Script costs
Script costs can include adaptation rights, but often story rights are listed separately in the development section of a budget.
The cost of screenplays varies enormously, and there are often many different writers involved, some of which are uncredited. For example, Quentin Tarantino did uncredited rewrites for Silver Surfer and It's Pat (see Jami Berhard's Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies).
Jurassic Park was adapted by the book's author, Michael Crichton, for a large undisclosed sum. His salary for Twister was 2.5 million, but there were many writers involved, not just him.
Out of a $72 million budget for the film Signs, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan was paid $5 million, most of which were however license fees for the story rights. For the film The Village (total budget: $71 million) Shyamalan received $327,500 for all writing costs including the screenplay fees for his production company Blinding Edge Pictures and costs for materials, supplies, script duplication as well as fringes. An additional $7.2 million were payed to Shyamalan for the story rights, almost three times the amount Shyamalan earned for his work as producer and director on the film.
Although the highest paid names are stars and directors and sometimes novelists who get their novel adapted, a good screenwriter can command - and is worth - a large salary.
Total script costs can easily be ten percent of the film's budget but, like other areas of a film, unless the writer is a star, it is unlikely for a big budget film to spend more than 5% in the script department.
For a movie with a script budget of $500,000 that is not an adaptation, written on assignment, the payments might break down as follows (referred to as "300,000 against 500,000"):
- First draft: $150,000
- First draft revisions: $50,000
- Second draft: $75,000
- Second draft revisions: $25,000
- Production bonus: $200,000
The first four payments are paid half on commencement of the writing step and half on completion. The final payment, the production bonus, is paid only if the script goes into production and becomes due on the first day of principal photography. If a script is approved for production before all the steps have been completed, the production bonus could be bigger. This means there may be an incentive for the writer not to drag out the process.
The development process
Once a studio has purchased or commissioned a script, it goes through the process of revisions and rewriting until all stakeholders are satisfied and ready to proceed. It is not uncommon for a script to go through many, many drafts on its journey to production. Very few scripts improve steadily with each draft, and when a certain avenue has been exhausted the writer will often be replaced and another brought in to do a rewrite.
Occasionally it becomes impossible to satisfy all such parties, and the project enters development hell.
If a studio decides it does not wish to proceed to production with the script, the project enters 'turnaround'. Another studio may purchase the script from its original owner, but the script is encumbered with the development costs the studio has already incurred. At a certain point, it may simply be uneconomic for anyone to purchase the script, even if it is a very good one. This goes part of the way to explaining why some of the best scripts in Hollywood remain unproduced.
The shooting script
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Once a script has been approved for production, camera directions and notes may be inserted by the Director, and each scene is assigned a number to provide a convenient way for the various production departments to reference individual scenes. When a scene is omitted, its number is retained labeled with "OMITTED", so that it won't be assigned to any newly added scenes.
When the shooting script is distributed, its pages are locked, meaning that any subsequent revisions will apply to the first set of revision pages. When revisions are distributed, the pages are swapped into the outstanding drafts, and the script is once again locked. The process is repeated for each new round of revisions.
Each round of revisions is distributed on different colored paper. The progression of colors varies from one production to the next. Since rewrites often continue throughout principal photography, most shooting scripts evolve into a rainbow of gold, pink, blue, green and cherry pages. |
