How much should a screenwriter get paid?

13Nov/060

How much should a screenwriter get paid?

John August's latest post addresses a topic close to my heart:

I’ve never been paid anything close to 10% of a film’s budget. My first feature, Go, cost roughly $6 million. I was paid $70,000. That’s half a million dollars less than I “should” have gotten.

For The Movie, I was paid low-budget scale — $35,782, plus a $5,000 script publication fee. (If we’d qualified for the WGA Indie rates, we could have brought that down to zero.)

And as a writer who’s written several very expensive movies, let me tell you, I’d love to be cashing $20 million checks. But it doesn’t happen.

--johnaugust.com » Is the Slamdance script competition a bad idea?