Tyler Gibb – Writer, Director, Editor, Filmmaker

A friend of mine called me up the other day seeking advice. She was on her way to sign her first apartment lease and wanted to know if I had any tips on negotiating the rent.

I guess when you subside by doing your own thing with no perceptible means of gainful employment for years on end people just assume you have some deeper knowledge of wheeling and dealing. Negotiation, however, isn’t exactly something that comes naturally to me. In fact, I usually defer situations involving this skill to my beloved Vidya who could probably bargain her way out of quicksand.

None the less I will impart my advice on this subject which I’m sure I have gathered over the years in no small part thanks to Vidya.

Tip 1 – Is this a negotiable situation? (Vid would probably say yes, anything situation is, but I’m a little more of a prude) So I recommend you do your homework. Figure out what precedents have been set. In the case of housing, is it a buyers market or a sellers market? What’s the other guy’s interest in negotiating?

Tip 2 – Choose your battlefield. Heading to your lease-signing with bargaining for a lower rent in mind is not exactly the right venue. Do that and you’ll have one pissed off landlord. Negotiate early when both parties are prepared to engage in that process. Same applies to the creative field. Someone wants to buy your script? Awesome. Just don’t wait til you’re at the contract signing to start negotiating residuals. (Hahaha, residuals for novice a writer… I kill me.)

Tip 3 – Be patient and say as little as possible. This is all about gathering information and is true of any similar situation. Interviewers pulls this routine all the time. The more quiet you are the more the person on the other side of the table is likely to want to fill that void with chit chat and the more they talk, the more you’ll find out about their motivations maybe even their emotions (emotions are negotiation death).

Tip 4, and probably the most important tip – Be able to walk away.

When my friend asked about negotiation tips the first thing I asked her was: How badly do want this apartment? She wanted it bad. In fact, she needed it. Need is Want’s ugly brother. In other words she didn’t have a leg to stand on where negotiation was concerned. Sure, you wouldn’t be haggling over something unless you wanted it but you have to know – from the outset – what your ceiling is and be able to walk away if the other guy won’t meet it.

In the creative field this might seem like the hardest tip to meet. After all, if you’re just some schmuck trying to make a name for himself and someone wants to buy your script then being able to walk away isn’t exactly something you’re going to want to do. But have a look back at the other tips and see if this is a situation you even want to be in. Do your research. Find out if the other guy is even willing to give you a fair price for your work. Find out out if they’re likely to do your work justice. And figure out what the project’s worth to you.

My friend decided to forgo negotiating for a lower rent. She may have gotten the decrease if she’d done her bargaining up front or had other housing options but unfortunately she’d missed that opportunity. Still, she got the apartment which is what she wanted and that’s the important thing.

Basically, I think a successful negotiation is when everybody walks away feeling like they got what they wanted. A very successful negotiation is when the other guy walks away feeling like he got what he wanted when you know he could have gotten a lot more.

A picture is worth a thousand words but make sure you don’t put any in your script.

The industry standard for screenplays is rigid. Margins, font, spacing; all done the same way to preserve a format by which everything from a story’s pacing to the film’s budget is regulated. Very good reasons there’s no room for illustration. I would even hesitate to change up the font on my cover pages for fear of upsetting a stickler.

White paper, black ink; nothing more, nothing less.

No wonder it’s so hard to get someone, anyone, to read one of these things.

I have a friend who’s been trying to sell a script. A wad of those white pages marked with black ink. It’s no easy feat. However, what my friend did to get producers interested in their wad of paper was something I’d only ever heard mixed reviews about. Something to supplement the wad and essentially absolve the target “reader” of having to actually read anything right off the bat. The tactic was a visual presentation. A boardroom style visual summary of the proposed project.

Now I’ve heard that this can fall right in with the whole don’t illustrate your script law but every once in a while one of these anecdotal stories will appear and chip away at the rule. I heard that Michael Davis, writer/director of 2007’s Shoot’em up won execs over with what basically amounted to flip book animations of the action scenes to his movie. Whether or not the script got him in the door to start with, I don’t know, but as the story goes it’s the visual presentation that did the convincing.

More and more I’ve been pondering the power of the average film executive’s laziness– I mean the power of a visual presentation to sell your idea rather than a script. I think there might be something to it. Eventually your script will have to stand for itself but it’s that tingle of interest, that whetting of the appetite that goes a long way…

My buddy with the wad of paper? Word is that script is now being passed around Hollywood like gravy on Thanksgiving.

Today a radio broadcast Sparked my memory of a seminar I attended not so long ago about “type theory”. The broadcast was about introverts and how these personalities react to an online environment. All very interesting stuff and worth a listen. However, the introvert / extrovert topic and the subject of personality type theory that we were taught about in the seminar was quite different.

I should say, type theory is this hugely complex Jungian psychological subject only the tip of which I know anything about. So it’s certainly not deserving of the simplification that I’m going to reduce it to. I do so only as an introduction to how cool it is, and how cool it can be when applied to character development in creative writing. This is the way it was introduced to me by Dr. Carolyn Mamchur at the seminar.

Here we go: There are 16 different personality types. Sounds like pseudo-science already, doesn’t it? Or a Cosmo quiz. Ignore that, it’s very cool, I promise. The personality types are made up of one of two opposing traits in four different categories: Introverts/Extroverts, for example, is one category.

This may be easier illustrated than explained so lets go on a field trip… Personality types can be deciphered by filling out what’s called a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator questionnaire and then assessed by a professional or – thanks to the web – in a totally unprofessional manner by dweebs like me. You can do your own MBTI test here. I’ve been assessed by a professional and also taken the preceding test and they both yielded the same result, so props to the online test. But don’t take my word for it. Once you’ve got your four letter MBTI results code head on over to this site to read your profile – they use the term “temperaments” rather than personalities.

It’s like reading an autobiography you don’t remember writing.

If you learn a little more about the MBTI letter codes then you may find yourself quickly becoming obsessed with mentally diagnosing your friends and family members. But if you can get past that for a moment you may just realize the value of this theory as a source of character development.

Creating a character is all about creating (or recreating) a psychology. At least that’s the way I look at it. To make a character believable, their personality has to make sense as it guides their behaviour. An audience can detect if it does not. Measuring out that personality to get there can be like trying to put together Frankenstein’s monster. Well this MBTI stuff, is like a blue print to every character you’re ever going to write.

Again, way too much information for one little blog post but stuff worth sharing. Go now. Be amazed.

Got an email recently asking me about copyrighting work so I thought I’d answer it here.

Basically the question was do I copyright my scripts to protect myself. As this is really a legal question, you can imagine how many different ways there are to answer this. Moreover, as copyright laws differ from nation to nation things only get more complicated the more questions you ask. But the short answer is yes, I protect myself.

I’m going to state some things now but lets bear in mind that I’m just a schmuck and nothing beats consulting a professional entertainment lawyer (as I’ve stated previously) in your country.

The fact is, purely upon creating a work, you also create and own that copyright. No forms to fill out, no governing bodies to register with, you are the copyright holder of that work (unless you’re under contract that says otherwise). The real issue with regard to that copyright is being able to prove that you are the original creator of the work.

The easiest way to legally make this claim (in Canada) is to register your work with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. There’s a fee and you receive a pretty little paper that has your name on it. When I was a teenager my friends and I used to print t-shirts. For kicks, or maybe delusions of grandeur, I saved up my allowance and registered my favourite t-shirt design with the copyright office. Even then I couldn’t understand how they could issue a certificate for the copyright without ever seeing the work… Amazingly – or perhaps not, given the bureaucratic nature of government – this practice hasn’t changed. When you register a work with the CIPO, all they ask for is a title. None the less, this is still the most legal of legal documents proving your ownership of the work.

Next up, the guilds. This type of registration makes a little more sense to me because both the Writers Guild of Canada and of America both allow you to submit and will store your script for the duration of the registration period. What’s that? The registration period? Ah, there’s the rub. The WGC and the WGA both only honour your registration for five years. A good chunk of time if you’re actively out hustling a project, but it’s no lifetime protection. Both guilds have online registration forms. I register with the WGA West because it’s half the cost ($20 USD) of the WGC (sorry WGC, but c’mon).

As mentioned above, you own your work’s copyright simply by having created it; the real issue is protection. What you need is evidence that you created the work so that if it is stolen (which sucks by the way, believe me) and it ever comes before a judge you can prove the work was yours first. So as a failsafe for every script I still practice the age old mail-it-to-yourself trick. You take a hard copy of your work, you seal it in an envelope and you send it through the mail to yourself. What’s important here is the date that will appear on the postmark and that the envelope stays sealed so that if and when it is ever opened, it is done so by the judge.

That said, I’ve never heard of anybody actually ever having to fall back on this method. The reason for this is probably that, according to a lawyer I once spoke to, only 2% of copyright claim cases ever get as far as a trial that would ever involve a judge. Most are settled out of court.

So that’s copyrighting from your side of things. I’ll need to do an entirely new post at some point on the basics of what to look out for when signing documents that involve your copyright. That’s where the real fun begins.

The horrible, horrible fun.

When I was a kid – I don’t know, ten or something – I was family bound to a cottage in Northern Ontario for a day. The cottage was on a lake and I was apparently into fishing at the time. I sat myself down on a rock on the shoreline and began fishing. The memory is hazy. I don’t quite remember if I’d been told about an elusive pike just off shore or if by process of sitting there and getting strike upon strike on my line I’d created the mythology myself. There was, however, this pike prowling the waters off shore with whom I became locked in a mortal battle. I’d snagged and lost him a dozen times. He’d claimed at least two of my lures – the tree branches above my head had claimed a third. Each time he struck, he escaped. And each time he struck, I got better at reacting to his attacks, drawing him in. I sat there all day. Alone. I sat there through a rain storm. Fish on, fish off for hours. Night was coming. My family was fixing to leave when I finally reeled him in, landed him… Didn’t have a clue what to do with him.

His face was bruised. I don’t know if fish bruise but I swear his face was bruised from where I’d dragged him over the rocks over and over again. I held him up so that someone could take a picture of us. They told me to wait while they killed and cleaned him so that I could take the fillets with me. Kill him? This worthy adversary? In my daylong battle this ultimate outcome had never even occurred to me. Nor even that there would inevitably be an outcome one way or the other.

We let him go. I let him go.

Patience is a funny thing. I’m a big believer in the notion that a every day you wish away is a day closer to your death. So I don’t wish away my days. On the other hand, I am patient. And patience, by definition, dissolves away time. Finding harmony in both philosophies is a careful balancing act.

I let a big fish go this week in order to pursue another. A big fish that’s put up a good fight and that I’ve never quite landed. With enough patience and yet without wishing away those days in between, maybe someday I’ll find myself back on that shore, back on that rock, pursuing that worthy adversary once more.