Transcript: A Heartwarming Tax ID Number
Rob Long on how TV writers find companionship in money
This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.
Not too long ago, I worked on a project with a friend of mine. We wrote a script together that, despite being the best script ever written with one or two exceptions, didn’t, as the show business euphemism says, move forward.
It didn't move backward, either. It didn’t move at all, which was a disappointment, of course, but the sting of it somewhat lessened by the fact that no one called either one of us with that news.
One moment we were getting called every day or so with script notes from the studio, script notes from the network, studio script notes on the studio revised network draft, notes on the network revised draft from the network, notes from the studio on the draft based on the revised network draft second draft notes, and then, suddenly, no notes at all.
Which at first is a relief, but then is kind of depressing. We writers spend all of our time complaining about script notes, and then when they suddenly stop, we get all hurt and sulky.
But a few weeks later, my pal and I were having lunch, and he asked me a rather personal question.
“Have you been paid?” he asked.
For the script?
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I think we've been paid in full, but I'm not sure.”
Which I know sounds funny, unless you're a screenwriter. In our business, payment is broken into a zillion little pieces — outline, outline notes, first draft, second draft, approved draft, polish, things like that. And then they always hold something back — something fairly substantial; enough for a mortgage payment, or a decent used car — until they get the final signatures on a raft of useless legal and contractual documents.
The first few checks are easy to monitor — they've either paid you for the draft and the outline or they haven’t.
But the last couple — including payment for something called, with unsettling creepiness, a “Certificate of Authorship” — they hold those back. Just small enough so that in a writer’s 3 a.m. mental arithmetic, he or she might think, “I think I got it all. Some to my attorney. Some to my agent. Some to the accountant. I think . . . yeah, that's everything.”
But it's not everything.