John August

John

Screenwriting competitions aren’t worth the money

Film Industry, First Person

Since the early days of the site, I occasionally run posts by writers who can share their experience working in the industry. In this case, Paige wrote in to Scriptnotes with her take on screenplay contests.

My name is Paige Feldman. I was a guest/contestant on a Scriptnotes live show about a year ago (the one with Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge). That’s still one of my best quarantine memories.

I’m writing because contest season is fast approaching. Nicholl, AFF and Final Draft all have deadlines in May. While I know most aspiring screenwriters will be champing at the bit to apply, I wanted to share something I discovered about the cost of entering contests like these: it’s a lot of money for little upside.

Like many not-yet-full-time screenwriters, I have entered multiple contests, hoping for placement or notice that might help me push to the next level. And, like many not-yet-full-time screenwriters, I have received glowing comments from readers — and no momentum.

In June 2020, I embarked on an experiment. For four months, I kept track of every screenwriting contest I was advertised (either through email, targeted ads, or coming across them organically on social media). And for every contest that I could enter without doing more work (e.g. I had a completed script I could ostensibly enter), I would take the cost of the entry fee and put it in my savings.

Over the course of four months, from June to October — so not even “contest season” — I saved $1424.

That is from individual contest entry fees alone. This does not count paying extra for coverage. It is not the early entry fee plus the regular entry fee plus the late entry fee. It’s one entry fee per contest. Extrapolated to a full year, that would mean spending nearly $4500 on contests.

I already knew screenwriting competitions were an industry, but the amount is just shocking to me. What even is this screenwriting contest industrial complex? And why is it? And how many people is it actually helping?

At the end of my experiment, I didn’t have answers to those questions, but I did have an extra almost-$1500 lying around thanks to my savings scheme. I decided to use it to further my career in a way a contest could never do.

I took one of my already-written pilots and adapted it for audio. Then, I hired actors and recorded it remotely over Zoom (modeled after how you, John, had me send you audio recorded on my computer for that show last year). I hired a composer to write original music, an artist to design a logo, and used YouTube to teach myself how to edit and process audio. And now I have an audio pilot up across podcasting platforms. Plus, it was such a fun experience that I wrote the remaining nine episodes of season 1 and we’re starting to record them this weekend!

Now, instead of a bunch of contest rejections, I have an actual product that I can share with people: How to Fall in Love in the Hard Way

I wanted to write to you about this because I feel like the rhetoric that contests are the best way for unknown writers to break in continues to grow (especially on Twitter). I think it’s important to point out how much of an industry screenwriting competitions are becoming, how they help very few writers who invest that cash into them, and that there are other ways of becoming a working writer than winning a contest.

In my case, I met a director who hired me to write a script via someone I met in an acting class I accidentally took five years ago. That ended up being a better use of my money.

This isn’t a slam on all screenwriting competitions or the writers who’ve found some success through them. But for most aspiring screenwriters, I believe there are better ways to spend your time and money.

The Parable of the Potato Farmer

Random Advice

I can’t in good conscience recommend you watch all of this video, the third and final part of a series by Technoblade. But there’s wisdom to be found here.

To the outside world, I’m an ordinary Minecraft YouTuber, but secretly I’ve spent the last year fighting to maintain my spot as the number one potato farmer in Skyblock. Opposing me is SquidKid, the former rank number one, a man whose obsession with potatoes is rivaled only by my own.

Like Amundsen’s expedition to reach the South Pole, this is best thought of as a race, with two men competing to reach 500 million potatoes farmed. As with many battles, even the winner lost:

why did i spend 600 hours on this war. this was a terrible idea.

Yes. It’s an objectively terrible idea to farm digital potatoes. But we can actually learn from Technoblade’s futile quest. Late in his video, he makes two salient observations:

  1. It is only with a worthy rival we can reach our fullest potential.

  2. Rank number one isn’t an achievement. It’s a prison which forces you to dedicate your life to defending a temporary title.

The truth is we’re all potato farmers to some degree. We chase meaningless status symbols. We optimize systems rather than questioning whether they should even exist. We villainize our competition and slink into ethical gray areas.

Technoblade wrote his own cautionary tale, an Aesop fable for the digital age. In the end, he wasted a lot of time, but at least he learned something from it.

I gained a lot from the Potato War: patience, discipline, carpal tunnel.

Farming 500 million digital potatoes is stupid, but registering 500,000 voters could swing an election. Exploiting a quirk in how minions behave is pointless, but convincing our cells to manufacture a target virus protein is a game-changer.

The difference ultimately isn’t in the amount of work, but the choice of the objective.

With this in mind, I’ve started asking this question about how I’m spending my time: Is this actually productive, or just potato farming?

Recapping the AMBA Campaign

WGA

While there’s already an official timeline of the WGA agency campaign on the Guild website, I’ve put together my own version that fills in some further details based on my own records and notes: ((I served on both the WGA board and the negotiating committee, but everything here has been widely reported. In the timeline, I’ve included links to news articles where available.))

Timeline of the WGA Agency Campaign

This is largely for historical record; there’s nothing really new here. But it’s helpful to see the whole campaign in context, and to resist oversimplifying the narrative.

To me, there are four main storylines to follow:

  1. WGA membership holding together
  2. The one-by-one signing of agencies 5 through 12, followed by the big four
  3. The lawsuits, and how the trial kept getting pushed back
  4. Internal and external pressures at the big four agencies, including WME’s IPO

I’d rank them in that order of significance, but they all played a part in getting us to the successful conclusion.

One important storyline doesn’t fit on the timeline because there is no associated date: TV staffing. Because of a lot of hard work and scrambling, an assortment of official and unofficial tools helped shows get staffed without agents. The much-feared staffing crisis became a dog that didn’t bark.

The pandemic isn’t listed, even though it’s obviously affected every single event since March 2020. To me, the coronavirus and the resulting shutdown was a wash in terms of its impact on the agency campaign. It curtailed both member meetings and face-to-face negotiations. It had a disproportionately large impact on the big four agencies, and a disproportionately small impact on writer income. But the most pervasive effect was psychological: the pandemic became by far the biggest issue in everyone’s life, followed by the presidential election. For both writers and agents, resolving the AMBA campaign remained a priority, but got pushed further down the list.

It’s important to keep in mind just how much happened in 2018 before the original AMBA expired. There were a lot of member meetings, both to educate writers about the issues involved, and to gauge how much support there would be for the battle. This was a two year fight only if you start the clock in April 2019 and ignore a year’s worth of preparation.

Because it’s my timeline, I’m including some things that were significant to me but may not be meaningful in the final accounting of things. For example, when I signed at Verve, it was newsworthy. But it didn’t break open the floodgates. Most writers at my level waited for the battle to be over so they could go back to their original agents — or made the transition to other agencies quietly.

I honestly have no idea what the equivalent timeline from an agency perspective would look like. We might agree that agency X signed with the WGA on a given date, but which agencies really mattered? How important were the lawsuits? Was internal or external pressure a bigger factor in getting them to sign? In the end, I’m not sure we’ll ever know.

You can find my timeline here.

Feature Residuals and the Mystery of SVOD

Film Industry, Follow Up, WGA

Following up on my earlier post, here’s an update on Aladdin’s residuals.

Let’s look at the breakdown for 2020 Q3:

Re-Use Market Amount
Basic Cable $1,536
Foreign Free TV $8,071
Home Video/DVD $11,161
Pay TV $76,687
New Media — EST $11,134
New Media — SVOD $222,496
TOTAL $331,086

Note that these are total writer residuals. As Aladdin’s co-writer, I get half, so I’m simply doubling what I see in my individual residuals report.

The first four categories are pretty self-explanatory. You can find more information about them in the WGA’s residuals survival guide.

New Media — EST stands for Electronic Sell-Through. This is when a customer purchases a download, which they then own forever. If you buy a movie for $19.99 on iTunes, that’s an EST. It’s the digital equivalent of someone purchasing a DVD at Target. The residual is calculated as 0.36% of the company’s accountable receipts.

The final category is a little confusing. Even after serving on the negotiating committee for the last MBA, I ended up emailing a colleague at the Guild for clarification.

New Media — SVOD combines very two different ideas. The full title for this category should really be something like New Media — Rental and SVOD. ((And even that’s not complete: this category also includes “Premium VOD,” which hasn’t really been a thing but might become more important.))

Rental is what you think. If you’ve ever paid $1.99 for a movie on iTunes and had 48 hours to watch it, that’s an electronic rental. The residual is calculated at 1.2% of the studio’s accountable receipts.

SVOD stands for Subscription Video on Demand, services like Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu, also referred to as streamers. The residual is calculated as 1.2% of the amount the studio receives for licensing the movie to the service. For example, MGM might license an old James Bond movie to Amazon Prime for 12 months. The screenwriter would get a residual based off the price MGM was able to charge.

In the case of Aladdin, it’s available exclusively on Disney+. Disney is never going to license it to Netflix or Peacock or Amazon Prime. So any fee Disney-the-studio is charging Disney-the-streamer is really just numbers on a spreadsheet. They’re the same company.

Now you’re asking: Wait, if this residual is 1.2% of a made-up number, how do you know it’s a fair price?

Self-dealing is always a concern, and has long been an issue in television. My colleague at the Guild writes:

When that happens the MBA requires the company to impute a license fee based on comparable pictures. This is an issue happening across all the streamers and is one of our most important enforcement efforts.

For 2020 Q3, this lone residual was worth nearly a quarter of million dollars for Aladdin. It’s both hugely important and largely opaque.

I don’t have a breakdown to show how much of this line item came from rental versus the imputed license fee, but it’s something I’ll be watching closely in the years ahead.