movie MONEY...please advise.

Your agent should be able to answer that question.

But in my experience, you could be talking about a few hundred bucks for an option -- to a few thousand. It's rarely more than that. Production companies "option" a book by paying you a set fee to take that property off the market while they decide whether they really, really, really want to film it.

The contract usually spells out the monies involved. To option = X-amount. To film as a TV movie = X-amount. To film as a feature=X-amount. A TV series = X-amount.

The option is finite, and if they're still trying to decide when time runs out, there's usually an option-renewal clause.

All that said, don't get too excited. Hollywood can convince you that you're the best thing since sliced bread this week -- and forget your name next week.

When a contract is signed and the check clears, celebrate.

Until then, just wait to see what happens.

Probably less than 10% of optioned properties are filmed. Things disappear into 'development hell' all the time.

That being said, here's the WGA's minimum schedule. http://http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/contracts/min2004.pdf

Keep in mind indies & such are permitted to pay less. Sometimes a lot less.

I hope your agent has a film agent lined up. She's going to need all the help she can get to swim with the Hollyweird sharks.

And...BTW...Congratulations!!!

Most likely they'll want to take an option, which is temporary ownership of the movie rights. An option enables a would-be producer to show your work around to investors without worrying that one of them will get in touch with you and try to buy the rights out from under him. As long as he has an option, he "owns" the movie rights.

Options are usually for a year or so. When it's about to expire, the option-holder can renew by paying you more money.

When an option is negotiated, the final selling price of the full movie rights has to be established. Otherwise, the producer would be showing the work to investors without being able to tell them how much the work will cost.

Let's say I offer you $15,000 for a one-year option, against a full purchase price of $100,000. The first option price is applied to the full price if the deal goes through, so if I get all my investors, I owe you $85,000 for the full rights. But if I don't get all my investors together and still want to push the project, I can offer you another $10,000 (or whatever) for another six months (say), but that 10,000 is not applied to the purchase price. So if I end up buying an option for 15K, and three more for 10K each, and get the green light, I still have to pay you 85K for the full rights.

And of course, your agent gets her percentage of all this...

It's true that most optioned works don't get made into movies, but as long as you keep selling options, why worry?

I have mutual friend of Walter Mosley, who wrote Devil in a Blue Dress, and he tells me Mosley kept getting renewed options on it every six months for something like three years. By the time they finally made the movie, he kind of missed the steady deliveries of money. Of course, your mileage may vary...

The price of the option and the final selling price are whatever traffic will allow. Could be huge, could be peanuts. Depends on how bad they want it, and how willing you are to refuse a deal you don't like.

Ancient history

A few months after it came out my first book was optioned by Lorimar Productions. (Anyone remember them?)

They paid me 100.00. The publisher took half. (Shoulda had an agent to keep my media rights on that book contract.)

When the option ran out after a year nothing happened for about five years until the book was optioned by a different film company. They were a big name, putting out movies I'd actually seen.

THEY paid a whopping 50.00 for the option.

The publisher took half of that, too.

Options are sort of a deposit and can be ridiculously tiny. A book I did was optioned for a year for the sum of one dollar because the producer was friends with my co-writer.

Nothing happened with that, either.

You'll have likely noticed a theme here. There's often lots of talk, little to no money, then nothing comes of it.

If you hit the lottery and they actually DO get your book into film production, then terrific. But until that happens keep the day job and keep writing.

I don't have any advice, but congratulations!!

Further to what the other commentators have said, I was speaking to a UK-based author this summer who'd been offered some serious money for options of their work. The thing they were concerned about wasn't the money but losing control of their story.

If you get to the stage where a company has a screenwriter adapting your manuscript, then the screenwriter will chop things out, put things in and sometimes change completely the things that happen (Dark Is Rising, anyone?). Authors will usually get no say in what happens during that process (and sometimes they don't even know what's happened until the show is on tv or the film is in the cinemas). I don't know to what extent a concerned author can address this in the option rights - the author I was speaking to said that the companies they spoke to all balked at the suggestion that even consultation rights be granted. Basically, if you're happy to take the money and aren't bothered by the results, then it can be a nice additional source of cash. But if you want to preserve the integrity of your work, then the author advised me to never do it.

Hope that's some help.

MM

Just remember that it's always possible your book will be part of that smallish percent that gets turned into the next big blockbuster! Getting an option is a fabulous first step, so congratulations!!

I would be less concerned about a work of fiction getting jerked around. I saw the movie Children of Men and then read the book because of it, partly because I'd heard they were very different. They were actually two entirely different stories, with only the central conceit (all of a sudden, women stop getting pregnant, all over the world) being used. I never would have heard of the book otherwise and I thought it was magnificent.

Where I get a little more concerned is when they take a true story, rewrite it according to taste and put it out there with names intact. If it were my memoir out there (you can relax, I'm talking theoretically), I'd be a lot more concerned.

Like Gillhoughly, I had a short story optioned years ago. Made a cool $75, but not a single frame of film was ever shot.

On the other hand, I believe Mike Resnick has had Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge (or one of his other Africa stories...can't remember just now) optioned repeatedly with no movie ever made, and he's made over a million from it. Or, so the story goes.

scribbler1382 said:

Like Gillhoughly, I had a short story optioned years ago. Made a cool $75, but not a single frame of film was ever shot.

On the other hand, I believe Mike Resnick has had Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge (or one of his other Africa stories...can't remember just now) optioned repeatedly with no movie ever made, and he's made over a million from it. Or, so the story goes.

Click to expand...

Unless your ms. is a best-seller, it's rather difficult to get the project off the ground -- many have been in "negotiation" forever. Even best-sellers can take years to develop. A friend of mine has sold four options already, but still no movies. For now, he's okay with selling his options.

I believe Robert Bloch's agent gave away the rights to "Psycho" for a whole 2,000.00--and told Bloch he should be grateful to get that kind of money.

The movie was a hit, but he never got another penny from that property from the film company.

Dumb-ass agent.

Thankfully *mine* is much smarter. Whew.

didn't the movie company try to screw the guy who wrote 'forest gump' out of his fair share using shady accounting (which hollywood is notorious for)?

anyhoo, i knew a guy who did a script. his buddy's dad was a big wig at disney, so they optioned it and he lived off that for a couple of years somehow. that said, my question is ~ should you expect more for an optioned script than an optioned manuscript?

I saw in the Deals section of Publisher's Marketplace that Anthony got half a mil for the movie rights to Xanth.

interesting. and cheap, imo. certainly he got some kind of other compensation, right? i'd think he's retaining some kind of creative control, too. just my opinion, of course. i mean, when he dies his tombstone will read, 'piers anthony, hippie, that guy who wrote those xanth books.' half a mil is a paltry sum in exchange for your legacy, especially when that legacy is in the hands of hollywood. just tell me the score is written by john williams and i'll rest easy. 'featuring the music of britney spears' and my confidence level will require a backhoe to raise up.

Gillhoughly said:

I believe Robert Bloch's agent gave away the rights to "Psycho" for a whole 2,000.00--and told Bloch he should be grateful to get that kind of money.

The movie was a hit, but he never got another penny from that property from the film company.

Click to expand...

True. On the other hand, his book sales got a big bump from the "Soon to be a Major Motion Picture" effect, and then from plastering "Author of Psycho" on everything else he wrote or reissued...so there's at least a PR value.

True, but getting residuals would have been nice, too. That was the impression he gave in his autobiography, Once Around the Bloch.

A quote from a review:

"Bloch lived the real working writer's life. The one where he didn't get to go to a great many foreign lands, didn't win national acclaim or even fame (despite the success of Psycho), but worked hard, and mostly broke, at his craft for decades."

Humbling.

<digression> My parents (!!!) gave me a book of horror stories (!!!) by Bloch and Bradbury when I was at home with a fever at about the age of ten or eleven. In the book was a story called "Fever Dream" about a kid with a fever who gets possessed by demonic bacteria.

I think that little recollection explains why I have never developed a taste for horror. </digression>