✍🏼 Writer’s Quotes to Live By
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”
— Richard Bach
✍🏻 ATA Shoots Their Shot, WGA leaves “left on read”
As reported two weeks ago, members of the negotiating committees of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Association of Talent Agents (ATA) met for the first time since talks between the two had broken off in mid April.
ATA took the meeting time to hopefully make headway in negotiations as they’ve presented their new franchise agreement proposals.
WGA West Executive Director David Young told the agents they would hear a response by “next week”. This past week came and went with no response.
ATA feels as if they were left on read, and that’s not a great sign as rumblings have been brewing that the guild’s negotiators appeared underwhelmed by the new proposals.
The new deal STILL include packaging — with increased revenue sharing offer from 1% to 2.5% for writers — and affiliated production entities, with new layers for transparency and opportunities for clients to opt-out introduced.
“There was cause for concern, including a revenue sharing proposal that instead of 1% is now 2%,” the guild cautioned after the meeting, adding, “as we’ve stated, whatever solution we find, it will have to address conflicts of interest and realign agency incentives with those of their writer clients.”
Agencies attempted to restart talks, only for the WGA to be extremely underwhelmed by their starting negotiation tactics. There seems to be division on the writer’s end with some in favor of the strong arming tactics by the WGA, and with others in favor of going to the table and cranking out a deal.
Either way, the tea is hot, and WGA wins the first round of the rebooted negotiations with their power move.
✍🏻 Beast Mode *Deactivated*
In another episode of “Death By A Thousand Paper cuts: X-Men Edition” we hear the story of how editor/composer John Ottman, X2: X-Men United, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and X-Men: Apocalypse, pitched the concept for a BEAST story.
His assistant editor and screenwriter Byron Burton sold John Ottman on the concept on what IF Beast had his own film?
“I said, ‘Knock yourself out, but just know there’s a 95 percent chance no one is ever going to make this,’” Ottman explained.
*Because you know…Hollywood!
Burton came back with a script titled “X-MEN: FEAR THE BEAST,” you can read it here, and Ottoman loved the script enough to polish it with an edit, and even went as further as pitching the project to FOX executives.
The project was DOA without a chance as Simon Kinberg, refused to even read the script, which functionally killed the project.
Here at RFS Daily, we’ve obtained an accurate re-enactment of Simon getting the email with the Beast screenplay inside.
✍🏻 VidAngel Pays The *Bleeping Price
Does anybody remember the startup VidAngel? They would rip content from DVD copies, and streams them to users? Yeah me neither, and if you don’t remember here’s the recap: ‘THE HOOK’ of VidAngel would filter out profanity, nudity and violence from movies and TV series on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO.
*Word on the street is their cut of Pulp fiction is a “satisfying, Samuel L. Jackson-less cut that Tarantino would NOT approve of.
The startup came and literally went as U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte ruled that VidAngel’s service was illegal, and left the decision up to jurors to decide on the amount of the damages.
Birotte ordered the service to shut down their practices in December 2016, and yesterday a federal jury in Los Angeles ordered VidAngel to pay $62.4 million to Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. for streaming studio content on its service without permission.
The company has rebranded themselves (still as VidAngel) as a filtering service for Netflix and Amazon, which is still in operation.
This is bad news for the Utah based company, and looks to be the deathblow to finally force VidAngel out of business.
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