We Should Try This

Just finished listening to a great KCRW podcast with a very inspiring idea. The podcast was about how, faced with the implosion of the record business, musicians are trying out new and creative ways of building careers. The system is broken, and instead of trying to fix it they are taking matters into their own hands and trying out more individualized business plans. One of these – www.sellaband.com – is genius; musicians hold an IPO and sell shares of their future earnings to investors for cash. The website acts as a matchmaker, connecting investors to musicians and showcasing the musicians’ work. Anybody can invest, with shares going for only $10. With the help of the website, the musicians raise the money and then record and market their music. The resulting cds and digital downloads go up for sale to the public, with the investors and the musicians sharing the proceeds. Genius. Everybody wins.

Of course, the first thing I thought was – screenwriters should do this! I should do this! And I immediately thought this because, well, this is exactly what a friend of mine tried to work out back when I first moved out here over 10 years ago. He approached me and a couple of other guys – all 4 of us writers – and pitched this very idea. He had some contacts in the oil business back home in Houston, and maybe – just maybe – they could be convinced to invest in the future earnings of 4 young, ambitious screenwriters. We would raise as much as we could and then use this money to rent an office and pay ourselves regular salaries to come in to work and write screenplays. We could then be able to make a decent living while spending all our time writing. And without the need for day jobs, just think how much we could get done between the 4 of us in a year (or more) to pitch to the studios and production companies! I thought the idea was genius and was totally on board, but the thing fell apart before we could go to investors. What can I say. My friend was ahead of his time.

So how can writers use creative new business models like these? One advantage that musicians have in this set-up is that their finished products are just that – finished products, ready for sale to the public, at 99 cents a track. For writers, especially feature screenwriters and novelists, the marketplace for selling their “finished product” isn’t the public, but instead one much smaller and much more specialized. We should challenge ourselves to come up with some kind of writers’ equivalent to sellaband.

And I’m not talking about established models like www.inktip.com and www.sellascript.com. Those are great for writers, don’t get me wrong, and my option made me a fan of inktip for life. But never forget that the business plan for those sites is to generate as much money as possible for those sites, not for the writer himself. I’m talking about something more direct. Something to finance the writing process itself.

The traditional answer has been for writers to write shorter, more sellable material while waiting for their big break – specifically writing for magazines and newspapers. Writing for the web is the obvious promised land, but I still see it as merely the most recent iteration of this traditional “day job” solution. During the strike there was all kinds of talk about Hollywood writers jumping into new ventures in the web, shredding the traditional models and getting radical, but you don’t hear so much about those ideas these days. Anybody can write and shoot a movie and put it up on YouTube, and for next to nothing. And then there’s the supposed upcoming era of the 2-minute “webisode.” But I am ambivalent about these – writing and producing short films or even shorter pieces of short films is very different from writing features. And if you want to write features, the best way to get practice is by… writing features.

Maybe my hesitancy is just the kind of old-school rigidity that is exactly the enemy in this whole issue, but I’m not convinced. The idea here is to be bold, and I don’t think a day job writing for a website while writing a real movie after work is much bolder than a day job writing for traditional media while writing a real movie after work. I thought the whole idea was to use the power of the web to subvert the whole idea of the “day job” itself. But who am I? Just a guy who can’t even get a writing gig on the web and blogs for free… while writing a real movie after work at a day job.

So… who’s got the new business plan?

Free Script Coverage? Abbot Management?

Interesting… very interesting. Saw this on a blog a couple of days ago:

Abbot Management is currently accepting Film and Television Screenplays for consideration.

The Producers and Production Companies that accept our submissions expect a professional quality product. That being said, most of our Screenplay submissions will be rejected, some will be placed in our Development Library, and few will be selected for representation and sent out for Producer / Production Company consideration. Regardless of our decision, in most cases our coverages are forwarded onto our writers so they understand what works / does not work with their Screenplay – free of cost.

Free coverage? Nice. Usually writers pay services $60+ for “industry-quality” coverage of their scripts. Intrigued, I surfed on:

Our team includes an East Coast Manager, a West Coast Manager, an Entertainment Lawyer, a Development Manager, and fifteen Script Readers.

We currently represent 13 screenwriters and are developing the works of 28 Screenwriters in our Development Library. In our short history we have received over 500 submissions, and represent only the highest quality in film and television Screenplays.

[Note 12/15/09: The above info was accurate as of January 2008. It is my understanding that Abbot has now received over 2,000 script submissions, and I’m sure their staff/infrastructure has changed dramatically.]

Sounds great: best case = management, worst case = free coverage. I googled and found another blog mention, with an apparent quote from Tim Lambert, the guy who runs Abbot.

Why (I Think) Writers Are Miserable

Stay with me here (I’m still figuring this out):

Last week we were invited by some friends to join their Thanksgiving festivities. One of the other guests (I’ll call him Chuck) was an aspiring Hollywood writer. I know this because it was impossible for anyone in attendance to avoid learning this. Or avoid learning how many spec scripts Chuck has written. Or avoid hearing again how tough it is for Chuck to get a break in this business.

This guy annoyed the crap out of me.

Now wait – wait a second. This post is NOT a mean-spirited rant about this guy or how miserable he is.

The Strike (And Me) Part One

As the WGA strike enters its 4th week, things get more and more interesting around here. And by “here,” I mean the fringes of the business. With the strike, writers can’t write or submit anything and studios can’t read or buy anything. So… where does that leave all the agents?

If no deals are getting done and no money is changing hands, agents are starting to feel the squeeze. After all, 10% of nothing is nothing. But agents have one thing to look forward to: the after-strike euphoria. The longer the strike goes on, the longer there is nothing getting produced or bought or scheduled, the bigger the vacuum that is created. And once the strike ends, there will likely be this huge frenzy of buying and shooting as studios try to fill that pipeline with quick and constant product before dead air hits the TV and multiplex. At least, that’s what everyone is counting on.

So if you were an agent, and none of your existing clients will write anything new during a strike, and yet you want to accumulate as many scripts as you can to have ready to feed to this hungry beast once the fast is over, what do you do with all this free time brought to you by the strike? You go look for new writers to represent. And that means… Robb (and a hell of a lot of other writers on the fringes of legitimacy).

Since the strike began on November 1, my script downloads on inktip.com have picked up a little. I am sure there is a ton of increased traffic on the site, and I am getting a modest number of eyeballs. I’d been keeping an eye this and didn’t see anything to get excited about – until today. William Morris – one of the biggest and most powerful agencies in the business – today downloaded both my scripts on the market, Aftershocks and I Hate That Guy!. This is easily the biggest player to check out me and my stuff in quite a while, probably ever. This could be good – Supervillain is still under option, which looks good on my inktip resume as people check me out. And as Supervillain’s producer told me the other week, a financing deal for Supervillain may benefit from the building vacuum as well. The key is that these two sides could feed off each other, each one creating heat and legitimacy for the other. We’ll see.

Could be good.

Now, to bring myself down from this nice moment: Just imagine if I had more COMPLETED scripts to put up on inktip… like Psycho Ex or Dead Guy…

Sigh.

Supervillain Update

I know everyone out there is hearing about the writers’ strike and thinking, “yeah, yeah, DVDs, residuals, internet – but how does it affect ROBB?!” I thought the same thing. So I emailed the producer who has optioned my script and asked her. Here’s what she said:

>>It’s hard to peg exactly how the strike will affect everything, but it could very well be helpful. We’re definitely still trying to find a home for Supervillain. We even have a potential investor for 85% of the budget if we can find the other 15%.

>>…the strike could end up being helpful, since there will be a lack of content in the market soon, but the tricky part is that November & December are the lightest buying months anyway, so a lot of places are just holing up and waiting to see if the strike is over by the new year.

So… 85% of the budget is there – anybody want to make an investment?

Hey, if we sell the house…

About The Strike

I am watching the writers’ strike pretty closely, both as a writer trying to get into the guild and also as an observer of economic evolution. This is tectonic plate stuff we are watching here, the crisis of an entire economic model. Anyway, I haven’t posted anything about it (out of fear of sermonizing) but then today a friend did something foolish: she asked my opinion. She emailed me this link to Suicide by Strike, a blog entry by Marc Andreeseen, the founder of Netscape and current founder of Ning, in response to an article on the strike in the New York Times. Here’s what she said:

Robb – what are your thoughts on this article?

A strike by Hollywood writers began in New York just after midnight Monday…

[M]ore than 12,000 screenwriters represented by the Writer Guild of America West and the Writers Guild of America East in the early morning hours in New York began the first industry-wide strike since writers walked out in 1988. That strike lasted five months…

Throughout the weekend, guild leaders held orientation meetings for strike captains, who would supervise picketing teams, and otherwise prepared for an effort to shut down as much movie and television production as possible…

The sides have been at odds over, among other things, writers’ demands for a large increase in pay for movies and television shows released on DVD, and for a bigger share of the revenue from such work delivered over the Internet.

So imagine you’re a major media mogul, a captain of the film and television business, a shaper of global culture, one of the anointed few who can green-light major entertainment projects.

You’re faced with a massive, once-in-a-lifetime shift in mainstream consumer behavior from traditional mass media, including film and television, to new activities that you do not control: the Internet, social networking, user-generated content, mobile services, video games. It’s been snowballing since the mid 90’s, for like 12 years — 12 years of denial and obfuscation — but it’s really rolling fast now.

Many of your current lifeblood properties are not growing anymore or are in outright decline, and you don’t own enough of the vital new properties to offset that, nor are you certain how you would make money with the new properties even if you did own them. And the consumers you rely upon for revenue are so frustrated with your company’s inability to supply them with what they want, when they want it, that digital piracy of your content has become mainstream and socially acceptable behavior practically overnight, and all of your efforts to stop it seem to only make it worse.

And your company’s culture is not prepared to deal with the shift. Your company was founded 50 or 80 or 100 or 150 years ago by different people in a different time, and the overwhelming majority of your people now — smart and well-meaning managers and bureaucrats, but still managers and bureaucrats — have to be retrained and reoriented toward entrepreneurial thinking in a viciously dynamic and startlingly fast-changing world not of your, or their, creation.

Is this really the right time to pick a fight with the writers over royalties from DVD and Internet sales, leading to an industry-wide shutdown and massive economic pain for all sides in the world of traditional scripted film and television content?

Really?

If you’re a mogul, the key question has to be, what would the founders of my industry have done in this situation? Really, what would they have done? Thomas Edison, Darryl Zanuck, Jack Warner, Irving Thalberg, Adolph Zukor, David Selznick, Louis Mayer, David Sarnoff, Bill Paley, Walt Disney… presented with such a period of profound change and global market expansion, would they have declared war on the writers of all people or blamed Apple of all companies for their problems, or would they be charging ahead and developing new businesses, new forms of entertainment, new markets, and new sources of revenue?

In a nutshell, would they have crawled into a hole of protecting the status quo or would they be forging a new, exciting, optimistic future through force of will and creativity?

Why aren’t you doing what they would be doing?

If you, like me, are just a normal and normally happy consumer of TV shows and movies — at least when you’re not equally happily playing video games, surfing the Internet, networking socially, blogging, or kicking it with your IPod — then one day your grandchildren are likely to ask you, “Hey, old man, I learned in school today that there used to be these companies called ‘studios’, and they would actually spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars making scripted entertainment, and you would actually sit still, in a chair, and watch it — whatever happened to that?”

And you’ll get to say, “Well, it’s complicated, but let me tell you a little story about the writers’ strike of 2007…”

Here’s what I said (I did get a tiny bit evangelical…)

A very good article. The writer is correct but the connection that he doesn’t make is that those guys who built the industry were entrepreneurs who ran private companies who could risk it all. The moguls that the article is addressed to are not individuals anymore – they are multinational public corporations.

The truth is that the guys who made Hollywood WERE faced with earth-shattering