Why do producers, when they have spent their development budget and have no viable script to show for the investment, think it is appropriate to offer the writer they turn to, to rescue them, a very low fee for the rewrite? The unstated reasoning is that ‘We have spent all the money we had built in to our budget so you need to subsidise us and accept less than you would normally be paid.’

Been thinking a great deal about changes we want to make to TwelvePoint: mainly to make it more of a web resource and less pivoted around ‘magazine’ articles. This has led us to look at what our members could be getting from the website that they are perhaps not getting. In turn this raised the question about the role that talent plays in the making of a writer.

There is talent in being a good observer. There is talent in being a good interpreter of that which is observed. There is talent in being able to make the correct selection from all that has been observed.

The recession has affected many industries, although there is a wishful stream of consciousness that encourages those of us who work in film, television and publishing to believe that in depressed times people need more entertainment.

Movie-going is on the increase, but it is not cheap especially if you buy popcorn and soft drinks. Are the films better than they were before the recession? I doubt it. Maybe the unemployed have so much time on their hands that they have to go to the cinema more often?

Big brand name writers – script or book – are doing well.

In the TwelvePoint Forum, the discussion about whether women write women better than men and so on has raised interesting points. The most recent posting mentioned ‘emotional intelligence’ and argued cogently that good writers write characters of all ages, both genders and so on.

It does beg a question: can young people write scripts covering the four quadrants so beloved of audience analysts (old/young/male/female).

I have noticed a trend: writers are increasingly becoming producers and also directors. Two writer clients have recently made their directorial debuts. Admittedly both are also actors. Had lunch with a writer today possibly looking for a rewrite on a script she has written. One conclusion from the meeting is that she should probably direct it. She is also an actor.

What does this mean for writers who are not actors? Probably that they should not leap from the cold and lonely writing space into a very hot fire, without going through a stage or two.

Went to delightful launch of Garen Ewing’s amazing new graphic novel The Rainbow Orchid tonight at Foyles’ Gallery. I had seen the book in the agency but I was not prepared for the amazing drawings hanging up in the gallery, drawings showing how Garen drew the pages of the novel.

What was so nice (in this rat-race world of editors being fired and advances being smaller than 20 years ago) was the enthusiasm.

The papers are full of the many thousands of graduates who will be on the dole, being sent off on gap years and generally finding that the recession is not a nice place to be.

For scriptwriters there are even bigger problems: with the demise of soaps like Brookside, Family Affairs, Crossroads (RIP!) and The Bill cutting to one hourly episode per week, where is a chap or girl to cut their teeth?

Doctors is swamped, the BBC Writers’ Academy only takes 8 particpants per year, yet the universities and film schools are graduating ever-increasing numbers of students.

The Guardian editorial

Had lunch today with a client who has just returned from Comic-Con and LA. What fun it sounded, not only the loony costumes (admittedly being worn by loving, die-hard (not Die Hard) fans but the casual way stars and major double-A-list producers wandered round accessible to all.

He just ‘happened’ to meet, for instance, Gail Ann Hurd as well as many other notables. I have made a note in the diary to go next year. If you have to work at least have fun too. There seemed to be a lot of British writers and producers there.

Strange day today: every few months the book and film/TV departments at the agency sit down and go through the entire client list so the film/TV agents can tell the book agents what is happening re their clients.

The current issue of Screen International has a fascinating editorial by Conor Dignam about the great results shown in the UKFC statistical yearbook and the fact that for independent film-makers things have never been worse.

For indies ‘…the battle to find funding and audiences for their films has never been tougher.

Good lunch at Patisserie Valerie (why pay for membership of Soho clubs when theirs is free and they do good hamburgers?) with a client and a producer. Discussion good, food good and there were some philosophical questions about how writers get selected.

My client asked about another production company who had sent him a DVD of one of their films to look at while they read his material.

It was a long day as there were several contracts that needed doing fast from scratch: two deal memos and a book contract. I remember my lawyer warning me against short deal memos: if you only have three pages he said, then you don’t have much to define your rights and their obligations.

Poor Ben Stephenson: damned if he does and even more so if he doesn’t. Looking at the responses on the Guardian website I wonder if there really is a debate?

It is great that people are responding but sadly much of it is either puerile or pointless. Someone wants plays with mainly dialogue? Go to a theatre.

Went to a very interesting meeting to see if there was scope for distribution of Innocent (the low-budget feature about bullying I am exec producing) to other outlets than theatrical and television. We are aiming for both but have made the decision to first create a buzz about the film.

When faced with competition from £5m or £10m (never mind higher) budget films, a movie made for less than £200,000 needs all the help it can get.

On return from a few days away in Cannes (life is rather pleasant there when the film festival is not on) I found myself confronting a series of common and not so common contractual problems.

The first was a contract in which the client was [a] being asked to defer most of the initial guaranteed payment (a very low figure) for the writing of the script and [b] that the 3% of the budget (a relatively high figure) that would be paid depended on the writer not sharing any credit with any other writer (the producer could contribute to the script but that would not penalise the writer!).

So t