I'm the king of my own land

“There has been discussion after Martin Scorsese made this point about an opposition between ‘cinema’ and Marvel movies. As somebody who is making both Marvel movies and—maybe not movies with Martin Scorsese, I don’t think you’ve worked with him—this kind of arthouse films or ‘serious cinema’, how do you look at this opposition? And have you followed this debate?”

This is seriously dangerous to creators

Read the letter from Alan Dean Foster:

Dear Mickey,

We have a lot in common, you and I.  We share a birthday: November 18.  My dad’s nickname was Mickey.  There’s more.

When you purchased Lucasfilm you acquired the rights to some books I wrote.  STAR WARS, the novelization of the very first film.  SPLINTER OF THE MIND’S EYE, the first sequel novel.  You owe me royalties on these books.  You stopped paying them.

When you purchased 20th Century Fox, you eventually acquired the rights to other books I had written.  The novelizations of ALIEN, ALIENS, and ALIEN 3.  You’ve never paid royalties on any of these, or even issued royalty statements for them.

All these books are all still very much in print.  They still earn money.  For you.  When one company buys another, they acquire its liabilities as well as its assets.  You’re certainly reaping the benefits of the assets.  I’d very much like my miniscule (though it’s not small to me) share.

You want me to sign an NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) before even talking.  I’ve signed a lot of NDAs in my 50-year career.  Never once did anyone ever ask me to sign one prior to negotiations.  For the obvious reason that once you sign, you can no longer talk about the matter at hand.  Every one of my representatives in this matter, with many, many decades of experience in such business, echo my bewilderment.

You continue to ignore requests from my agents.  You continue to ignore queries from SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.  You continue to ignore my legal representatives.  I know this is what gargantuan corporations often do.  Ignore requests and inquiries hoping the petitioner will simply go away.  Or possibly die.  But I’m still here, and I am still entitled to what you owe me.  Including not to be ignored, just because I’m only one lone writer.  How many other writers and artists out there are you similarly ignoring?

My wife has serious medical issues and in 2016 I was diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer.  We could use the money.  Not charity: just what I’m owed.  I’ve always loved Disney.  The films, the parks, growing up with the Disneyland TV show.  I don’t think Unca Walt would approve of how you are currently treating me.  Maybe someone in the right position just hasn’t received the word, though after all these months of ignored requests and queries, that’s hard to countenance.  Or as a guy named Bob Iger said….

“The way you do anything is the way you do everything.”

I’m not feeling it.

BOOST.

But something I think should be highlighted is the difference between the Disney franchise model, and a lot of previous franchise models, and why the Disney model sucks.

If you, say, write an original novel, and it gets published in a traditional publishing house, they will give you a check up front and also pay you royalties, that is, a percentage of the profits the book makes. (If you’re asking “why don’t you get ALL the profit, if you’re the sole author?” the answer is that the editors, typesetters, printers, cover artist, advertisers, and bookstores need to get paid, too; they aren’t producing and selling your book out of the goodness of their heart.) If the book is a flop, you’ll get nothing but the up-front check; if it’s a smash hit that sells a lot really quickly and then gets forgotten about, you’ll get a lot of money in the first year and not much thereafter; if it becomes a classic or perennial favorite you will have a small but steady stream of revenue trickling in for years.

When Disney hires someone to create something for a franchise they own, they do not pay royalties. They never have, to the best of my knowledge. The contract is a strict one off, work-for-hire. You create something to their specifications, they give you a check, and off you go. If the thing you created is the greatest of its kind ever, you don’t get royalties. Disney can profit for the next century, but you don’t get anything. This is legal, because when you signed the contract you agreed to it--you got all your money up front, not tied to the success or failure of your creation. If your creation is a failure, this is a really good deal, because you’ll make more money. If your creation does medium-well, it’s a toss-up, because you might have made more money with royalties, but you might not; and the accounting and business angle is simpler if you get a lump sum vs. dribs and drabs trickling in for the next couple of years. But if your work is a great success ... then not getting royalties for it means the contract was a really terrible deal for you and a great deal for Disney.

But the thing is, Disney has spent the last several years buying up franchises from other people and corporations. And some of those franchises did pay royalties, at least for some authors. See, especially back in the 70s through the 90s, if you wanted a big-name author to write a novelization or tie-in (and thus have a better chance of that book selling well), offering royalties was how you did it. Because sure, there were a lot of mid-list or bottom-list or newbie authors who would write work-for-hire (i.e. payment up front but no royalties) just because they needed the cash. For a newbie or bottom-list or mid-list author, they might actually make more money doing work-for-hire for a major franchise than they would writing their own original stuff. You churn out a novel to their specifications, you take your check, pay your bills, and then go back to writing the stuff you actually want to write. Which is why so many novelizations and tie-ins are mediocre at best. But a major author (who might do a better job, and who would attract readers who otherwise don’t bother with tie-ins and novelizations) wouldn’t take a contract like that because they’d make more money on their own stuff where they would get royalties.

Alan Dean Foster was one of the leading SF/F authors of the late 20th Century. And he had a positive talent for writing tie-ins and novelizations and making them really good. Which is why he got good contracts with royalties to write those books instead of them being work-for-hire, and also why many of those books are still in print and still selling steadily, today, literally 40 years later, decades after most of the other tie-ins and novelizations of that era are out of print.

So even after snaffling up all these other franchises, there probably aren’t too many authors who wrote books that Disney now owns the rights to who are due royalties. And most of the books Disney now owns where the authors are due royalties ... it probably doesn’t matter much because the books are old enough that they haven’t sold many copies in the last decade or so, so it’s a moot point.

I bet that what happened was that Disney doesn’t have anyone on staff who actually handles figuring out who is owed royalties and how much, because ... they’ve never had to deal with royalties because they do everything work-for-hire. So then Alan Dean Foster, one of the few people who a) wrote novels that Disney now owns the rights to, b) is entitled to royalties on them, and c) those novels actually sell enough on a regular basis to generate royalties, starts asking why he’s not getting his quarterly check. And Disney is like, who does this dude think he is, why should we pay him for books that he wrote forty years ago, he’s already been paid, we own the books now fair and square.

Except that’s not what the contract says. And now they’re trying to wiggle out of it.

Writing on his personal blog earlier this month, Foster revealed that a formal statement was imminent over the dispute, saying “the irritating imbroglio with Disney, which you may have read about, is moving rapidly toward a mutually agreeable conclusion.”

they have their whole host of cop characters, including the straight-laced official types, regularly treat their job like a game.

yes they had an episode about racial profiling. but what was that episode telling us? that at the end of the day, there are good cops within the system actively fighting corruption and winning. i recently saw someone in exact words say “b99 taught me that not all cops are bad.” that’s copaganda. even if you believe in your heart that some cops are good, they are still people with weapons designed to kill whose job centers on apprehending anyone they deem a trouble-maker, and they are. not. your. friends.

b99 wants you to believe that diversity within the system creates fair treatment, right? that a gay Black captain and a crew of racially and sexually diverse cops are the Good Guys.

in real life, the Seattle chief of police is a Black woman who is AT BEST allowing the people in her command to terrorize their city, and at worst actively commanding it. the tear-gassing in seattle? the little girl who got pepper-sprayed? that happened under the leadership and command of a Black woman. because cops are cops first. the job itself demands that they abandon their communities and their humanity. we joke about being [x thing] first and human second a lot, right? well, cops really are.

b99 talked about the prison industry, right? they talked about guard brutality, retaliation, in-prison violence, right? but think about the fact that within that plotline, the cops were the only characters who we were told didn’t belong there. how cinnamon roll jake peralta, a Good Cop Who Didn’t Belong in Prison, was interacting exclusively with people like a gang leader and an unrepentant cannibal.

b99 is deeply insidious cop propaganda. and i’ve watched it and i’ve enjoyed it! and i don’t believe the creators set out to make copaganda. i think they were trying to do a lighthearted riff on your standard procedural, and they cast a diverse group of actors, and they tried to write socially conscious scripts, and they slowly snowballed their way into copaganda while we were all distracted by andy samberg getting hotter.

i’m not at all saying don’t watch cop shows, if that’s your thing, i guess. hell, i’ve enjoyed more than one of them in my life. but please think critically about their messaging and choose to reject what does not align with your values. think critically about your values, and what influences them. and for the love of god, stop responding to people’s angry, grieving cries over Black people being systematically murdered by cops by defending your favorite fictional cop. real people are dead.

October 14 2019 - After 11 days of strikes, occupations, protests and riots against the austerity package, during which the government was forced to flee the capital of Quito, and at least seven people were murdered by the cops, the protesters have won an important victory. [article]