My wife is writing the scripts and doing some designing for a series educational video. She agreed at the beginning to be paid some percentage of the profits from the sale of the video. I voiced concern over this from the beginning, but she is a a charitable person and doesn’t really think of herself as being in it for the money in any case.
But over the months, she has come to really feel the effects of being (what I consider) exploited like this. She’s putting in a good ten to fifteen hours of work (sometimes more) a week and is not seeing any return on it–and for all we know she never will.
She and the other person who is working with her on this have decided they are going to ask for some money up front.
The problem is, none of us knows what a reasonable number to ask for might be, nor do we know what would be a reasonable way to ask for information which would be relevant to determining such a numebr. We don’t know what their projected sales are, what their projected expenses are, what their selling price will be, and so on.
We do know that pretty much everyone else working on the project (animators and artists) is being paid an hourly wage of some kind, but we don’t know what that wage is.
We don’t know if a percentage of profits was appropriate to agree to, or if it should have been a percentage of gross.
We figure we should go in asking for some kind of up front stipend plus percentage (profit or gross, we don’t know), and be willing to settle for some smaller advance on a percentage, with no stipend. (Where the idea here would be she gets an advance payment now and then whatever percentage there is over and above that advance later.)
But what words of wisdom might anyone here have to offer about this situation?
She says there is a contract, but that it doesn’t prevent her from just quitting. So it seems to us the contract doesn’t really have much to do with anything.
Also, them firing her is certainly a possibility, but it doesn’t seem like it would be in their interests.
They might find a way to say there are no or very little profits. That is the deal that has gotten many people in the movie industry screwed. The movie might make millions but there is supposedly no profit. Or people agree to taking their own percentage of the profits AFTER Persons 1-1,000 have gotten their percentage of the profits.
On the other hand, it’s hard to get a company to agree to pay you on a percentage of the gross. I think it’s becoming more common in Hollywood these days, but in past years only very big top-tier stars could even hope to get a percentage of the gross. (Disclaimer: I read this in Variety or Vanity Fair.) Low-level non-revenue-producing people had no chance of wages on the gross.
Why doesn’t your wife just ask for whatever hourly wage she would get if she were doing this for anyone else? If they won’t agree she can ask them to tie it to her future wages against the profits, so she’ll come out the same in the end. (Assuming she really would have made anything off the profits.) If they totally refuse to pin her current pay against future supposed profits, it would make me think they didn’t really expect to make any profits anyway. In that case, she can either work for free or walk.