First up is Kevin with…
A question about writing credits and pay. I know that when the credits read "Levine & Isaacs" (with an ampersand) that means you two split the money. But if it's "Levine & Isaacs and Smith" (A-N-D) that means you two as a team wrote some and Smith wrote some. Do you then split the money three ways? Do they pay more? Does the team get its full union scale AND Smith get the same? I.E. does it cost the company twice as much for that script?
No more than two writers (a team with an & constitutes one writer) may share credit on a script without a waiver from the WGA. And each writer is entitled to half.
So let’s say William Shakespeare writes the first act and since no one can trust him to write the whole script, David Isaacs and I write the second act.
If the credit reads:
Written by William Shakespeare and Ken Levine & David Isaacs
Then Willie gets 50% and David and I each get 25%.
But if the credit reads:
Written by William Shakespeare & Ken Levine & David Isaacs
Then the WGA would have to approve it and all three of us would get 50%. In other words the studio would have to pay one-and-a-half times the normal script fee. That’s what we did all the time on ALMOST PERFECT when Robin Schiff, David, and I wrote drafts.
You can also break down the writing credit by having “Story by” credit and “Teleplay by” credit. There are formulas with each of those and you’ll notice on Chuck Lorre shows the writing credits are always an alphabet soup of names. That’s because no one really writes the script. It’s room written, but since every writer can’t be credited they just rotate the credit among the staff.
Y. Knott asks:
Conan O'Brien and his staff are being sued for joke theft. A Twitter user claims he wrote and posted daily topical jokes that O'Brien's staff would use the same night. (Google the recent Vanity Fair article for details.)
What do you think -- is it possible? Or is it case of parallel joke development? Accusations of joke theft are common, but does it actually happen?
Conan himself eloquently answers this. Here’s the link.
I agree with him. It happens ALL the time. I’ve seen situations in the writing room where two writers on either side of the room will pitch out essentially the same joke at the same time.
When I do my award show reviews I release them as soon as I can so I won’t be accused of stealing other peoples’ material. But there are only so many ways to describe atrocious-looking gowns.
From Chris:
I have been reading back through old post as I am still fairly new to the blog.
Something that comes up from time to time. "Scoring". Eg You have said Lilith was meant to be a small guest role, but you lucked out. "She scored really well" and you made her a regular
Who is doing the scoring? Is it a questionnaire the studio audience get? Or ring around poll?
Assuming it is the former, what sort of questions are in it and there must be other people doing it too (execs?), or is it literally the actors potential regular gig hanging on the mood of whoever happens to be in the audience on the filming day of that one off guest appearance?
No, Chris, it just means that the actors get big laughs. And sometimes that will prompt the producers to bring them back. Or if a supporting character really scores the producers may give him a more prominent role like with the Fonz.
We don’t do questionnaires, but the network does test the show from time to time, and their results are either something we already knew or way off base. Studio audiences are a better indicator than twenty tourists plucked from the MGM Grand Casino nickel slots area.
And finally, from Kirk:
Here's a somewhat self-indulgent Friday Question. The fact that I, who's nobody, can leave a comment and someone who's name I've seen in TV credits for years will actually read that comment, is to me nothing short of amazing (which is why I went overboard when I first started reading this blog and left a comment every time out, even when I had nothing to say.) But I wonder, how does that feel from the other side? I know you can tell very little about us from reading our comments, but, that said, is there anything about us or what we regularly have to say that you find amazing, or at least mildly surprising?
I often find the comments way more amusing and interesting than my posts.
From time to time I ask readers to tell me where they’re from, what they like, etc. I should probably do that again soon.
But I enjoy the comments. Sometimes I’ll get a person who comments frequently and then they disappear and I wonder, “Hey, where is she? Did I piss her off? Is she just done with this blog?” But I know that readers come and go. Still I wonder. Am I just the blog version of Puff the Magic Dragon?
Have a great summer, kids. Thanks for reading and commenting.
from By Ken Levine
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