was to do each opening sequence.


Mission: Impossible
(TV show, 1988)

A little more slick than the 60s, but the format is generally the same.


Tomorrow I'll show how I'm doing credits for a low-budget film... for less than one dollar.

George Lucas on Charlie Rose

One of the best hours I ever spent watching TV. Lucas has a lot of insight to impart about the nature and traditions of cinema, among other things. The part I most remember about this interview was Lucas talking about fresco painting vs. oil painting (around 28 minutes). A must watch:

Tuesday, 7PM: Open for Business

As of 7PM yesterday, the WGA strike is officially over. This is great news—nay, fantastic news—and deserves some closing remarks.

Why did the strike happen at all? How could it have gotten so bad that writers thought their chances of getting a better deal would require walking out on work altogether? Why did the AMPTP offer so many rollbacks and no residuals on the internet before the strike, only to cave at the end of the strike?

Here's what I think...

Hollywood moguls were under pressure with their Wall Street investors to perform financially. The AMPTP was watching an emerging new media—the internet—where they they had been labeling webisodes and mobisodes as "promotionals" to encourage viewers to get hooked on a given series. Once a full episode had been broadcast, it was cheaper to re-broadcast those episodes and also label them "promotionals". Because webisdoes, mobisodes, and full-episode internet broadcasts were considered promotionals, aka "freebies", nobody can be paid from them or the AMPTP loses money.

Since the writers went on strike in 1988 and were convinced then to accept a debilitating residual rate on video rentals for VHS (the AMPTP's tack then was, "we don't know yet if there will be any money in home video rentals or DVD sales, but don't worry, we'll take care of you next time..."), the AMPTP thought they could pull the same stunt again. After all, the WGA is a guild, i.e., a loosely knit, geographically decentralized group, not like a company of workers, so if a strike occurs, it should be easy to whittle down the writers' collective resolve as the months would drag on. And to remind the writers on who's the boss, the AMPTP would start by offering writers 34 pages of rollsback on pension, health care, etc. so writers have to claw past all those rollbacks first and not have enough gumption left over to dispute the Big Kahuna, internet residuals. Essentially, divide & conquer.

What they didn't count on was:

1. Writers have a long-term memory. The DVD medium for digital entertainment is already on its way out, soon to be replaced by the internet, and writers haven't forgotten how they got screwed the last time around with the residual rates for home video rentals and DVD sales. Like an abused lover, writers grew some self-respect since the last strike.
   
2. Writers had the high moral ground. Writers weren't asking for a lot, just to receive residuals as authors of their work as if they were book authors and songwriters. Even then, they weren't asking for a set fee, but a percentage of profits—"If you don't get paid, we don't get paid." Writers slept the sleep of The Pure; their resolve was absolute.
   
3. Writers are writers. The AMPTP might have waged an effective war in the trade magazines, but writers make their money with words, so over time, the court of public opinion swayed in their favor. It's kind of absurd for the AMPTP to tell Wall Street investors they expect to make tons of money off new media but tell writers there's not enough money to pay residuals fees to compliment meager upfront costs.

The strike's over. United we stood, united we won.

EPILOGUE
Every battle has its compromises and some items were left on the table. The WGA wanted to bring reality TV writers under the WGA umbrella, but had to cut that lifeline, for now. Most of us would assume reality TV shows don't even use writers... I mean, it's reality TV—what's there to write? While that's true to an extent, the AMPTP does hire "Consulting Producers" or "Story Editors", which is basically the AMPTP trying to give a title to these people which doesn't include the word "writer" for fear the WGA would try to have them covered, which means the AMPTP would then have to pay benefits, pensions, meaning less profit. But what does a "Consulting Producer" or "Story Editor" actually do? They create situations (scenes), they might help cast talent that best interact with each other (character creation), and develop each episode's rough storyline (story arcs). So in many respects, these people are a new breed of writer.

Thus, they also ought to be covered by the WGA.

But you can't win them all. Looking forward to 2011...

Which pencil goes down?

Writers can write spec scripts, but they have to be truly spec scripts—outside of any contractual relationship, expressed or implied, with a producer. —WGA spokesman Gregg Mitchell

In the midst of this writers' strike, many writers are still unclear what they can and can't write.

Take this L.A. Times article:

"Surely, we can write a spec, right?" asked Tim Fall, another WGA screenwriter and actor....

A few minutes later, Fall [had] resolved the spec issue, sort of. "My lawyer e-mailed me," he said, holding up his BlackBerry. The verdict, he said, was that writers "are not enjoined" from writing spec scripts, but that it was nonetheless "potentially a gray zone."

Great. Big help.

What are the guidelines in this new war zone? For starters, the WGA has drawn up its own Strike Rules:

1. Stop writing for all struck companies immediately.
   
2. Do not deliver or submit any literary material or any documents to a struck company.
   
3. Do not negotiate with a struck company.
   
4. Notify struck companies to return your literary material.
   
5. Do not discuss future employment, sales or options with a struck company.
   
6. Do not negotiate with a struck company to obtain financing for development or production of a project.
   
7. Honor all Guild picket lines and do not enter the premises of any struck company.
   
8. File with the Guild copies of all unproduced literary material written for a struck company ("script validation program").
   
9. Inform the Guild of the name of any writer you have reason to believe is engaged in any strike breaking activity or scab writing.
   
10. You have the obligation to picket and/or perform other strike support duties.
    
11. Do not attempt to negotiate a settlement of the strike with any struck company.

That sounds to me like WGA writers are still free to write whatever they want as long as it isn't intended to be for pay. You can write a spec screenplay for yourself, but—for the duration of the strike—not with the intent to sell that spec to anyone in particular. Obviously, that's cold comfort to serial TV writers, but feature writers can dig out their wildest script ideas and go crazy. These scripts might get sold one day, but they're not being written to be sold. A hazy difference, perhaps, but an important one. Writers have writing in their veins... telling a writer not to write at all is like telling the sun not to rise.

The WGA also has this to say about non-members:

The Guild does not have the authority to discipline non-members for strike breaking and/or scab writing. However, the Guild can and will bar that writer from future Guild membership. This policy has been strictly enforced in the past and has resulted in convincing many would-be strike breakers to refrain from seriously harming the Guild and its members during a strike. Therefore, it is important for you to report to the Guild the name of any non-member whom you believe has performed any writing services for a struck company and as much information as possible about the non-member's services.

In a union-happy town like L.A., having your WGA membership barred is pretty bad news. Some writers are cavalier about crossing the picket line, which is highly risky, because if the WGA doesn't unconditionally and indefinitely welcome them into the picket line (as wise strikers would do), it's career suicide.

Why Writers Must Strike

WGA member Harold Gould explains, without hyperbole or venom, why writers must strike:

Monday, 12:01 AM: Closed For Business

As I type this, negotiators for the Writers Guild of America sit opposite negotiators for the American Motion Picture and Television Producers. Their meeting will hopefully avert a crippling industry-wide strike. We'll see how that plays out.

I hate strikes. I do. I loathe them. In my experience, strikes usually incur an unreasonable degree of collateral damage to the faultless public. No matter how you slice that, strikes typically fuel a venomous word of mouth from which few participants ever totally recover. On top of that, strikes have always felt to me like a legal equivalent to bullying... and blackmail. And I'm not even a dues-paying WGA member, so this writer's strike doesn't really affect me. Or does it?

I do get offered film writing gigs of all sorts.

Thus, after having studied what writers are fighting to achieve with this strike, I can't, with a clear conscience, accept any writing contracts from producers for the entire duration of a WGA strike.

Writers are not asking for the moon, and it seems like they've taken every step to appeal to the AMPTP's common sense. However, when logic fails...

Pencils down means pencils down.

Respectfully, then, this is for all producers out there: for the duration of a WGA strike, I cannot accept any writing work for motion pictures, including: script & story consultation, feature script writing & rewriting, outlines, treatments, log lines, dialog polishes, character bios. Nothing. My writing factory will be closed for business until further notice, which is a polite way of saying, "Please don't ask me to do any writing work." It will just result in an awkward conversation as I offer a ham-fisted explanation why a non-WGA member is essentially joining a WGA picket line.

Perhaps my response would be this simple: one day I will be a WGA member and on that Day of Days, I couldn't proudly stand beside my WGA colleagues with the knowledge that, in their greatest hour of need, I was a scab undermining everything they risked their livelihoods to secure. Most important of all, one day, all the benefits the WGA are fighting for now, will benefit me, so accepting work during a writers' strike would be like shooting myself in the face.

If this morning's negotiations fail, the WGA's strike is scheduled to begin Monday, November 5, 2007 at 12:01 AM.

On Writers & Strikes—Mining gold?

In Jonathan Tasini's article, Greed Is Good: How Big Media Wants To Steal From Its Workers, he makes a point that rings true, even if not backed up by cold hard facts:

While the media titans like Murdoch and Iger run around crying poverty, out of one side of their mouths, and an inability to pay writers, they run to Wall Street, investors and media analysts and speak a different tone: they claim, individually, that their company is on the leading edge of new media and can be counted on to continue to capitalize on the explosion in new media uses...and, therefore, the Street, investors and analysts should have great faith in their leadership...and value their stocks accordingly. They sell advertising based on flogging their companies as the leaders in the business. So, in one place they cry "uncertainty"—when it comes to paying writers their fair share—and in another forum they cry, "we are future-looking geniuses cashing in on the Internet gold." Link.

I'd really like to see are the balance sheets of all the Big Media companies. If they're really keeping 99.7% of the the pie, where in the hell is it going? Into an ING savings account to weather this uncertain future they keeping talking about? Into the pockets of the CEOs? (Quoting a Forbes article, Tasini reveals the average 2006 annual income of CEOs at Time Warner, Disney, CBS, and New Corp. is $20 million. That's average.)

So which is it, AMPTP? Are you mining gold or not? I have yet to hear the AMPTP's side of the story. Somebody please help me out here.

On Writers & Strikes: Richard Cox reply

Over on Myspace, fellow novelist Richard Cox posted this response to last night's blog about the WGA strike. I had a lengthy reply I'd prefer to not get lost in the Myspace ether, so I'm reposting here for posterity.

Richard's reply:

Even after reading your blog I'm not sure I understand the situation well enough to comment.

However, as a novelist, I don't incur any risk when selling my novel to a publisher. The publisher shells out the money to print the book and market it (although in my case, they didn't shell out much for marketing, haha.)

And yet I am still paid for each book sold, assuming I earn out my advance.

It boggles my mind that you could write a brilliant screenplay or teleplay and be paid a flat fee no matter how well it performed.

From my uneducated position, writing suffers when you treat it as a commodity. I realize producers believe they can take any high-concept piece of junk screenplay and, with the right actors and director, turn it into a moneymaker.

But why don't they learn from the lessons of really awesome movies that are well written that become juggernauts? Why do they accept mediocrity?

And then there is the whole argument of how a brilliant screenplay becomes a lump of generic mashed potatoes after studio people muck it up with test screening results. In trying to minimize risk, they ruin the chance to make a mint. And the original writer probably doesn't want to claim those mashed potatoes, anyway.

Posted by Richard on Thursday, November 01, 2007 at 8:00 AM

And my reply:

I did gloss over a few points to make the issues more palatable, but the gist is there. Perhaps the most important point I did not make is that there isn't One True Way to offer financial remuneration from producers to writers—there is only precedent, and precedent is always rooted in historical and cultural contexts. In Europe or Asia, they may treat this issue in an entirely different way. Nevertheless, all that is really moot: what matter is what has been done in the past and how the present deals on the table relate to past precedent.

In the past, writers have been offered what's called "scale", or a salaried pay, which is agreed upon three years advance in a document called the Schedule of Minimums (which you can find online here). Much like an advance for novelists, it has to be done this way because what happens if the final product, for whatever reason, does not get produced? At least the creator's time has been appropriately reimbursed. Writers do get residuals from DVD sales (see the car/idea analogy above), but writers feel like they got screwed 20 years ago on that deal. Internet residuals are on the table and they're not making the same mistake twice.

However, producers paying scale mean they're shouldering the cost and that means financial risk until the product makes money. For novels, there is relatively low cost incurred compared to films because a publisher can issue multiple prints to gauge market interest whereas only one film or set of TV episodes is "published" at once. Movie producers have a lot at risk, financially speaking, and when money comes into the picture, people tend to get gunshy. (The solution here is obvious: make all writers producers by forcing them to invest their own money up front. That would change their toon pretty bloody quickly!)

Novels are also a low collaboration medium, compared to movies. As Orson Welles said, "A poet needs a pen, an artist, a brush, and a filmmaker—an army." So the payout structure for films calls for a lot of employees to make the product, whereas with a novel, you need three people: the novelist, the publisher, and the printer; in some cases, the novelist is even the publisher, too. It would be pretty cheeky for a publisher to pay a novelist $100,000 for a novel and then make $10,000,000 without any kind of royalties since the novelist is the TOTAL creator of his medium. Comparatively, a screenwriter is just a blueprint maker, since actors, directors, and even producers can add their 2 cents along the serpentine path to the movie theatre. Should the actors, directors and producers then receive a residual based on their input? It's a slippery slope.

The answer to your question about why producers don't learn from the lessons of well-written films is simple: it's about money. Producers want to make hits, so their initial intent is to make the next American Beauty, but along the way, producers (or more accurately, producers' employees) have second-thoughts—what if the script I'm gunning for doesn't do well?—and thus the truly original writing self-selects out. In this respect, literary writers will always hold a trump card over screenwriters. If a novelist or journalist fails, they wipe egg off their face, but if a screenwriter fails, their producer's very career is at stake.

Thanks for posting! It's good to have another writer's perspective. I neglected to mention that the National Writers Union (nwu.org) recently supported the WGA strike; they are a "United nationwide local of the United Auto Workers representing (at this point) about 2000 freelance journalists, book authors, PR writers, etc."

On Writers & Strikes

After living in France, I really hate strikes. French workers seem like they'll strike if you look at them funny. Going on strike always felt like a form of blackmail, yet it can be an effective, and legal, tool to get things done. You can't talk from a position of power if you don't have a loaded gun readily visible... and the willpower to use it, even as a last resort after every attempt at amicable resolution has failed.

The Writers' Guild (WGA) is on the brink of a massive strike, so of course, I've got mixed feelings about it: if this strike goes ahead as planned, and continues until January, TV programs will start to get pushed around. After that, movies at the theatre will become affected. Basically, it's equal opportunity nastiness for everyone involved.

There's an old story about two children fighting over who should get the last slice of pizza. A parent overhears the argument and suggests they share the slice. But whoever cuts it, someone is probably going to get a larger slice... so the parent suggests that the first child cuts the pizza, and the second child selects which slice the first one gets. The result: both slices are exactly the same size.

This is the essence of any equitable negotiation—if each side can place themselves in the shoes of their adversary and design a solution preferable to their adversary, but solution which also seems fair for themselves, then the pizza has been cut exactly down the middle.

Thus, I've been following the WGA's conflicts with the AMPTP with great interest. Is one side asking for more of a pizza slice than the other? From what I've read, I don't think so, but then I haven't read what the AMPTP is saying about the negotiations. Obviously, as a writer, I'm biased towards the WGA's point of view, but if the WGA is only asking for what's fair and reasonable, why haven't they already gotten it? The AMPTP aren't villains with curly mustaches—they're people like anyone else and people always act to forward their own interests. Unfortunately, that approach doesn't always forward everyone else's interests. Why isn't the AMPTP agreeing to the WGA's demands?

I read this a half hour ago, from the WGA's Contract Captain Laeta Kalogridis:

I like the industry I work in. I have great respect for the men and women on both sides of the table—people I work with, and the people I work for. I get crazy with it, we all do, but at the end of the day I get to do what I love, and I’m grateful for that.

I’m also a working mother of two young boys, and the sole breadwinner for our family. I take my financial responsibilities very seriously, because they are serious.

This means, obviously, that I don’t want a strike.

But I also don’t want a terrible deal.

And for the last 27 years, here’s what’s happened to us as writers: slowly but steadily, we’ve lost, or had gutted, our rights on every new platform. VHS, DVD’s, cable, reality.

Now, for the first time in more than a quarter-century, we are refusing to back off of a new platform. We want to share in the new media and internet revenues that we are already helping create. They don’t want to share with us. It’s about that simple. Link.

I spoke to Hans about this a while back and he offered this insight on how a producer sees things: say you've spent 50% on overhead and you've promised 30% to residuals, and you keep 20% for yourself. What happens if your overhead rises to 70% or 80%? You go out of business. Obviously, producers want to make money in entertainment, but more importantly, they want to stay around long enough to do it. Residuals for a producer equal money out the door and that means less financial stability. I can't say I disagree with that perspective.

It got me thinking about the structure of financial remuneration in general. If you're a business owner, you put in sweat equity and your financial backers put in financial equity. You invest time, they invest money. Whatever profits are left over are usually split down the middle. But if your business requires employees, do they split that profit with you, too? After all, they worked for it as well. Right?

No. Employees are work-for-hires, and as such are given a static fee in exchange for their time. They work 40 hours per week, they go home, you pay them X amount, and they don't share the profits with you. But you work 100+ hours per week to make the business a success and split the profits of your hard work with your investors. It's like slicing that pizza.

The question is, are writers work-for-hire employees or business owners? They're acting as if they're business owners, but they're taking a salary check like work-for-hire employees.

Now, finally, we're at the core issue of this new world of distributing digital entertainment: ownership vs. licensing. If I bought a car from you, I would own the car and could do whatever I want with it and you can't say squat. Instead of a car, though, I'm buying your time, and when your time is up, you go home and you don't get to tell me what I do with the product you helped me create—that's the structure of a work-for-hire arrangement.

With licensing, everything changes. You retain ownership, but I control the car. I can't destroy the car without being accountable to you, but you can't tell me where I can and can't drive the car. Most importantly, if I make money with my new car, you are entitled to share in a small amount of those profits, otherwise known as residuals.

The clash of ideals is intrinsic when selling art. Is it still art after you sell it? Is art a commodity if you never sell it? Writers are artists, but the rules of commerce insist a price tag is put on their intellectual creations as if their property were a car.

So is the car bought outright? Or is it licensed?

Hollywood doesn't want business partners to split their profits... they want work-for-hires, even if a long tradition exists of offering back end points ("monkey points") on projects so bad that the producer can't get a proper budget to pay writers as work-for-hires. The movie business isn't like other businesses. How many other professions offer their employees back end points?

Furthermore, the car analogy breaks down when looking at the question of scale. For example, I can only buy a car from you once and sell it once, but I can buy an idea from you once—for $1—and then sell that idea a million times for a penny. If I sell it a million times and I own the idea, am I legally obligated to offer you a residual payment? I might be ethically obligated, but legally? Of course I wouldn't be legally obligated—because you had no obligation to sell me the idea at the price I was asking. But you did. And once you did, it became my idea, not yours.

And there's the issue.

The WGA is arguing (among other things) to be paid residuals for the reuse of their content... even though writers are work-for-hire employees. As Mark Kemp always used to say, "Perhaps I don't understand—you want to share the rewards, but you don't want to shoulder any of the risk? Can you please tell me how that's fair?"

Writers have the trump card, though. Their position is pretty reasonable: if a film they write makes no money, writers get paid no residuals. Yet if the film is wildly successful, writers should get a small slice of that pizza. They don't want the whole slice, but they would like something. This structure doesn't bankrupt producers, and it provides writers incentive to create wildly successful projects. Everyone wins.

Even so, producers will still grab whatever they can get, and they have a powerful reach. Case in point, Terry Rossio talks about his experience with Disney, and after reading this, it's really hard not to see the AMPTP as greedy zombies drinking the blood of newborn babies:

We are told, regarding royalties, that Disney's position on merchandising is that the characters, items, ships, locations, etc., are not described in enough detail in the screenplay in order to be considered anything other than generic. This allows them to sell a Jack Sparrow figure, dressed like the character from the movie, with scenes we created referenced on the packaging, and when you press a button Jack actually speaks six different lines of dialogue straight from the film—but that's really just a 'generic' pirate, and so you pay the writers nothing. (The way the legal definitions work, only the 'look' of the item matters, not what is spoken, and payments are made on the spoken words only if they are part of the separated rights agreement, such as a live performance.) My flight of fancy would be to manufacture the exact same figure saying the same lines and watch how fast Disney would sue for copyright infringement. Somehow they are able to hold the contradictory positions that the same figure that is indeed unique enough to be protected via copyright is somehow also not quite unique enough to qualify for merchandising payments to the writers.

To date, the WGA has a 90% strike authorization vote, and the Teamsters have decided to informally stand with the WGA (the Teamsters can't order their drivers not to cross picket lines, but their union can't punish anyone for individually deciding to cross the line). SAG has also voiced support for the WGA. That's bad news for the AMPTP.

I hate strikes, but in this case, it seems like the writers make a very good case, and AMPTP really hasn't been listening. Even if the AMPTP is right about the specifics of these negotiations, too many writers have been taken advantage of for way too long. Payback's going to hurt. Can you hear the world's smallest violins?

Further reading about the WGA, the AMPTP, and other entertainment news:
The Artful Writer
United Hollywood
Deadline Hollywood Daily

Pink Pages

I was an Associate Producer on a feature about six months ago and way too many script changes were flying around. Nobody seemed to be aware of the utility of having locked pages or how to manage script revisions using pink pages, so I took the initiative to detail the pink page process I learned years ago. (Some parts of this process aren't exactly standard Hollywood because I work as a Script Supervisor and use Final Draft, the industry standard for writing screenplays, but my guidelines do seem to make things easier to follow, so take whatever's helpful and leave the rest.)

WHAT ARE PINK PAGES?
Anytime revisions are made to a script, it's often hard to keep track of them. Visual markers are needed to quickly show everyone what was changed. To solve this, asterisks were added in the right margin on each line that was changed, but that wasn't enough—each page with a revision was also printed on a colored page. New sets of revisions, or "pink pages", are circulated until more than a quarter of the entire script has been revised, after which a pristine white draft is reissued and the process begins again.

THE PINK PAGE PROCESS
First of all, each draft's page numbers are locked—they will not change. This means breakdown sheets can be done without scene and page numbers changing on the fly and everyone can literally stay on the same page. You can always tell which draft you have because the draft number and date is printed at the top right of each script page, just to the left of the page number. If you are looking at a revised page, the top right will instead have the revision set number and the date of that revision set.

REVISIONS: Chain of Command
1) You see a typo, a continuity problem, or anything which doesn't make sense and probably needs to be fixed in the script.
2) You bring your comment to the Script Super first, not the Director.
3) The Script Super adds all revisions to the latest list of revisions, but doesn't change the script yet...
4) The Script Super shows all the changes to the Writer, Director, UPM, the Line Producer, DP, and the 1st A.D. Once all those department heads approve the changes, or adjust them as needed, the Script Super adds the revisions to the script and prints out a new revision set, assigning it a revision set number and a date on the top right side of each page, to the left of the page number.
5) Revised pages are copied on a color-coded page corresponding to that set of revisions (see below).
6) Everyone gets a copy of the newly revised pages, although when the next set of revisions is distributed depends on how urgent the corrections are. (Obviously, actors get dialogue changes pronto, while the Line Producer needs changes that affect the budget, etc.)

REVISIONS: Methodology
Whenever revisions are made to the script (scenes added, omitted, or altered), redistribute new pages for everyone. With each set of revisions, the pages should be copied on different colored paper and have the date of the revision in the top right hand corner: "Rev. 8/31/06"

These color-coded revision pages are commonly referred to as "Pink Pages", even though they are not necessarily pink.

This is the color key for each set of "Pink Pages":
1st Revision—Blue
2nd Revision—Pink
3rd Revision—Yellow
4th Revision—Green
5th Revision—Gold
6th Revision—Back to white

"Someone handed me a set of revised pages (or 'Pink Pages')... what do I do?"
Use the page numbers as a guide to replace the pages in your script with the revised pages... and throw away your old pages. For example, if pages are added between page 16 and page 17, you will be handed revised pages with numbers 16A, 16B, 16C, etc.—put these in between pages 16 & 17; if pages are deleted between page 16 and page 24, you will receive a new page 16 with a page number of "16-23"; any omitted scenes will simply say 10 OMIT 10 (for scene 10).

The following people must receive copies of the Pink Pages:
Script Supervisor
Director
1st A.D.
Line Producer
UPM
Propmaster
Wardrobe
Makeup
Writer
All lead actors

If at any time during the shoot, you are missing a set of "pink pages", ask the Script Super.

Network TV, the hungry giants

The best article I ever read about the inner workings of TV production was Minimum Headroom by Benjamin J. Stein, and I read it in the February 1988 issue of Playboy magazine. Yes, you read that right—we do sometimes read it for the articles. Not that I was a Playboy subscriber, but a fellow screenwriter matter-of-factly handed me the article and said, "Read this."

20 years later and all the machinations laid down in Stein's article are still painfully true because the main principles haven't changed: the more people have at risk, the more gunshy they get. TV delivers a weekly product which must deliver on its promise as many as 24 times a year... and some kinds of revenue streams dry up quickly if you lose your audience because you try something nobody has ever done before.

Stein's premise centered around the principle of self-censorship: top network execs want something fresh and original, so they order their assistants to go forth and find a new series, something more like Monty Python or Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Their assistants may indeed find hundreds of fresh and original scripts, but hesitate recommending the really original stuff for fear the new series is so original that it can't find an audience. Who recommended this steamy turdpile???, a network exec might scream after the show spectacularly flops. And so ends the new career of a rising network exec, punished for following orders to find something fresh and original. Thus, top network execs are only recommended the safer choices, similar remakes of The Cosby Show and Golden Girls. Hesitant to be remembered for backing a series that killed the network, even the top network exec reneges on his promise to provide "fresh and original" programming. The cycle continues.

This is why programming quality on ad-based network TV has taken a nose dive, and subscription-based cable TV has thrived: network TV dies without its advertising so weekly ratings become disproportionately important while cable execs can experiment with more ease of mind.

Consider the immensely clever Firefly, a Joss Whedon creation which could have successfully found a larger following... if only FOX hadn't cancelled it after 13 episodes. Or Tim Minear's (a Firefly co-creator!) more recent series Drive, cancelled after only 4 episodes, again by FOX. By contrast, a series like HBO's Six Feet Under and Deadwood can take risks and not worry about losing too many viewers because truly original programming is what HBO subscribers are expecting. But for network TV, too much is riding on the line... if a series on network TV doesn't look like it's going to find an audience immediately, it gets the axe. Network TV is a hungry giant wandering around for a big meal: a house salad—which is sufficient for many—isn't going to satisfy his mammoth appetite.

This can only end badly. Most of these giants will starve and die off, but some of them will have to learn to live with smaller appetites. This will most likely have a ripple effect for everyone else in the industry—lower salaries for network execs and series creators will spur an exodus to cable networks like TNT and Lifetime, a paucity of network programming will foster more creative advertising and/or more original programming. But who knows how it will finally play out?

Here's a great article that explains why this summer's best TV isn't on the main network channels:

Rick Kushman: Best dramas not on broadcast networks
By Rick Kushman - Bee Columnist
Last Updated 6:49 am PDT Monday, August 20, 2007

This has been some summer for TV dramas.

If you've been watching the broadcast networks, that makes no sense to you. TV's big dogs are twiddling around with game shows and talent contests. But out on cable, and just basic cable, there's some good television going on.

Here's a partial list of the new stuff: "Saving Grace" on TNT; "Damages" on FX; "Mad Men" on AMC; "Burn Notice" on USA; "Army Wives" and "State of Mind" on Lifetime; and "Kill Point" on Spike TV.


And here are some of the stars involved: Holly Hunter, Glenn Close, Kim Delaney, Lili Taylor and John Leguizamo.

That doesn't include the continuing cable series airing this summer like TNT's "The Closer" and FX's "Rescue Me." That's about as much excitement as you'll find in the networks' new fall seasons, and the success rate is already way higher. All of the new cable shows are drawing solid ratings or good reviews, and most have been renewed.

And notice what some of these networks are. Lifetime, home of women-in-peril movies and sap. Spike, ground zero for testosterone-fueled anything. Their new shows have the old Lifetime and Spike DNA, but they're still better than anything either network has done in a while.

So, what's going on here?

It all starts with two facts about summer. First, fewer people watch TV when the weather is good and the days are longer. Plus, the networks can't afford to make new scripted dramas and comedies all year long, so summer -- when TV use is down -- seems a good time to bail and go with cheaper game and reality shows.

Cable networks, on the other hand, can live with lower ratings. They spend less on their original shows -- usually that means fewer big-money stars and faster production schedules -- and they air a lot of repeat programming. (They also get revenue from the cable systems, such as Comcast, that carry them, but the class on TV financing is for another day.)

In any case, TNT, USA and the others can survive with smaller audiences. If 3 million or 4 million people watch a basic-cable show, that's a good payday. If 4 million viewers watch "Shaq's Big Challenge," which was about the number for ABC's good-hearted reality series this summer, it's a disaster.

And because the broadcast nets don't air many original dramas in the summer, that lets the cable folks launch their new shows with much less competition.

The last piece of the picture is that the bar has been raised on cable, by shows such as "The Closer" and FX's "The Shield" and "Nip/Tuck," by pay-cable channels HBO and Showtime, and by all of the competition out in the culture for viewer attention and entertainment dollars.

"Cable has kind of changed the landscape," Hunter, star of "Saving Grace," told TV critics last month. "It happens to be made for less money. And so risks can be greater because less cash is at risk. And it's not in competition with the networks. So every single thing about it adds up for the people who were wanting to take some chances."

Specifically, that means, say, AMC doesn't have to try to make a show with a broad- enough appeal to draw 10 million-plus viewers. And often, broad appeal means rounding off some of the sharper edges and themes of a series.

Instead, AMC is a smaller cable network that just needs to give people a new reason to tune in, and it's doing that with "Mad Men," a smart, moody period drama about Madison Avenue in 1960.

(The show is averaging a bit more than 1 million viewers, which is still a big increase over anything AMC has aired recently.)

Matt Weiner, the creator of "Mad Men," wrote for HBO's "The Sopranos" and told TV critics he believes his show has benefited from the HBO-like patience and creative freedom AMC showed Weiner when he was developing the new series.

"These people, they really like this thing," Weiner said. "They want to do a show based on quality, and when you hear them say the word 'quality,' they're not saying it in that fake way... They really mean it."

Stars such as Hunter, "State of Mind's" Taylor and "Damages' " Close all told critics separately during the TV Critics Association press tour in July that the writing on some cable shows is actually better than anything they're offered in the feature world, and as Close said, it's always a good career move to "go where the writing is."

And because the cable networks are trying to be original and challenging -- to offer something different from the often-safer network fare -- a lot of the new cable dramas feature anti-heroes like Close's and Hunter's characters. And they feature women leads who are over 40 years old or, in Close's case, 60.

There are a lot of reasons for that, but a big one is that many of the cable shows are just trying to break old molds. Taylor said that television and movies used to work off of basic formulas, which made for simple, unrealistic women characters.

But the demand for better TV forced writers to break out, and female characters became "less two-dimensional and more complicated."

Less two-dimensional and more complicated pretty much describes the entire crop of new cable shows.

Successful is another description, and that's got the broad-cast networks thinking they can't give away their summer audiences much longer.

ABC entertainment president Steve McPherson told TV critics that maybe the networks have to revamp their annual plans: "We'd like to get some original scripted (shows), both drama and comedy, on next summer."

The Kashi Shoot

Worked on a great shoot as Script Supervisor this last Saturday for Kashi. As the photos here show, Kashi pulled out all the stops to make their commercial the best it could be. Frankly, I was surprised they shot a TV commercial on 35mm:

The biggest problem doing continuity on commercials is the pace. The day starts out fine with the 1st A.D. highlighting which scenes are the most important for continuity, but then the lighting takes longer than expected, the instructions get garbled, equipment invariably malfunctions and all the while the sun is moving relentlessly forward. Suddenly, you're under the gun and a continuity question has to be answered in 10 seconds rather than 2 minutes, which makes it hard to give the right answer but you do your best and take snapshots of everything. The good news is that continuity usually doesn't matter too much on a commercial, but you can't count on an editor to give you that grace; as the master of continuity, your job is to kill continuity errors before they get in the can.

The catering on this shoot was spectacular. Breakfast included scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, fruit salad... but lunch was astonishing: tri-tip, chicken, sweet corn on the cob, roasted peppers, Portobello mushrooms, wheat rolls, seasoned butter... as I was chowing down these delicacies, I realized that their catering had to be outstanding. This was, after all, a company whose product was nutritional food, and the commercial was about trading in bad food for "stuff that makes you feel good." If they had served McDonald's-type fast food, Kashi would have quickly gained a reputation for hypocrisy. Instead, they implicitly bribed 60+ cast & crew to tout Kashi's gastronomic good will forever. Everything you do is publicity, even if it's off-camera.

The most interesting part of this shoot was filming the product shots at the end of day. The grips and P.A.'s spent many, many hours constructing a black tented studio right there on the grass in Land Park. It's kind of surreal to walk into a black hooded box where at least 10 crew members are already assembled—Director, DP, 1st A.C., 2nd A.C., Production Designer, Gaffer, 2 Grips, Script Super and Client(s)—and feel like you're on a studio lot, but then look down and see grass under your feet. Then you wait while the D.P. makes countless tweaks to get precisely the lighting he wants. As frustrating as it is to wait for the lighting to be "just right", this caliber of filmmaking is motion photography as its finest. Truly, an art form.

Also check out the photos of the cantilevered pulley mounted on the dolly to keep the heavy 35 mm camera hanging in mid-air. That's a clever tool to simulate handheld shots while keeping the weight off the shoulders of the D.P.

Did I mention the temperature got up to 104°? Man, was I happy I brought sunscreen.

Monkey Points

When Frank Capra was asked what made his films so appealing, he described his famous "Capra Touch", highlighting his choice of lighting, his great actors, and all manner of things... everything, in short, except the script. The next day, Capra received a script in the mail from a writer he'd recently worked with. Capra eagerly opened the script to find all 120 pages were totally blank. On the front page, the writer had scrawled: "Put the Capra Touch on this!"—Richard Walter, Screenwriting: The Art, Craft, and Business of Writing for Film and Television

Today I learned a new filmmaking term: "monkey points". This is odd because, having worked in low budget filmmaking for so long, you'd think I'd have heard about it sooner. I read it in the opening speech by John Bowman at the WGA's salary negotiations:

What other business but ours has the accounting term, "monkey points?"

What the hell?, I asked myself.

And here's what Wikipedia said:

In the motion picture industry, the term monkey points refers to the practice of many low budget production companies offering talent, such as actor or writer, a percentage of a film's profits, as opposed to a percentage of the film's gross, or a fixed salary. In this case, 'monkey' is intended to be derogatory. This term was coined by Eddie Murphy, who also stated that only a fool would accept net points in their contracts; always insist on gross points. Since such projects usually never make any money—at least on paper—the talent who accepts a percentage of the project's profits usually never makes any money. This is due to the infamous Hollywood accounting, where a studio manages to list every conceivable expense associated with running a studio as an expense of the film in question—eating up any gross profits. Writers and other lesser persons often get stuck with monkey points. Being a gross player, someone with enough clout to be given gross points, is not common in Hollywood.

I've been offered, and have taken, net points on films, and they rarely pay (although that's mainly because the films didn't make money, not because of the Hollywood accounting system). Usually, net points are used to convince you that the car you're driving is actually a beautiful painting, even though all evidence points to the contrary.

The fact that this term even exists is a sign for how creative financing can often be to get films made... and how foolish people are to accept this kind of lottery ticket salary. Writers are often stiffed in this process, especially when it concerns residuals. For example, of all secondary markets like broadcasting movies on TV, pay-per-view, and home video, the residual formulas dictate that writers are supposed to collect 1.2% of what the companies make, which the companies didn't want to pay, so in 1985, the companies decided to apply that 1.2% formula to only 20% of what they made. After two strikes by the WGA, the policy currently rests at the much-hated 1.5%–1.8% of 20% of what companies make on VHS and DVD.

So let's ask ourselves: if a screenplay is well written and the movie does well, doesn't the writer deserve a fair amount of that movie's residuals? Sure, producers and investors and actors all deserve a slice of the residuals pie as well, but without good writing, what is there to produce? What is there to invest in? What is there to act?

Nowhere was this salary divide clearer than when the new Battlestar Galactica produced webisodes to bridge the story from season 2 to season 3 and build buzz for its season 3 premiere:

The Webisodes themselves have caused a conflict between NBC and those involved in their development, relating to the royalties that the developers should receive. NBC Universal, the major studio behind the reimagined series, refused to pay or credit the webisode writers on the grounds that the webisodes were promotional materials. In response, Ronald D. Moore said he would no longer release any webisodes. NBC Universal then took control of the webisodes and filed an unfair labor practices suit against the Writers Guild of America. The Guild told Moore and other NBC Universal television show producers to halt production of any further webisodes until a deal over residuals had been reached.

Every three years, the Writer's Guild of America (WGA), and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), meet to hammer out how much professional writers get paid, and for what kind of work (treatments, rewrites, polishes, etc.). The finished document is called a Schedule of Minimums, as in minimum payments writers are to receive. With the rising popularity of streaming media, the issue of residuals is again a key negotiating point because nobody knows how the revenue stream for online digital entertainment will play out.

This opening speech by John Bowman on behalf of the WGA's Negotiating Committee perfectly articulates the issues writers face in modern-day Hollywood (my highlights are in boldface):

There is a real disconnect between what the [production] companies are reporting to Wall Street and what they’re saying to the talent community. Investors are hearing about the changing landscape in entertainment and exciting new markets to exploit. In contrast, the AMPTP communicates nothing but problems to the Writers Guild. Problems like—and this was mentioned by AMPTP at a recent press conference—ad skipping, even though NBC Universal had just announced a one billion dollar DVR deal. And while WGA member revenues have not kept pace with industry growth—we are a line item that is definitely under control—the companies balk at giving us a fair and reasonable share of the industry’s success.

I don’t think anyone in this room is arguing about the right of writers, actors, and directors to residuals. As collective authors of a work, we are entitled to a portion of the revenue generated by that work. But you have publicly stated that you no longer want to pay us residuals on shows that are not in profit. Here’s why that is untenable: Writers are a cost of doing business. They have no say in production, marketing, on advertising and publicity, directors, casting, the decision to spend tens of millions of dollars advertising, etc. They can’t be expected to be paid from profits when they have no say in the costs which affect those profits. Profits are under the control of CEOs and their executive staffs.

Intellectual property has rights, just as physical property does. Management has no problem paying the person who made the DVD box before a film turns a profit; they shouldn’t have any problem paying the artists who created the intellectual experience that came in that box either. To claim that intellectual property has lesser rights than physical property is a dangerous argument for anyone in our business to make. You are making the same argument to us that digital pirates make to you.

According to Hollywood accounting, The Simpsons is not in profits. How can we trust that kind of bookkeeping? What other business but ours has the accounting term, “monkey points?”

Residuals from shows not in “profit help” support a writing middle class, and keep writers in the business until they finally create that one great thing. Do away with residuals, and you do away with late-blooming careers like Marc Cherry and David Chase - they couldn’t afford to stay in the business. Your proposal transfers money from developing, promising writers, actors, and directors who need them the most to established pros who need them the least. It’s bad for the business.

This article has been a summary of two excellent pieces from The Artful Writer:
John Bowman - First Shot Fired
The Average Writer's Non-Biased Guide To The Upcoming WGA Negotiations