Signing your life Away

Ok, so, I’m sorry I’ve been away for a couple of weeks. I always hate reading ‘sorry I didn’t blog’ at the top of these things, but in this case last week I got a late afternoon call to go and take over directing a network show in the wilds of the mid-west - so at least it was at least relevant to my blog!

I’ve recently been blogging about some ‘process’ stuff, agents and lawyers, and about how they fit into the life of a Reality TV producer. This week I’m picking up from my blog about lawyers with a blog about Contracts. It’s not sexy, but I think it’s really important to be reminded of the basics whether you’re a young producer starting out, or a seasoned executive. Brace yourself.

In the olden days when one caveman asked another caveman if he’d agree to come and help him make some fire, they were as good as their word. Minutes later grilled mammoth burgers all round.

Then one day, a disgruntled caveman, let’s call him ‘UG’, wandered over the hill in search of his missing fire-making-buddy. You can imagine his anger when UG saw his friend crouched over some sticks starting a fire for someone else. “WTF?!” UG exclaimed forcefully, (although truth be told, every exclamation he made sounded forceful and pretty much indistinguishable from anything else). The unabashed fire-buddy looked up, and earnestly as he could said “This guy is cooking me Bison. It’s just business”.

The next day UG became a lawyer.

This is at the heart of every contract you will ever be a party to in TV or Film. When things happen to us that we don’t like it makes us feel bad. The Contract is our way of trying to avoid feeling bad. It’s very basic and very human.

Just to be clear, it’s important for me to make the point right up front that a contract doesn’t have to be tens of pages filled with long words. A contract can be a verbal one, (remember Kim Basinger’s verbal agreement to appear in Boxing Helena? That reportedly cost her $8M), it could be an email, a single line on the back of a napkin - provided it has your signature at the bottom, and you both agree, it’s a contract.

The problem with contracts though, is that not enough people know that contracts are a preventative step rather than an aggressive one. This is especially true when we’re starting out, and we’re dealing with people who haven’t been doing this for years. So in the process of trying to cover all the ways we can avoid getting each other screwed - some people end up feeling threatened and bad.

Sometimes, more often than you’d believe, the very act of trying to get a contract signed with someone is the very thing that ends the relationship - or worse, plants the seeds that will eventually bring the project down.

Here’s an example. I had to do a contract recently where I was engaging a sports team for a reality show. The guys were all great, the promo tape we’d shoot I knew would be fantastic, and I knew this show could sell. All I needed before we did anything was a signed contract with this guy giving me exclusivity and the right to produce the show.

Unfortunately, during the process he got the idea that because I was explaining all the ways that we were both protected from being screwed, that I was actually in the process of screwing him. No matter how much I tried to explain to him that these things weren’t actually happening to him, they were just on paper, he just didn’t get it. After many, many hours of explaining, reading and re-explaining he finally agreed to sign.

It was hard work - but without that contract I had no project.

Here’s the biggest, simplest truth about working as a producer or production company in reality TV or feature films… YOU HAVE TO LEARN THE LAW. You have to learn to read contracts and you have to have a basic, working understanding of the very horrible messes you are opening yourself up to if you screw it up at this stage.

Here’s the second biggest, simplest truth that fells many a producer; YOU WON’T WANT TO.

In the haze of excitement about selling your show, getting a gig, or in your desperation to sign someone, you just simply will not take the time to read, I mean REALLY read, the contracts and understand them. Something will get overlooked and you’ll be regretting it in the very near future.

So, some important advice: Read contracts. Read em. Any contract you can read, have a read.

Then, finally, ASK. Do not be afraid to say, ‘I don’t understand what this means’. Sometimes I ask my lawyer to translate a line, or a paragraph - just so I’m crystal clear. I’ll then write that in the margin of my copy so I can explain it to the smart person who asks me later on.

I won’t be the first to say that nobody thinks I went to Harvard. But I know a guy who did. And he’s the guy who get’s paid a decent percentage of my budgets to tell me this stuff. (See last week’s Blog about Lawyers).

In the first few years you will make and sign a lot of contracts. In those contracts you will make a lot of mistakes. They will cost you money and you’ll be very frustrated. I know, I made mistakes. I made one last week - a term I didn’t understand correctly was used and I signed the contract. Turns out that one word means I will have to return a few thousand dollars of cash to a network. But, it’s ok. I know I saved a bunch of other issues from coming up and costing us even more in that contract because I’d worked hard to understand it. You win some, you lose some.

Here’s the second major piece of advice today: It is your responsibility to learn to understand contracts. It’s a very big part of your job.

Here’s an example that might come up in your very first contract… A tv show you create. Great format. Great show. And line 556 of your contract with the production company or network says ‘Producer shall have the right to remove Owner at Producer’s discretion, with no recourse, and no further monies payable to Owner’. So, this is rubbish legalese, but I’m making a point, if you can’t read that sentence and say to yourself, ‘hold on a minute I’m not going to sign that because it says that I can get removed from the show at any moment without being paid a single penny!’, then you definitely need to read more contracts.

Lifesaving? No. VITAL for your future? Certainly.

So, now I’ve hopefully made it clear how important it is for you to understand contracts, now, what should you use them for?

Every time you have an expectation of something from someone you should get yourself a contract. When you start your company, you should write down an agreement between you what you each expect from each other, and what will happen should the company fail. Be honest, be simple.

When you want to sign up a host, or ‘option’ and idea from a producer, writer, journalist, or get the rights to a book, you’ll need a contract.

They’ll become a part of your life - it’s your job to try to keep it as small a part as possible so you can spend more time making reality TV!

At my company, we’ve tried to keep a ‘standard’ set of contracts on hand. This way you don’t have to start from scratch each time you want to sign one, it will also speed up the process. You can even fill in most of the major bits you know, including names and addresses, which will save your lawyer time and you money.

You’ll also need to contract your employees, locations (a location release), and people you shoot (personal releases), the equipment you rent, the offices you move in to. So there’s a lot to do, a lot to read and a lot of carefully filing you need to do.

But, it’s ok. You should never forget that this is as much a part of Reality TV as filming people yelling at each other. It’s a part of the job that will let you come up with great shows.

Above all it’s a part of the job which means you OWN something. Now you can shop your project with, people attached, or access to a specific company or you can have a book, or the rights to a newspaper article. You OWN it. Now, if the networks want it, they have to have you too! Great!

My final word on contracts is to say that a contract is between two people. You should never forget that. For a contract to be successful it MUST, work for both parties. You give, you take. Ultimately if both of you can walk away from the contract feeling happy, then you’ve made a great contract.

I’ll get back to life on the road of Reality TV next week.

I AM THE LAW - Do I Need a Lawyer?

Last week we talked about Agents, and asked ‘As an Independent Producer, Do I Need One?’ - so, today let’s ask the same of the Lawyers. Do I need a lawyer?

‘In the beginning there were lawyers. And it was good. And value for money’

At least that’s how the revised draft came back.

Of course, I hadn’t even asked for a revision, but the lawyer suggested the original was “far too open to broad interpretation” and this way at least the other side don’t get everything they want.

So, this is the main issue with the dark art of the lawyer. They have the capacity to manipulate reality in ways that you could never have even conceived of previously. They also have the capacity to talk out of their collective rear-ends.

Lawyers will all tell you that we all definitely need to hire one of them - mainly because they fill the world with incomprehensible documents which only lawyers can understand.

So for this reason alone, given that the UN haven’t yet passed the ‘Send All Lawyers off to Live in the Arctic - with no coats on’ Bill yet, I think it’s safe to say ‘YES, you need one’.

So that’s out of the way. That was easy. But, what do you need to know about lawyers?

Before you cry “you better be going somewhere with this, Councilor”, first let me tell you where a lawyer fits in the food-chain of my work as an independent producer, and what it is he does.

There are four areas where we work closely with our lawyer; 1) ‘Optioning’ material, (‘buying a book’ or arranging a co-production deal with other producers who have ideas we want to make), 2) Negotiating contracts with networks for shows we’ve sold, 3) Employment Contracts with cast and crew, and 4) General legal compliance issues for shows we make.

Stay with me - this really IS as genuinely brain-numbing as it sounds. But, stay with me, because this is VERY hard learned stuff which I hope will save you and give you more time to spend reading John Grisham books or watching Law and Order. And I promise I’ll put in a joke somewhere. Or a picture of Waldo.

So - how do we use a lawyer?

First, we’ll use our lawyer to secure the rights to the show we want to make. If it’s a show we’ve created in-house we wouldn’t bother him with this, but if we’re working with a producer who has come to us with a show we want to make, or if we want to get the rights to a book, or someone’s life, we’ll ask him to draw up and negotiate the contract. (More on Contracts next week… oooh goody!).

Before we’ve even started production on a show, before we’ve even shot the pitch tape, we’ll call our lawyer and tell him about the idea. We’ll tell him the areas we think will cause us problems in future, or need some more advice on. You don’t need to have spent any time at Harvard to know that getting it wrong at this stage can potentially kill your show’s chances of ever being sold to the risk averse networks - let alone getting your show actually made.

For instance, we have one show which deals in part with school-aged children. If we’re going to be taken seriously by a network when we pitch the show to them we need to show that we’re a responsible company, and we’re a team who know the terrible litigious future that lay in store should we screw up legally right at the start.

So, we need to know the current laws on putting these children on television, we need to know what legal deep water we’re getting into in terms of getting their releases signed (with divorced parents, or custody battles, what used to be simple release forms are fast become prime time-wasting country), and what extra bits of paperwork would be useful to make our case should anything ever go to court.

Also, we ask the lawyer to play devil’s advocate and give us a list of possible recriminations from the children, their families or schools should anyone take issue with how we portray the any of them in the show and we listen to his suggested ways out should it get that far. That way we can spout his answers when the network exec inevitably asks us these same questions in the pitch meeting. Yes, we get to sound smart. That’s worth his fee alone.

Essentially, we go in wide-eyed, full of optimism that we can and will find a way around any potential issues - but with the very grown up attitude that we must cover our asses.

If we’re casting a show we’ll ask him to take a look at our ‘standard’ Host Shopping Agreement, the one we use when signing up any potential hosts for any show, to see if it needs amending to cover this specific show.

Then, assuming the networks LOVE the idea, our agents will negotiate the broadstrokes of the deal with the network, then hand over the negotiations to the lawyer to work out the full, ’short and long form contract’ with the network’s business affairs department.

In short, I use my lawyer for anything that might one day cause me to go to prison.

It’s a well oiled machine.

But here are the spanners that frequently screw up that machine.

1) Lawyers are expensive. Yes, of course, they’ll save you money if it all goes to hell. But, just like my solar-powered jet-pack, while I bet it’ll save me super-amounts of cash in the long run, until then I’m forking out a LOT more money than I ever thought I would be. I’ve heard of producers paying around $400 for writing a single letter.  (To be fair, it was a whole 2 pages. Double spaced).

2) Lawyers are busy. Very busy, mainly on other people’s work - and the better the lawyer you get, the busier with other people’s stuff they’ll be.

3) Not only are busy lawyers less easy to pin down, but busy lawyers are often also not fully concentrating on your contract even when they’re looking right at it. They miss things. Even the best miss things in my experience.

So, here are the some things that I’ve picked up along the way to remove spanners or limit their damage.

First, find a lawyer who charges by commission, not by the hour. They’re out there, and if your lawyer agrees, you’ll know they’re invested in you and your future. That’s a great sign because it means they’re inent on keeping you OUT of prison. That’s a good thing. (Expect to pay somewhere in the region of a 3-5% fee. This will be on top of the 10% fee you’re paying your agent).

A lawyer might even agree a ‘buy out’ fee per project - a flat rate. I know this happens with feature films sometimes. But KNOW what you’re paying, don’t be shy. Ask, be clear. Get it in writing.

When you meet a lawyer you like, try to arrange a lunch or coffee date at least once a month - just 10 minutes of face time will keep you on their mind.

Know what really is important to you in any deal - make a 5 point list - give it to your lawyer BEFORE they start negotiating the contract. (We always assume that your lawyer understands innately what you want, but they won’t know unless you tell them).

Read EVERY line of EVERY contract. Make the time. Ask questions, look up strange Latin phrases on Wikipedia, most of them are up there. But, you’re just going to have to face it, if you’re in the business of working with the law, you’re going to have to brush up on your Jonny Cochran skills.

If you don’t like the look of something in the contract - ask to have it changed. That is, after all the whole point of this. Despite what you might end up telling people when you’re desperately trying to get them to sign something, there IS NO SUCH THING as a standard contract.

Keep tabs on your lawyer - send nicely worded update emails letting him know the status of your projects - which are in reality thinly veiled prompts to publicly remind him what he’s not yet done.

Be very open about tactics with your lawyer - try to make them see you and include you as part of the team. I cannot emphasize enough how easy it is for lawyers to go rogue, doing what they think is what you want - but which might be miles from what you really want. This also goes for your long term goals - giving your lawyer context REALLY helps them negotiate a contract.

For instance, telling your lawyer that your priority in the next six months is to sell a series to BRAVO will really help him know how easy to go on the Bravo business affairs people. If you tell your lawyer your priority in the next six months is to get the message out there that you’re a really expensive company who cost a lot of money to work with - you can see how the negotiating would be different. But all too often this simple idea is not thought of as relevant and weeks (I’m serious WEEKS) of time are wasted going down expensive wrong roads.

Don’t be scared to look stupid. It’s ok - you’re in TV, everyone thinks that already - what have you got to lose? Ask questions, go through the contract line by line if you have to, ask your lawyer to send you a one sheet ‘plain English’ summary, or ask his assistant to email you a glossary of terms they use a lot.

Don’t expect things to move fast. They really don’t. We just had a contract completely signed this week - four months after we’d shot the presentation tape, been paid for it and screened it to the board of the network, and almost eight months after the first handshake over the deal. Make a sock puppet, or write your Holiday cards rather than waste a second worrying about it getting done. There is NOTHING , NOTHING you can do to make people think you’re imporant. You’re not, (at least not when compared to who and whatelse they’re up to ).

I’ve been wracking my brain for a good funny anecdote about a lawyer, and I genuinely cannot think of one that I’m able to laugh at. A legal screw up at this early stage will leave you damaged, exposed and quite possibly horribly exploited. Being screwed will leave you bitter, or allow you to blame someone when your career falls apart… “If it wasn’t for that STINKING lawyer at Screwum-Bleedum-Cleenum and Leeve, I’d have sold Survivor first!”.

So, do your homework, keep good notes, file things neatly - keep everyone talking and above all - don’t be scared of lawyers. You need them. They need you. Like a lion tamer and his lions - when it works it all looks effortless and wonderful.

But get it wrong and you become just another unfortunate limbless lion tamer.