DV Filmmaking

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

When the time comes, remember that you don’t have to accept the first contract a distributor gives you. As Dean says above, don’t take the first offer—you have every right to negotiate and rework the terms to find a deal that benefits both you and the distributor.

I once saw an interview with Ice Cube, the rapper turned actor, who said the job of a producer is to get him to act in a film for as little money as possible. His job, he said, is to get the producer to pay him as much as possible to act in the same film. Negotiating a distribution contract works pretty much the same way.

It’s a common practice for a distribution company, or anyone else you’re doing business with, to initially make a lower offer because it then leaves them room to negotiate up. Often, people expect you to make a counter offer and ask for more money upfront as well as a larger percentage of your film’s future proceeds. If you don’t know that, and accept the first offer someone makes, you miss out on the chance to negotiate a better deal for yourself and may never know what you really could have gotten.

Negotiations are such an important part of any creative endeavor that each semester I teach, I set aside an entire class meeting to work with students on developing a budget and negotiating payment for their work. I start out by asking the class if anyone ever named a dollar figure, either as a buyer or a seller, only to have the person they were negotiating with agree too quickly. ...