I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Writing Overlords

“Democrats need to embrace Hollywood because this is where they need to come to learn how to tell a story.“ – Michael Moore.

The first draft is the most lucrative step in any feature writer deal. A rule of thumb is that a “rewrite” pays two-thirds of a “first draft.” So if you’re being paid $75,000 for a rewrite, you should expect to get $100,000 for the first draft. In practice that gap tends to be a little bigger but for our purposes, two-thirds is a good benchmark (Remember that calculation because it’s going to become very important later on in our discussion of A.I.).

Via Stephen Green.

10 Replies to “I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Writing Overlords”

I didn’t click the link because
$75,000 is 3/4 of $100,000.

“A rule of thumb is that a “rewrite” pays two-thirds of a “first draft.” So if you’re being paid $75,000 for a rewrite, you should expect to get $100,000 for the first draft.”

So right away, we see the Hollywood math problem that only compounds (pun intended) the problem.

That doesn’t even take into account “grossing-up” math which their agents readily understand but they are clueless about.

JD says:

August 8, 2023 at 10:04 pm

well if the “writers” are innumerate enough to give up the extra $12.5k, why should the studios care?

Maybe he shouldn’t have used “The Magnificent Seven” as one of his examples, since it was just Seven Samurai as a western?

TheTooner says:

August 8, 2023 at 10:49 pm

If AI can’t write The Magnificent Seven, it can’t write The Seven Samurai, and how many of the people to whom he’s explaining have seen either?

I clicked the link despite the math error and am glad I did, I had NO idea screenwriters are paid so highly!

$250,000 to $300,000 for the average run of a 22 episode TV show is obscene, especially when you consider the child’s view of reality of most series.

They can stay on strike forever and all be replaced by AI, which couldn’t do much worse than the writers.

Over the past century we’ve seen so many honest workers mechanized out of their jobs, people who produced real products that we need to live, and all we were ever told was,”that’s progress”. The arrogant f***s of the entertainment world need to be brought down several dozen pegs, glad to see it’s starting to happen.

Interesting perspective. The author does not think A-I will overtake human’s because it wouldn’t be able to come up with a list of films that I assume the author considers gems.

Ok.

But, consider today’s audience. Let me be blunt. How many Fast and Furious movies have there been? That’s today’s audience. They’d never sit through The Godfather. They wouldn’t even go to The Big Lebowski. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would get a re-write to be a gay romantic comedy.