Career, Negotiations, Notable, Representatives

“You Were Right And I Was Wrong”

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Some time ago, a client called me to apologize for not taking my advice on a deal that ultimately went bad for her.

“Alright” she said. “Let’s get this over with. Tell me you told me so.”

“No,” I said. “We discussed the risks, you considered my advice very carefully and then you made your own decision.”

A rep’s judgment should never in itself become a substitute for your own judgment. As between the rep and you, you alone will likely have to live with the consequences.

Most big decisions in this business (and in life) are a crap shoot; there’s rarely a bright line to follow. However, there are a few things you can do to increase the odds in your favor.

1.     Surround yourself with smart people of good will (that’s by far the hardest part). Look up the word “supportive.” It doesn’t mean working with reps who are yes men and it doesn’t mean silencing their dissent. However, it does mean ensuring that your reps are acting in your – not in their or someone else’s – best interests. See e.g., Iago in “Othello” or more apropos, Sammy in “What Makes Sammy Run?”

2.     Actively seek out your reps’ counsel. Don’t assume their silence means that they approve. They might just be inattentive, lazy or misunderstand their role in the decision making process.  If so, go back to step #1. Consider the risks, benefits and alternatives that they provide (as well as your own take).

3.     Then and only then make up your own mind.

And if you screw up against your reps’ best advice, that’s OK. Everyone screws up at some point.  But your reps better still be there for you to help clean up the mess.  That, and their good counsel is what you pay them for.

Of course, if anyone doubts that, just tell them I told you so.

Actors, Notable, Television, The Culture

Getting Out Of Getting In Your Own Way

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I recently called four actors about a potential gig on a television series.

Only one of them got back to me. Four days later. By email.

All of them, without exception, regularly complain to me about the lack of work in L.A. and now, all of them, without exception, were missing an opportunity to work in their field. Worse still, I might not call them next time.

It’s possible that the opportunity wasn’t right for them.
Or they each had scheduling conflicts.

Or, they each just got in their own way.

Call it audition fatigue. The continuous, consistent rejection inherent to the profession is bound to erode the motivation and enthusiasm of even the hardiest of thespians.

I’ve seen the same self-defeating behavior in lawyers, agents, production executives and other so-called “suits” in the business. Recently, I received a resume by email in response to an opening with my law firm. The resume arrived in a word.doc format which when opened, was covered with very visible, “red-lined” changes clearly revealing that the job seeker’s CV was based on someone else’s resume.

If you’re going to take all the time, effort and expense of putting yourself out there, you might as well follow through by taking just a bit more time and a bit more effort to do it right the first time (in the above case, by removing all the metadata before sending or better yet, attaching a .pdf file to preserve formatting). In the short term, that old saw is true: you never get a second chance to make a good first impression.

Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape and developer of the first widely used web browser recently raised similar concerns in his blog:

Opportunities that present themselves to you are the consequence — at least partially — of being in the right place at the right time. They tend to present themselves when you’re not expecting it — and often when you are engaged in other activities that would seem to preclude you from pursuing them. And they come and go quickly — if you don’t jump all over an opportunity, someone else generally will and it will vanish.

I believe a huge part of what people would like to refer to as “career planning” is being continuously alert to opportunities that present themselves to you spontaneously, when you happen to be in the right place at the right time.

* A senior person at your firm is looking for someone young and hungry to do the legwork on an important project, in addition to your day job.

* Your former manager has jumped ship to a hot growth company and calls you three months later and says, come join me.

* Or, a small group of your smartest friends are headed to Denny’s at 11PM to discuss an idea for a startup — would you like to come along?

I am continually amazed at the number of people who are presented with an opportunity like one of the above, and pass.

There’s your basic dividing line between the people who shoot up in their careers like a rocket ship, and those who don’t — right there.

Marc was lamenting the road not taken; I’m more concerned with the road taken badly. At the end of the day, your success and certainly your capacity to even understand what success is in this business or any business is based more on your motivation than raw talent. Anyone who has watched this season’s lineup of mediocre TV programming or been forced to watch Norbit knows this to be true.

Andreessen continued:

The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.

To be fair, Andreessen has likely never tried to break into the entertainment business and probably can’t appreciate its unique challenges. But certainly Steve Martin has. In a recent interview on Charlie Rose, Steve Martin waxed philosophical about how to succeed in this business:

When people ask me how do you make it in show business or whatever, what I always tell them . . . and nobody ever takes note of it cuz it’s not the answer they wanted to hear. What they want to hear is here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script, here’s how you do this. But, I always say, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If somebody’s thinking, “How can I be really good?”, people are going to come to you. It’s much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties.

Hey, it’s worth a shot.

Equity, Film, Financing, Internet, Notable, Producing, Start-ups, The Culture, Venture Capital

Smart Money vs. Dumb Money

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One of my web start-up clients recently extolled the virtues of smart money over dumb money.

My client asserted that smart money is the best way to grow a start-up. In addition to capital, smart money may provide infrastructure, personnel and the input of boards of directors and advisers. These boards provide additional expertise and guidance. Moreover the optics or perception of their association with the start-up increases the venture’s curb appeal and chances for success.

Dumb money, he cautioned, isn’t pejorative; it merely describes a cash investment with little or no oversight of the actual use of the funds other than initial approval of certain elements, cash flow and the overall budget.

To be fair, it’s like comparing apples and oranges. Smart and dumb money deals are structured in different ways to address different risks and expected returns of very different investors. Nevertheless, I was struck by the disparate thinking of movie producers and start-up entrepreneurs; film financiers and venture capitalists in their capital preferences.

My start up client preferred working with smart money from VC investors because he could leverage greater resources into the growth of his company than he could with the same amount of dumb money.

I explained that smart money is anathema to movie people unless it comes with distribution and even then, they’re never thrilled with an investor armed with approval rights over talent, budget and distribution. Dumb money shuts up and stays out of the way.

That said, we both agreed that if an investor offers up smart money, dumb money or any other kind of money, take it (provided it’s legal).

Actors, Deal Points, Negotiations, Profit Participation, Television

Money For Nuthin’ or Nick’s For Free

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AFTRA accused Nickelodeon of improperly negotiating talent revenue participation for the cable outlet outside of Nick’s shows. A copy of AFTRA’s purported letter to Nick (I couldn’t verify its authenticity) is here.

More specifically, AFTRA’s letter asserts that Nick requires “that the performer grant to the employer a right to a ‘profit participation’ interest in the talent’s third-party income as a condition of employment” in violation of AFTRA’s collective bargaining agreement and possibly California law.

I don’t think that AFTRA has a leg to stand on or they would have cited the applicable provisions of their agreement and the law chapter and verse. I suspect that Nick’s lawyers came to the same conclusion.

What is clear is that the major studios, networks and cable outlets are looking for the next Martha Stewart or, in Nick’s case, their answer to the Disney Channel’s “Hannah Montana”; building brands on the backs of the talent they break with the goal of cashing in on their success essentially forever.

While it’s difficult to empathize with the big entertainment companies, production costs are rising and viewership is more fragmented. As a result, they’re on a desperate search for new revenue streams.

I posted about this emerging deal point several months ago when the Food Network started asking for similar language in their talent agreements. With Nick now taking up the cause, a trend has developed and it won’t be long before the rest follow suit.

What was once an unreasonable “ask,” will become – if it isn’t already – business affairs policy unless talent reps develop the leverage to collectively reject it. However, with the potential millions to be made by breaking the next Miley Cyrus and a surplus of talented kids (and their parents) hoping to make it big, I doubt that’s possible.