Transcript: The Garbageman's Vanity Card
Rob Long on standing out in Hollywood's junk and clutter
This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.
You’d think that a business famous for its double-talk and lack of candor would have more complicated and oblique jargon, but show business is pretty straightforward when it comes to that.
The “answer print” of a movie is the first basic version of a movie in post-production, and it’s called the “answer print” because it answers the question, is this movie terrible? Sometimes you really don’t know until the answer print.
“Favored nations” is a provision of a contract that guarantees that whatever you give one person, you’ve got to give the other one the same.
And an if-come deal means, essentially, this: writer goes to a production company with an idea or a script, and together with that company they go to a network or streamer and try to get the project going. That phrase, project going, means only one thing: money. They try to get money. And if the money comes, then everyone gets paid. The way it used to work was, a production company had actual money to spend, which they did, and that sort of paid the fee for the right to give the writer notes and suggestions on the project. Now, with the proliferation of if-come deals, the writer gets all that help and input and notes calls for free. And when the project gets set up, the writer gets all of them from the first people and the people who are now paying.
But that’s the problem — well, one of the problems — with show business right now. There are a lot of production companies out there, and a lot of writers, but not a lot of set-up projects. That’s a lot of if-come and not a lot of pay check.
And even before all of this disruption, there were too many producers running around.