My. I have been busy.
This Christmas, I have no less than three plays on in London.
I’m producing The Just So Stories at The King’s Head Theatre.
I wrote the adaptation of A Christmas Carol at the Lion & Unicorn.
And on top of that, my new play The Strange Mésalliance of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick is having a rehearsed reading next Thursday.
So it’s all been a bit hectic recently.
Buy tickets for The Just So Stories
Buy tickets for A Christmas Carol
That’s Pau Amma, The Crab That Played With The Sea, as drawn for us by Hannah Broadway. If you look closely, you can see that he is taller than the smoke of three volcanoes!
Tickets are now on sale for The Just So Stories at the King’s Head Theatre from December 15 2010 through to January 3 2011.
I’m producing the play, and my brother Rafe is directing – the first production from our new theatre company, Red Table.
£10 for adults, £6 for concessions.
Buy your tickets here. The power of Giant Happy Crab compels you!
So there’s this thing called Amazon Studios.
They’ve got 2.7 million dollars, and they want to give it away to people who make films, including the writers of feature film scripts. Hooray! You might be thinking. At last, my chance to bypass the gatekeepers, get a little respect, earn money, and have my film made!
Not so fast, bucko. Let’s just review a few things. You want to be a professional writer, right? Well the first thing a professional does is find out what the hell they’re signing up for.
(Some professionals have agents or managers or lawyers for this, of course. But the point still stands.)
Let’s take a quick look at the Development Agreement. Once you submit your script to Amazon, you’ve signed up to this contract. So it’s worth taking a few minutes to find out what you’ve agreed to.
1. Acceptance
“You accept the terms of this Agreement by clicking to confirm acceptance or by contributing Content to Amazon Studios.”
So don’t send them one damn thing before you make sure you’ve read the contract. Thinking you might send them something on the off-chance, something you’ve had in the back of the drawer for a few years, maybe? After all, what’s the harm?
Stop. Put it away. Read on.
2. Purpose of Agreement and Important Transfers of Rights
“If your Content is a Revision, you grant us all rights to the Revision forever and you retain no rights to the Revision.”
Revise someone else’s project? Everything you do on that belongs to Amazon forever. Whether you get any money for it (f’r’example by winning a competition there) or not.
When a professional relinquishes rights, they get paid for it. You? Nothing.
5. Execution of Further Agreements
“If you do not complete and return Additional Documents within 5 business days after our request, you agree that we can sign the Additional Documents on your behalf and, to make your agreement legally enforceable, you hereby irrevocably appoint us as your attorney-in-fact with full power to execute, acknowledge and deliver the Additional Documents and record the Additional Documents in the U.S. Copyright Office or elsewhere.”
No backsies. If you submit a screenplay to them, and they decide to do something with it – whether you like that something or not – you officially become Amazon’s bitch.
All you need to have done for this to happen is to have submitted a screenplay to them in the first place. No paper contracts or further signing on your behalf is required.
6.1.2. Right to Use Original Properties and Derivative Works During and After the License Period
“You grant us a worldwide, royalty-free (except as specifically provided in Sections 6.4 and 9 below), non-terminable, sub-licensable, transferable right, during and after the License Period (without exercising the Option), to (a) copy, transfer, stream, sell, rent, make available for download and otherwise exploit and distribute any Original Property you contribute to Amazon Studios and all Derivative Works created during the License Period in any and all media, formats and modes now known or later invented.”
Even after 18 months they can still put that script anywhere online they like without giving you any money for it. Or even asking your permission.
6.1.3. Non-Derived Elements
“You acknowledge that Revisions may include elements that are Derivative Works of an Original Property and elements that are not, such as elements that are original to the creator of the Revision or are derived from or based on another source property (“Non-Derived Elements”). As between you and us, we shall solely own all rights in the Non-Derived Elements and have the complete and unfettered right to exploit them in any way we see fit.”
You’ve introduced Sparky the SuperDog and his canine romance into a dull ol’ kitchen-sink drama in order to liven it up. Neither the new script, nor the kitchen-sink-drama original version win a competition, so you receive no money whatsoever.
Guess what? Sparky belongs to Amazon now.
They make the Sparky the SuperDog film, which becomes a multinational hit, with toys, several sequels, and a Saturday-morning cartoon series? You don’t even get a reacharound.
6.1.4. License Period
“The “License Period” starts on the date you contribute your Original Property, as indicated in the Amazon Studios confirmation of your contribution, and continues for 18 months.”
You’re giving them a free option for 18 months.
14. No Guild Jurisdiction
“Amazon is not a signatory to any agreement with a collective bargaining organization, including, without limitation, the Writers Guild of America Minimum Basic Agreement or the Directors Guild of America Basic Agreement, and none of the activity conducted in connection with Amazon Studios is subject to the jurisdiction of any collective bargaining organization.”
If you’re a member of a Union, or indeed any organisation that looks out for you, guess what? You’ve just signed away any chance you had of them being able to help.
Now, I Am Not A Lawyer. I don’t even play one on television. But, fuck me, if I can see so many problems without even having to look very hard, imagine how bad the contract must really be.
Then there’s giving a free option for 18 months to Amazon just for sending them a script. As Shel points out here, how would you feel if, say, Paramount got complete rights to your script for 18 months the moment it dropped through their letterbox?
And let’s not even get started on the lack of residuals and pension contributions.
Now, the other possibility is that your script is so good it wins the 2011 best script award. That’s $100k. (Well, 100k shared between you and anyone that re-wrote it.)
In addition to that, someone else on Amazon Studios makes a film of it which is so good that it wins the 2011 best movie award! And you get 200k of that million bucks, as well! (Well, 100k for you and another 100k shared between you and anyone that rewrote it.)
So if no-one rewrote your script, that’s three hundred thousand lovely dollars! Woo!
Stop. Think. If your script is good enough to get $300,000 dollars from Amazon Studios, then it’s good enough to sell right now. Only with a back end. And guaranteed rewrites. And a pension. And residuals.
Now, some people will be so desperate to get their screenplays read that they’ll sign away their rights without any further thought.
But you won’t.
Because you’re a professional.
So I’ve set up a theatre company.
This has been rumbling on for a while now. M’brother Rafe and myself have had several successful productions already individually – Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol for me, Dark Tales, Kitty and Damnation, and The Duchess of Padua for him – and we wanted to do some work together.
So together we’ve founded Red Table, a company dedicated to bringing outstanding fringe theatre to London.
I’m also pleased to be able to announce that our first production will be an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Just So Stories at The King’s Head Theatre in Islington this Christmas, from the 15 December through to the 3 January. Rafe is directing the show, while I’m producing.
Rehearsals started on Monday with a – frankly – magnificent cast and tickets will be on sale shortly.
You can find out more about the company, the production, and the cast by visiting the Red Table website.
My stage version of A Christmas Carol is being revived this year by Giant Olive at The Lion and Unicorn Theatre.
It opens on the 7th December 2010 and runs through to the 15th January 2011.
They’re already taking advance bookings, and you can get your tickets here. You might want to book sooner rather than later, as the show sold out on several occasions last time.
The script is also available for your reading pleasure – you can order it via the button on the right of the blog.
More theatre news to come shortly!
(Oh, I’m such a tease…)
M’brother Rafe and I are attempting to put on a play this Christmas. This will be the first production of our new theatre company.
If we can make the figures work, it’ll be on in London as a late morning or early afternoon show in December/January this year.
There are a lot of interesting things that we want to do, including something that – as far as we’re aware – has never been attempted in Fringe Theatre before. More details on that over the next month or so.
But in the short term, we need some data on what time people would be most likely to go to the theatre in the day.
That’s where you come in.
If you’d be so good as to spend a few minutes to answer a short questionnaire, it’d help us immensely in our planning.
Thanks!
Alex Vega has just been brought to the surface as I write these words.
He’s the tenth man to have been raised from the mine where he and 32 others have been trapped almost 700 metres beneath the surface for the last 69 days.
No-one has ever been trapped underground for so long before and survived.
A few moments ago, the Chilean president came on television, thanking God for the rescue of these men. Others have also praised God for His help in this matter.
Sebastián Piñera was, of course, incorrect.
It was men who organised the operation.
Men who designed the equipment.
Men who drilled the shaft.
Men who worked day and night for the last two months.
Men who have saved the lives of these 33 people.
God?
He’s just the fucker that dropped a mountain on those miners in the first place.
A challenge I received from Mister Stephen Gallagher for the more bookish among us.
1. Go through the alphabet, and for each letter, think of a book you’ve read that starts with that letter (A, An, and The do not count).
2. You must write down the FIRST book you think of for any given letter.
3. You must have actually READ the book.
4. If you think of a more impressive-sounding book for a particular letter, you CANNOT change to the more impressive-sounding book.
American Gods
The Bitch
A Clash of Cymbals
Danny the Champion of the World
Empire of the Sun
The First Men in the Moon
Grey Lensman
Hunters of Gor
Illuminatus!
Jaws
Kane and Abel
Lucky Jim
The Man in the High Castle
Norstrilia
Oliver Twist
President Fu Manchu (Might have been The Princess Bride. Who knows? But Loli mentioned it to me, so it’s not the first one I thought of…)
The Queen of the Damned
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Skylark of Space
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
Ulysses
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Watership Down
Xenocide
The Young Visiters
Z for Zachariah
Damn. My roots are showing.
No taggery for this one, it’s strictly voluntary, but stick a link in the comments if you do so I can read yours.
A sketch show pilot that I worked on last year has made its way onto the Internet.
Splendid.
Splendid – The complete Sketch show! from Dan Turner on Vimeo.
a series of occasional emails sent from Los Angeles in the past
originally posted 18 may 2004
—
So there I was in Starbucks the other day, drinking my coffee and thinking about nothing in particular, when I happened to glance at the logo on my cup.
It’s a woman, with long hair covering her breasts. She’s smiling, and wears a crown.
And what’s this to one side of her? A fish tail.
Ah, so it’s a mermaid.
But what’s this on the other side? Another fish tail.
Oh, I see. So rather than having one tail, she’s got a tail in place of each of her legs.
So those things in the gap between her body and legs must be her arms…
Which means that she’s holding her legs spread wide apart with a huge smile on her face.
Just for you.
