Now available on Wikipedia, as pointed to by kottke.
The Motaba virus sounds bad, but the cure — heavy doses of Dustin Hoffman — is arguably worse. Count Choculitis is a recent favorite. See the whole list here.
QandA
Follow-up, please
I’ve had this site up and running for about four years,
What I haven’t done is followed up with any of those questioners to see what they actually did with the information I offered.
In some cases, the answer I gave was simply The Answer — there wasn’t a next step or a decision lurking on the horizon. But many readers write in asking for advice about a specific situation, a career choice or judgment call. These are often my favorite questions to answer, but I have no idea whether my advice is being heeded, or if it’s even helpful.
That’s why for this week I’m urging anyone whose question I’ve answered to write back in and me know what you did, and what happened.
I’m thinking about the guy whose friend was directing a movie, and wondered what job he should beg for. The girl who couldn’t stop writing. Hell, Dracula’s son.
Even if I’ve just told you that the page 17 sex joke is a myth, I’m curious to hear what’s up with you.
How will I know if it’s the real person writing in? Well, in most cases I have the original email, or at least an IP address. But my curiosity far outweighs my suspicion. Let me know how it turned out.
High net-worth individuals
I’ve encounted this euphemism for “rich people” at least five times this week. It’s not exactly new; I’ve heard it occasionally for the last few years. But I don’t know where it came from, or how long it’s been gaining traction around the memosphere.
This morning’s appearance came in a Variety article about Radar’s Ted Field acquiring roughly $600 million in financing:
The financial partners in Radar’s fund are a combination of equity financiers and high net-worth individuals, including JP Morgan & Co., D.E. Shaw & Co., Kevin Flynn, the Rothman family, Cardinal Growth, GE Capital, US Bank, CIT and Mercantile Bank.
Kevin Flynn is an individual. The Rothman family presumably counts — though technically, they’re not an individual. You or I would just call them rich, wealthy or loaded. So why doesn’t Variety?
My theory is that super-rich people are actually a bit embarrassed by their vast wealth. “High net-worth individual” is a way of obfuscating and distracting from the dollar signs. Don’t judge me; I have a condition. It’s scientific. It’s treatable: “Oh, I’m not rich. I just have a high net worth.”
To refer back to the old-school SAT analogies:
alcoholism::disease
wealth:: high net worth
My friend Chuck is a VP at a bank that specializes in high net-worth individuals. (Which, to be fair, makes a lot more sense than banking for the poor and indigent.) When I ask him about his job, Chuck uses the HNWI term a lot, generally to protect the anonymity of his clients. Hearing him talk about it, one realizes that vast wealth is like a supertanker; it’s actually kind of a pain in the ass to move it around.
The only time it gets awkward with Chuck is when he refers to, “high net-worth individuals such as yourself.” I can never tell if he’s being generous or deluded. My net worth is high compared with, say, a Kentucky coal miner. But I’m not looking for places to park $600 million. “High” is clearly a relative term.
Which leads to my second hunch: “high net-worth individual” was coined because there’s a vast realm between millionaires and billionaires, and you need something to call these people.
The film industry increasingly calls them partners, because they’re bankrolling many of the super-budgeted movies filling our megaplexes. But I wonder if we’ve lost something by reducing our tycoons and barons to mere high net-worth individuals. Great wealth is supposed to invoke romance, intrigue and familial drama, not spreadsheets and hedge funds. Just by giving it a new term, they’ve taken away half the reason to be rich.
Is the Slamdance script competition a bad idea?
I am a writer who has multiple scripts entered in the Slamdance Horror Script Competition.
Recently, Slamdance announced the new Grand Prize: $10,000 and acquisition of all rights and title by an independent production company. In said acquisition, the production company plans to produce a feature motion picture from the grand-prize winning script.
The winner will be paid five percent of the film’s minimum budget, which is $200,000.
So here’s my first question: Shouldn’t the writer be paid 10% of the film’s budget according to WGA standards?
As a writer who has primarily entered the competition with the hope of placing in the competition so I can attract queries from agents, I am a bit puzzled by this new Grand Prize. If a script is good enough to rise to the top of a competition like this, and if the writer is lucky enough to land a good agent, wouldn’t it be within the writer’s interest to look for a better deal?
Not to mention that upon accepting the Grand Prize and putting pen to paper, the writer is signing all rights of the script to the powers that be.
Would it be foolish for someone to decline the Grand Prize and take his or her chances with attracting an agent who might be able to find a better deal?
— Terrell
Newnan, Georgia
Yes, it would be foolish. If you win, you should take the prize money and the additional $10,000. (I’m assuming that the 10% of the budget comes on top of the prize money, but either way, take the deal.)
Why am I suggesting you blindly take whatever’s offered, when just two days ago I advised another reader to quickly get another lawyer? Because you live in Georgia. You’re treating the Slamdance competition as a sort of become-a-screenwriter lottery. The first, unspoken rule of lotteries is “always take the money.”
Could winning the competition help get you started as an honest-to-goodness screenwriter? Sure. But getting a movie made would be a much, much bigger help. Lots of writers win competitions but never get beyond that point. However, if you get a movie made — if you get a movie set up — you suddenly become an actual, working screenwriter. And the process of finding agents, managers and future work becomes much easier.
Now that your main question is resolved, let’s correct one fundamental misunderstanding:
Shouldn’t the writer be paid 10% of the film’s budget according
to WGA standards?
Yes, in Fantasyland. There’s no WGA rule or standard. All there is is WGA scale, which indicates the minimum a writer can be paid for movies of a certain budget. These are flat figures, not percentages. (You can download a .pdf of the rates here.)
I’ve never been paid anything close to 10% of a film’s budget. My first feature, Go, cost roughly $6 million. I was paid $70,000. That’s half a million dollars less than I “should” have gotten.
For The Movie, I was paid low-budget scale — $35,782, plus a $5,000 script publication fee. (If we’d qualified for the WGA Indie rates, we could have brought that down to zero.)
And as a writer who’s written several very expensive movies, let me tell you, I’d love to be cashing $20 million checks. But it doesn’t happen.
Don’t get me wrong, a screenwriter can make plenty of money. But dollar signs shouldn’t be a driving force in choosing it as a career, no matter what level you’re talking about.