The truth about screenwriting money
Why you need to recalibrate your expectations
By Ian Masters
When I signed up with my agent three years ago, she explained that in all likelihood it would take about five years of solid continuous graft before there was even a possibility that I could give up my day job and survive on my screenwriting income.
Of course, I believed that I would be the exception – that I would buck the norm, sell TV pilots, land TV writing commissions, with maybe a feature or two to top up the family finances.
I’m three years in now. On the surface, the first two years felt really positive: my writing partner and I optioned a thriller TV series, a spec historical feature, and were hired as writers to develop a comedy feature from a one-pager, and develop a feature treatment based on a true crime book.
Other scripts of ours landed finalist spots in C21, London Pitchbox, PAGE. We took a host of meetings, notched up tonnes of reads with seriously well-known and prolific producers. The response was mainly positive – “Great writing, but not quite what we’re looking for”, “There’s something similar on our slate, but keep ‘em coming” etc.
But all this interest wasn’t turning into hard cash.
Let’s talk about the money
Our TV series was optioned in January 2019. But it was one of those dreaded, no-fee, 12-month options. The producer had no funds but it was officially “in development” with a known European production company. They hustled for development money from soft funds in Italy. And they eventually found some. Three thousand dollars, three years later.
It seemed like a small sum for such a long period of development, but that’s all that was on offer. And at various points, our producers did solicit bites from this streamer or that distributor. They seemed to be inching ever closer to landing us a proper development and production deal – just over the next hill…
The comedy feature came with a more reasonable payout – $3,000 for the treatment, $10,000 for the script.
Meanwhile, a producer I’d known for years liked a one-page pitch we’d sent him on a historical action film and offered us a total of $4,000 to write the script – with a generous buyout due if he ever managed to get the movie made. Why not, we thought? At least it would be some cash in the bank and an IMDB credit in the bag – even if that meant not really getting paid much for our efforts.
The comedy feature came with a more reasonable payout – $3,000 for the treatment, $10,000 for the script. But it was with a group of “producers” who were self-financing development and had little experience of producing – yet who claimed to have connections to people that did. We took the money and ended up loving the project and indeed the multinational team. But they had no idea what to do with it next. It stalled.
And finally, after meeting a producer at London Pitchbox and pitching a Peaky Blinders-style historical drama about the Chinese community in Liverpool during WWII, we were asked to take the first stab at the adaptation of a true crime murder story set in Peking in the 1930s. We were paid $20,000 for the treatment and invited to the Sino-European Project lab.
This was it! Real money. Producers that trusted us as writers enough to pay us a decent living wage.
Drill down into the numbers
However, despite all the little nibbles, and the feeling that we seemed to be doing quite well in our five-year plan, somehow it still didn’t add up to a financially solvent career.
Let’s look at those numbers. Over three years:
$3,000 – development of the thriller TV series
$4,000 – feature film script
$13,000 – feature film as writers for hire
$20,000 – to write a treatment
TOTAL: $40,000
Less our agent’s percentage, this became $35,000. And there’s two of us, so it’s more like $17,500. And that’s over three years, so that's under $6,000 per year. You can earn more than that in the UK if you’re unemployed on benefits. And the triple if you work a five-day shift at McDonald’s.
How does our feeling that we were “doing reasonably well” equate with our earning a lot less than a minimum wage?
It’s our expectations that are the problem, not the reality of where we are in our journey.
DRecalibrating expectations
Ultimately our agent was right. Screenwriting is a long game. We’re half-way into our five-year plan. The only thing that is frustrating us is our misguided belief that we will be different – that somehow, kerching, we’ll experience that miracle leap into the big league, and earn big bucks.
I’ve realised I need to recalibrate my writing expectations. It’s tempting to feel frustrated and demoralised when all your work and dedication don’t turn into something you can live on. Not even the megabucks, but just a wage that pays the bills.
But that’s the truth of it, and even more so in a writing partnership. We’re unlikely to make enough from writing, even though we’re getting bites on our scripts and seem to be doing quite well. It’s our expectations that are the problem, not the reality of where we are in our journey.
Playing the long game
We’re writing new material, but also being a bit more selective about which projects to take to script, and which to leave as one-pagers. Now we have access to the buyers – we’re able to send out one-pagers to our contacts now, because they know that our writing is solid from having read our previous material.
It’s all part of the long, slow game, but definitely not a “da-da, we’ve made it!” moment.
Maybe there isn’t such a moment. The hustle must continue – chipping away, building a profile, writing new material on spec, trying as much as possible to target each spec. And then maybe, maybe, in five years, the cumulated income from all these bites will pay off and be enough to make us believe we’re bonafide, pro screenwriters.
But one thing has really become clear to me: if you let the financial frustrations of “making it as a writer” creep into your attitude to writing, it can quickly become a big, bad place for your mental health, and this will soon affect your attitude to life, family, friendships and more.
Recalibrate the expectations and keep writing. Get in it for the long haul. We are.
Ian Masters
Ian Masters is an award-winning scriptwriter who has worked across Africa and Asia for the past two decades. He is now based out of the UK with his writing partner, Jon Smith.
You can connect with Ian on LinkedIn, contact him through his agent or his website, and find out more about his work here.
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