Industry Salaries

[Dana King]

(Also posted in One Bite at a Time.)

I recently discovered the Editorial Ass blog; lots of good stuff there.

This post is a few weeks old, but interesting.

Any thoughts?

[D.R. MacMaster]

Oh, it's increased. I mean there have been remakes since the dawn of cinema, but Hollywood is so scared of anything that might endanger the CEO's bonus that they've been avoiding them like the plague.

When I tried to connect with a group looking for "new writers" in Toronto in the 1990s, they told me that the only way they'd look at me was if I had already had a feature film produced. Which at the time meant that 1 writer qualified for their program. I'm glad some things have changed over there.

[John McFetridge]

Luckily we have it a little better in Canada, then. The show I'm working on is being produced by E1 (they bought up Barna-Alper and Blueprint and pretty much every other Canadian production company) and they have plenty of people who started out with no connections and student debts.

I wonder if the percentage of movies being from other sources has increased in the last thirty years? I've never really looked into it, but I think it has.

It's another one of the reasons I prefer TV - so many original shows.

[D.R. MacMaster]

Despite Hollywood's obsession with remakes, some non-remakes or adaptations do get through on occasion.

I was thinking that the system had more to do with perpetuating an elitism where only the already wealthy and connected can hope to get ahead or even get started in the industry. The idea of a Lew Wasserman getting promoted from the mail-room because of pluck and guts is now an impossibility in Hollywood or publishing.

[John McFetridge]

The biggest difference, of course, is that in publishing very few books (and almost no fiction) is, "based on..." so the low-paid publishing staffers are really there to evaluate new material while the assistants in Hollywood are mostly (mostly, of course, not always) reviewing material from other mediums - comic books, novels, plays, short stories, etc..

[D.R. MacMaster]

It's just like assistants in Hollywood, except without the beatings and hot coffee scaldings.

I even wrote about it here for my pop culture business blog.

[John McFetridge]

Looking at what big publishers publish I would say there's some truth to the idea that they are servicing a rather narrow market. "The only people who can afford to spend years toiling at the bottom of the pyramid are the (often elite) college grads with no loans and, frequently, outside help to subsidize their rents in some of the most expensive cities in the world." This likely also reflects the main market for hardcover books (a few years after they've moved up the ranks or gotten into other jobs).

So, it means there's a big section of the market that big publishers aren't servicing. Hard Case Crime proved that there was a big market not being served.

[I. J. Parker]

Well, yes. Mind you, who gets your book at the publisher's depends on your agent. The agent selects the recipients. At that point you're already typecast as to the type of book it is and how much it's expected to earn. The proven bestsellers end up with top editors and get lots of attention. The lower ranks of editors (I'm not talking about editorial assistants, though I was once passed on to one of them -- a delightful young girl who did not stay) are not necessarily experts in your field and they tend to worry about the success of the book because if they are the buying editor, they will be held accountable. That can backfire.