Ficlets

I think there’s no doubt that Lethem will shortly be beset by legions of crazed recent NYU and USC film grads, all itchin’ to use the book as the source material that they would make with their actor friends using the hand-held hi-def video camera one of their fathers bought them over the holidays. I don’t envy Lethem’s assistant her slush-managing tasks in the wake of this announcement.

But will Lethem find a producer who makes movies with actual studios and doesn’t have to hope to get picked up at Sundance? It gets shaky here. To begin, despite the conventional wisdom on this, most filmmakers do not offer huge sums of money to option books (trust me on this one). Lethem’s offering 0% down, which sounds nice, but demanding 2% of the budget in return is likely to give film producers pause. According to Variety, the average film cost film studios $100 million to make and market. So assuming a certain run-of-the-mill-ness to this project, Lethem would still be getting $2 million. Fiddling with the parameters (tying the fee to the production budget only, making it an indie film, doing it super-cheap, so on and etc) is still likely to funnel more money to Lethem than movie producers are usually comfortable giving a book author (Lethem better also have a damn fine lawyer, since an industry that can manage to hide all the profit on any single film just so they don’t have to pay net participants a dime will have no problem juggling the production budget books to make sure some writer doesn’t get paid more than he needs to be).

But the real deal breaker is likely to be the second condition: moving the ancillary rights into the public domain five years after the film release. I can guarantee you that asking movie producers to give up rights (and the potential revenues those rights might provide) will cause aneurysms from Malibu to San Juan Capistrano. Leaving money on the table is simply not done. The last person who did that was the guy at 20th Century Fox who decided it would be a good idea to let George Lucas have the sequel and licensing rights to Star Wars in exchange for paying him less to direct the film. Hollywood is having a good year at the moment, thanks to the box office of 300, Road Hogs, Ghost Rider and Norbit, which means studios (and their faux-independent art house divisions) are less inclined to do something that gives them less control of a property.

Lethem’s best chance is not with a studio, but with someone who wants to stick it to the studios; for example, someone like billionaire Mark Cuban, who owns a theater chain, a film production company, and who has experimented with releasing movies simultaneously to theaters and to DVD, just to see what would happen. Cuban is the sort of financially perverse fellow who would agree to produce the film under Lethem’s terms, just to watch Hollywood freak out about it.

Outside of that, “super-indie” is the way I see this one going, although I would be delighted to be proved wrong. “Super-indie” may suit Lethem just fine, however. Clearly, if he’s trying to option his work this particular way, he’s not terribly concerned with the payday. Seriously, film school dudes: You might as well make an offer.