Day 138: A Pretty De-Emotionalized, Straightforward Argument For Why It's Worth It For the AMPTP To Spend A Little More Money On Writers And Also Acknowledge We Have A Major Systems Problem
At Intermission, You Can Watch This Unfurl As A Series of Tweets, Set To Scott Joplin, Because This Place Is A Content Factory
I went on Escape Hatch with Bad Motherfucker Hoon Lee last week. The conversation became a VERY nuts and bolts look at how writers on set matter, & how critical & nuanced an art it is to flow with the production. It’s not mentorship, but there’s knowledge here. Hoon is dope, too.
Maybe it’s because I have shingles right now (I wonder why I have shingles?), but the combination of anti-viral medication, antibiotics, never-ending switching between ibuprofen and Tylenol, and a huge red lesion on the right half of my face, so perfectly splitting the hemisphere of my head I appear to be, currently, a Marvel villain, but I’ve been feeling very unemotional and perhaps even dissociated about the strike for the last few days. In fact, even feeling like “They Hate Us”, the thesis of the last thing I wrote about the strike, is exactly the wrong approach.
I have been frustrated for years about not being able to get my writers to set. These producing lessons are hard to learn and take forever. That’s a big part of this strike.
Studios and Networks would save millions of dollars if they invested in simple infrastructure to help showrunners show their writers how to be out there. It’s 1000 times harder to flow with a production than be in a writers room.
For S11, our room cost about 3% of the budget. Throughout the process, for 18 months, I asked for extensions (including a 20 week extension), additional mini-rooms, adding writers mid-stream, and adding a writer for the last 8 weeks in Toronto. All denied
The reason for the “no” each time was because we were “over budget” at whatever point, but this is something based on hazy projections and guesses, as well as intentionally juked numbers, in some cases. This is a way to create an atmosphere of emergency during production.
When a streamer, studio, and company (i.e. the show) are up and running, there’s a complex dance happening. The streamer has signed a cost-plus contract with the studio (remember Halliburton?).
What this means: the studio and streamer have agreed on a set cost of the show. Say $75m. If the studio delivers the show to the streamer at that number, the streamer pays an enormous cash sum… usually 120%. So if the show gets made exactly at $75m, streamer owes studio $90m.
But guess what? If the studio delivers the show to the streamer, and it only cost $67m, the studio still gets… $90m. That extra $8m stays with the studio as additional profit. Straight cash. Instead of making $15m for their risk, they make $23m.
This is why, when a show goes into production, many times it feels like the executives closest to you and the creative go from being supportive to suddenly very different. It’s because their job changes at that exact moment— their job changes to extracting additional profit.
Exactly at that moment, your streamer network execs start asking for more— more story, more scenes, more great shit. THEIR job is to get best show they can. THEJR cost is predetermined. Which means— your streamer is asking you to spend just as your studio is telling you to cut.
Also, did I mention that it’s considered a betrayal to your studio if you’re talking to the network about creative without their knowledge? This will be logged as deceitful, even if it’s happening because streamer execs are DMing you on the side, saying ignore the studio. Yes that happens. They also DM you to tell you you’re a fuckup, tell you you’re great, ask about meeting the cast, and ask what things mean so they can explain them to their bosses. So do the studio executives. These are all traps, of course, which is too hard to explain here. If you’d like to know what people from the physical production departments of studios do to you, you’ll have to enter my home, personally, using a hand-gesture password, and I will speak to you by firelight, in Druidic, and tell you those stories, then kill you.
Let me take this moment and consider it a halfway point in the essay, and also reveal, in case it’s not obvious. that this is just a tweet thread I banged off on my phone. Sometimes, though, they do seem to have form, so why not? If you’d like to experience this entire essay as an old-timey video set to Scott Joplin, you’re in luck, because I also just banged that shit out on my phone between taking pills and putting some kind of gel in my eye.
Anyway. Here you are on your first day of production, and everyone hates you in a very specific way. This is the wonderfully insane position you find yourself in as showrunner, the moment hundreds of people (who know nothing of this) go out and throw their lives and well-being into something as logisticalally difficulty as a moon-landing.
(As wild as it sounds, I love the job.)
I don’t think the leadership of any of these places does this on purpose. I also don’t think it’s clear how important it is that other writers witness the BANANAS act of balancing these modes of communication and remaining artistically present, and— most importantly— humane. And I really think it’s important to emphasize that humane part. The amount of pain, microaggressions, frustrations, and dangerous stress happening on your set is always WAY TOO MUCH. There are not, as of now, many levers to pull to change this other than cut a bunch of shit. But that is not why we do this; everyone below the line is trying to make something great, too. It’s a systems problem. It’s a systems problem. It’s a systems problem.
I think it becomes very easy for the showrunner to be labeled one of a few types of “problem showrunner” things, very quickly. In some cases justifiably, in others, not at all. And it is very hard to decode that you HAVE been labeled something. Usually by the time you realize…
Circling back to the point of this— investing in understanding this pressure point, and how educating writers to be producers is extremely valuable in terms of cost-savings, is what I wish the AMPTP would consider and imagine with higher resolution than I think they do.
Station Eleven ended up $4m under budget (by all means, ask me if you’d like to see the email from Paramount revealing this to me), largely because I found a way to creatively adjust to massive losses in days and story... and remove a shitload of horses. I found this out months after we wrapped, while in post, and immediately started adding Parliament and asking Dan Romer to figure out how to turn Tuba’s Tuba-ing into the bass-line of Parliament. (Okay, okay, that idea was actually Eisenberg’s.) But goddamn. I cut the rap battle between Young Frank and Your Jeevan because of that. I cut 4 full days of shooting from episode 102 because I was being told we were more than $1.5m over budget.
This is happy news for a lot of people (there are people who get cash bonuses for things like this), but it’s also a blow to all the actors (including Mackenzie) who lost important scenes just as we were meeting the troupe, not to mention a blow to the network, HBO Max, who WANTED many of the scenes we had to cut.
That $4m surplus would have easily covered every ask I made about the writers, of course. And with them, I bet we could have saved even more days. More importantly, it would have meant several writers got weeks of exposure to set, and would be more ready for new shows.
This is not a long complaint or diatribe. Throughout this, I was under an overall and making a lot more money than WGA scale. I think sometimes to both entities, there’s a business argument saying— well he’s making all that money, let him do it all.
But here’s the thing— my overall was not a part of the budget of Station Eleven. Inside the budget, my labor was charged AT SCALE.
What I see is a fundamentally busted set of systems and a lot of people trying desperately to do their jobs in the way they were taught, and drift of norms over the years creating absolute misery for thousands of people.
I don’t know how to fix it other to emphatically repeat— try to imagine the problems of your employees at a higher resolution. Not of empathy, but in terms of workflow and role confusion. If you are the money, and something’s not working, it’s your fault. And your job to fix it.
Now I’ll go play Fortnite with my son and await calls from all the CEOs who see answers here. By the way, CEOs— you realize no one under 15 even watches TV, right? They’re gaming, on TikTok, or YouTube. You’re all so fucked. Writers and the people who make things will be okay. ❤️.