There are two kinds of people in the world, the old saying goes: the kind that divide people into two kinds, and the kind that doesn’t.
I’m the first kind.
One way to divide people who work in the entertainment business – aside from the more obvious categories, like those who are currently working and those who aren’t; talented/not talented; good/evil – is by those who are executives and work at studios and networks, meaning they get a salary and holidays and supervision and a place to sit every day, and those who don’t.
You can probably make that distinction everywhere else, too, but in the entertainment business the difference is more noticeable.
The executives who work in offices work in an environment almost indistinguishable from that of any other major multinational corporation: they get a nice office, a terrified assistant, a top-of-the-line computer, holidays, a reassuring amount of job security and an expensive ergonomically correct chair to sit in.
Those of us who are writers or actors have a very different set of circumstances.
We don’t get any of those things – we don’t know, often, where we’re going to be sitting next month or when we’ll be able to take holidays.
I know an actor who discovered that the only sure-fire way to book a really great role was, first, he had to book a non-refundable plane ticket to someplace far away. Having to toss an expensive plane ticket somehow created the proper karmic condition for him to land a really juicy role.
Most of us on the actor-writer side of things are envious of the clockwork pay cheques and the private bathrooms that our counterparts who work at studios and networks and talent agencies enjoy.
But they, in turn, envy our freedom.
At least, that’s how they look at it. It looks like footloose freedom to them. We see only anxiety and uncertainty and a powerless rage at an irrational marketplace, but for folks who work in offices all day, it’s just an endless parade of iced lattes and midday movies.
And that’s often true. In the life cycle of any entertainment industry product, there’s a certain amount of hanging-out time.
I know a writer – OK, OK, I’m talking about myself, here – who goes to a lot of movies in the middle of the day just because he can’t think of anything new to write, because the next act or next scene is a baffling mystery. What looks like goofing off, to some, is actually terror.
It’s not as if we’re having a good time.
Put it this way: if a writer spends a day staring listlessly at the computer, surfing the web, that writer isn’t going to get paid.
If a network executive spends the day staring listlessly at the computer, surfing the web, that executive is going to be promoted to senior vice president.
And so it goes in any negotiation between the two parties. For instance, when a studio wants to hire a writer, the key negotiating points are always centred around the writer demanding that the studio deliver things that its side offers its own employees, like offices and assistants and multiyear guarantees and a vague and indefinable list of deliverables; and the studio demanding that the writer hand over the one thing writers have that studios hate them for, which is freedom.
Because that’s the chief drawback to being an executive: you have to show up every day. Writers forget that. Despite the fancy offices and the expense-account lunches, you still have to at least appear to be working.
You can’t, as I did just this afternoon, take off for the beach. Part of the job of any executive is learning how to pretend to be working. This is probably a key function of every other job, too.
So when it comes time to make a deal, what the writer wants from the studio is stability and perks. And what the studio wants from the writer is unfettered devotion, meaning the studio or the network wants the writer exclusively. The writer can’t do what writers love to do, which is be mysteriously unavailable. “I can’t meet next Monday. I have a meeting”, a writer will say, imbuing the word “meeting” with as much power and import as possible, as if the next words would have been, had the writer wished to be indiscreet, “with Steven Spielberg and George Clooney and the French president”.
And in turn the writer will demand all sorts of guaranteed cheques, even if – and this is crucial – even if the writer ends up doing little or no work at all.
So the two sides are on a collision course, which is why most negotiations in Hollywood are bitter wrangles between two sides, both of them convinced that deep down, the other one has it easy. Of course, they’re both wrong. The only people who have it easy, in Hollywood, are the lawyers.
And everywhere else, too.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood
On Twitter:@rcbl