Goodwriterguy said:
I think the minimum payment for a feature script is around $90 or $100K.
No way.
An original screenplay from a first-timer bought by a sig ranges from $35K to $50K if purchased or commissioned outright. That's the WAG range negotiated in 2004, when Hollywood was freaking over rising costs. Very, very few of these buys are made; a dozen a month or less by the sigs.
Treatments, rewrites and adaptations are much more common, and pay less. Novelists with bestseller status might be able to get $100K, but that's getting more difficult to do, too, since most of Hollywood's options during the past five years have tanked.
And as for Elviro's assertion that you make more money if people go to see your movie, he's right: On your next script. You won't see a penny extra no matter how many people go to see a movie made from your story or screenplay. People like Richard Gere and Dustin Hoffman have had to sue to get backend payments. I've met dozens of writers in Hollywood and Manhattan in the past 15 years, and not one of them got extra money unless they were clearly credited as producers of the movie, and some of these people created hit movies (as well as some dogs). You can see that reflected in the credits now; writers of second or third features get listed as producers even though the only thing they did on the set was eat doughnuts.
The big cash that everyone thinks is available in Hollywood is a myth, unless you can make a hit. In Santa Monica, great money can be made by stapling yourself to TV programming. But not the millions everyone would like to think.
There are plenty of examples, though, of people making modest movies very cheaply who then score as auteurs. The best example of this is somebody like Lars von Trier or Spike Lee or Nick Gomez, who seemed to come out of the blue as director-writer-producers. Thier first theatrical releases in the U.S. did fine, but the studios were lining up to give them what they wanted. The most recent example of this is Carlos Reygadas, who made "Japon" on credit cards; I've gushed about this staggeringly brilliant movie on these boards already, but everybody from Madonna to Paramount was ready to give this guy half a million dollars BEFORE his movie was released or reviewed. You can track the writer Guillermo Arriaga, who is a blossom right now: He wrote fro Mexican TV, making $40K a year, at best, and pocketed a few grand to write a screenplay for Amores Perros; brilliant film, smash hit internationally, $5.4 million U.S. box office. That brought him a $100K sale for "21 grams" with Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio del Toro, and more importantly an "associate producer" credit, meaning he could have some of the backend of the $16-million U.S. box office; he didn't get much. But his next written piece was the screenplay for Tommie Lee jones that became "Three Burials of Melquies Estrada," and a screenplay for Brad Pitt which became "Babel." Three Burials was a relative hit ($5-million gross U.S.) for its budget, while Babel hit theatres last week and has so far been a disappointment. But Pitt and Arriaga will team up for "Dallas Buyers Club" next year, when Pitt plays an HIV-infected electrician who goes to any length for a cure; Arriaga easily scored $300K for this job, but the telltale signs of disaster are already attached: Two other screenplay credits are on the movie, the typical Hollywood route to disaster, where too many cooks . . .
If you'd told Arriaga in 1999 that his silly little script for Amores Perros would indirectly lead to a million bucks and a rep as one of the top writers in Hollywood, he would have laughed in your face. And here he is, off an initial sale of several thousand dollars. Maybe five grand.
It's the only route in, from my view, bringing total control over a project to a movie you can show in Hollywood. A dozen sig buys next month will be all that is available to first-time screenplay writers, and there are more than 2 million screenplays in Tinseltown.
