Hollywood is about to get overrun by blockheads

Rob Long

• Last Updated: February 13. 2009 9:30AM UAE / February 13. 2009 5:30AM GMT

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” Samuel Johnson said at some point to someone. It’s excellent advice.

Years ago, I used to write occasionally for a marginal London literary rag, and the editor would always say something like: “Gosh, I wish we could pay you properly. Anything we’d offer would be terribly insulting, I’m afraid.”

What the editor didn’t know, apparently, is that it’s almost impossible to insult a writer and offer him money at the same time. You can offer him too little, of course – if you do, he’ll probably act like he’s been insulted, but he’ll be lying. Writers, if they’re any good at all, will do it for almost free. But not entirely for free. And writers are so lazy and easily distracted – if they’re any good at all – that without even the most threadbare financial reward system in place – in my case, my English editor paid me 50 pounds per column – we simply wouldn’t get out of our bathrobes. We wouldn’t stop watching reality television during the day. We wouldn’t stop surfing the web. We wouldn’t not spend six hours at lunch.

Or so I used to think.

Not too long ago, Hollywood was a paradise for writers. Studios and networks would hand out cushy, fat development deals to any writer who happened to be loitering in the vicinity. If you were a young writer with a month or two of experience, some aggressive studio executive would hand you a barrel of money, show you to your studio-lot bungalow, and wait hopefully for the magic to begin.

Back then, it was easy to follow Dr Johnson’s rule pretty closely. At the height of the madness, I knew of two feature film writers who not only never wrote for free, but charged studios $50,000 just to pitch! They’d come into the office, gobble up some free cookies and a Diet Coke or two, and then proceed to describe two or three ideas that they’d like to write. That, to use the silly language beloved of MBAs everywhere, was their only “deliverable”. If you wanted one of their ideas worked out into script form, you had to pay extra. A lot extra. Around $1 million extra.

Deals like that have dried up – along with the lavish offices, the exotic bottled waters, the hot-and-cold-running assistants – all of it gone with the faltering world economy and the collapsing advertising rates and the disruptive efficiencies of web-based distribution.

I had lunch yesterday with an old friend. He’s a talented writer – he’s written on some of the biggest, most successful television comedies ever, and he’s also dabbled profitably in the world of feature films – but at lunch he was glum and depressing.

“You know what my agent said to me?” he asked, picking at his Caesar salad. “He said that if I wanted to get another show on the air, I’d have to write it. Myself. On spec.”

On spec is an industry term that’s slang for “speculative.” Translation: for free.

“Well,” I said, “that’s sort of the way it’s done now. But it’s not so bad. You get to write whatever you want. You get to sit down and write the script you’re passionate about. Writing on spec is actually very liberating.”

He looked at me with incredulous contempt.

“You’re an idiot. Who wants to write for free? Since when do I have to do that? I had a studio deal for 10 years, I wrote what I wanted, I made a great living…”

“But look at the bright side,” I said. “You don’t have the studio or the network meddling in the project, giving notes and –”

“I never listened to their notes anyway. And I still got paid. Boy, do I miss the old days.”

He picked some more at his salad and stared off into the middle distance.

“The thing is,” he said, “I don’t know if I can do it for free. I mean, what if I’m not good at it anymore?”

And that’s really the awful, painful fallout from the bursting of the writer’s paradise. Back when the studios were paying huge sums for scripts and passing out luxurious writers’ contracts, we writers walked with a strut to our step. We never wondered if we were any good, because of course we were! If we weren’t, why would the studio be paying us millions? And the studio, for its part, was convinced of its own brilliant deal-making. It was an echo-chamber of mutual validation.

Like everything – the mortgage debt market, credit default swaps, chain smoking – the era of fat studio development deals came to an end. For writers like my lunch companion it’s been a wrenching transition. He’s reliving the early days of his career, before he sold his first script, got his powerful agent, moved into his sleek studio office, and started yelling at his assistant. He’s back to basics: him, a laptop, a blinking cursor, no paycheque.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Perhaps. But if that’s true, Hollywood is about to get overrun with blockheads.



Rob Long is a Hollywood writer and producer.