Thread by @DavidHSteinberg

Welcome back to our deep dive into your EP and Writing Services Contract for that show you sold! We're on page 5 and today we'll be discussing ARTICLE 14! This doesn't seem like fun one, but honestly it's the most important discussion of the whole contract. Trust me.

Here's the link back to page 1:

https://twitter.com/DavidHSteinberg/status/1458131000907550721?s=20

First of all, we need to know what Article 14 is being contrasted with and big surprise, it’s Article 13! Article 13 of the Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA) deals with compensation in general, and 13B deals with television compensation...

...and more importantly within that section is the minimum compensation for week-to-week employment. This is going to cover staff writers and story editors who you’ll sometimes hear described as Article 13 writers which just means week-to-week which also means “not producers.”

Staff writers currently earn $4,446 per week for a 20-week guarantee (it’s more if it’s really week-to-week, like you’re only hired for literally one week. And it’s less if your guarantee is 40 weeks but no one’s complaining about 40 weeks guaranteed!)

That’s a lot of money compared to many jobs out there (assistants👀) but it’s only for 20 weeks so that’s shy of 90k and you have to pay your reps out of that.

But crucially, your weekly salary INCLUDES your writing services. People outside the industry must be like, “Um, yeah, why wouldn’t it???”

But this means the showrunner can have you write episodes, do rewrites, write a bible, anything related to the show and you won’t get a writing fee “on top” of that weekly fee. (BA calls these extra payments “scripts on top”).

And you only need to look up what a script fee is to see what you’re missing out on. Currently it’s $16,301 for a network (high budget) half hour and $29,630 for a network (high budget) hour. (It’s less for cable and and streaming.)

But a staff writer “only” gets the weekly salary, unless the amount of money they would have gotten from freelance writing the episodes exceeds the total weekly compensation, in which case they owe you the difference. This never happens.

Now you did great and you’re hired back for season 2! Congrats! You get promoted to story editor and your salary jumps to $7,249. That’s honestly a huge fucking jump and it’s probably the biggest pay jump you’ll ever have in your writing career.

(It’s a 63% increase in one year for the mathematically inclined—now you’re making around $145,000 for 20 weeks!)

And you can now see why some networks, BA, and showrunners might make you repeat staff writer. It’s all about money. And discrimination. But also money.

Story editors still don’t necessarily get script fees, though now it’s negotiable. But you’re still an Article 13 writer because you’re still paid weekly and you’re still not a “producer.” And counterintuitively, once you hit story editor weekly salary,

the challenge of moving up isn’t nearly as hard. Guess why? Because the pay increase is MUCH more gradual. In fact, a Co-Producer can make LESS than a story editor. Not really, but sort of.

When you become a co-producer (or executive story editor—I think this is Article 14), your job is legally defined by Article 14, “Writers Also Employed in Additional Capacities.” And those other capacities are producing.

Not only are you now a writer-producer, you will now forever be paid completely differently. Now you get paid… PER EPISODE!

To be clear, you used to get $4,446 per week, then $7,249 per week, and now you negotiate for your episodic quote, let’s call it $11,500 PER EPISODE. Three crucial differences.

First, the timing of your paychecks doesn’t actually become based on the episodes being produced or aired; you still get paid weekly, but your compensation is calculated based on the number of episodes.

(You make # episodes x $ episode fee but then it get divided by number of weeks and this is your weekly paycheck.)

Second, the number of episodes REALLY matters now. If you’re on a network show that gets cancelled after 3 episodes, you only get 3x your episode fee (it’s episodes shot, not aired). If you make $15,000 per episode on a 10 episode show, you’re going to get $150,000.

But how many weeks are you working on that show to earn your $150,000? This is where “span” comes into play. In the early days of Marvel tv on Netflix, the writers would work for 18 months to make 13 episodes.

You can’t pay the writer less than they would have made if they were hired weekly, so “span protection” is all about that division of episodes/weeks.

Essentially, you can’t make less than the story editor rate of $7,249 per week. (And this is actually the exact number that is imputed on your dues declaration to be your “writing” salary. Everything else is your producing portion which you do NOT pay dues on.)

But you can see where the math becomes tricky and a co-producer at $11,500 per episode might make less than a weekly story editor at $7,249. They would adjust the salary so it’s not less but the reality is there is often NO pay raise for making co-producer.

And each producer level bump is fairly small compared to that giant bump from staff to story editor. Only when you get to the top as a showrunner does the curve become steep again.

Finally, thirdly, once you are a writer-producer, oddly but awesomely, all your actual writing earns extra money. Article 14 writers are being paid an episodic fee to show up and “make the show.” Writing scripts is extra, a lot extra. (See script fees above.)

So that pretty much wraps up our discussion of Articles 13 and 14 and why your contract specifies that your services are for “additional capacities” and the weekly writing fee is imputed to be the story editor rate. Next time on Deep Dive, one of my favorites: SERIES ROYALTY!

Errata: The episodic script fees are wrong. Those are the "other than network" numbers. Network prime time is $27,778 for 1/2 hour and $40,854 for hour!

Paragraph 10, SERIES ROYALTY (and welcome to page 6 of your EP and Writing Services Contract). We had mentioned back on page 1 that there are several money streams to a show creator. A series royalty is pretty straightforward and in some ways the most normal in a copyright sense.

You created IP, and though in the US it's a work for hire, in the EU it would entitle you to certain "author rights" or as they are delightfully known in France, "moral rights." Here, every time something is produced based on your creation, you get a royalty.

On a tv series, that means every episode produced (beyond the pilot) earns a small fee regardless of whether you are still an EP, got fired, or died and went to heaven. Forever. (Half the fee if you got shared "created by" credit.)

Side note: Apologies for my use of terms like "small fee" but I'm comparing the fees for certain revenue streams to other fees in the same contract. A series royalty can be 1k on the low end to maybe 3-4k typically, or maybe a lot more if you are really A-list.

Again, this fee is separate from your pilot writing fee, pilot producing fee, episodic producing fee, bonuses, script fees, and residuals. It pays to get your show greenlit! Next up, CONTINGENT BONUS.

I'm going to get into "back end" tomorrow before I take the rest of the holiday week off, but question... do you want the long version of how deficit financing and syndication sales work (though largely irrelevant these days) or just the most relevant details?

The people have spoken! But long and detailed will have to wait until Monday. Happy Thanksgiving!

Your wish is my command!

https://twitter.com/DavidHSteinberg/status/1465363843882749955?s=20