Who's paying for development

BY Patricia Bailey

Writers have always accepted that they will do speculative writing to pitch their ideas for TV. The drive to see these ideas come to life on the small screen means that writers feel intense pressure to hook in the requisite broadcaster – and not many producers are willing to finance new ideas. As a result writers tend to self-finance development early on by pitching for free. It’s the price of entry into the game. But where does the pitch end and development begin? The trouble is that out there right now, depending on who you are working with, pitch material can consist of anything from a five-page proposal to a mini-bible or even a pilot script. Some of these stages of writing have definitions in the Writers Guild of Canada’s Independent Production Agreement (IPA) and require a contract for the writer. So when does the pitch stop being a pitch?

Cal Coons (Murdoch Mysteries) refers to this industry reality as the “development hell death spiral,” because writers can potentially get caught up in a soul-crushing cycle where they are not only responding to notes for free but also going through hoops to change their original idea. Like most writers, Coons believes that a shining pitch has a better chance of getting greenlit. As a result, he goes far beyond a one-pager. “I never have less than ten to twelve pages before I even pitch. I want to make sure it gets to the top of the pile.”

“A producer might say, 'Hey, your idea sounds great, I'd like to see more on that, could you throw a few pages together so I can show it to my people?'” echoes screenwriter Matt MacLennan (Call Me Fitz, Life With Derek). “But at that point it's not clear what the agreement is. There is no minimum fee for this pitch document. There is nothing called a five pager or a ten pager. It's not covered by the Guild.”

Pitches are tricky beasts to write, says MacLennan. “Mark Twain said, 'I didn’t have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one instead.' You have to figure out what an entire show is before you can distil it down into a two-page proposal. ”

Most writers interviewed for this article accept that they won't be paid to develop an idea before a broadcaster comes on board. At what stage in the process do writers start getting paid for their craft? In rare cases some production companies will pay a writer to flesh out an idea before approaching a network, says Greg Nelson (The Border). “Sometimes producers will have ideas and will bring in writers to develop them. I've had very good experiences doing this.”

But the industry standard appears to involve a writer and a production company approaching a network with a detailed pitch.

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