Van
@VanTheBrand
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(Van Robichaux) | Screenwriter (@fistfightmovie, @brooklyn99) | Founder @van_labs | Minion Wrangler @illumination ᯅ
Laurel Canyon
Joined December 2010
Don’t worry, I’ll never stop running my mouth about how dumb the people running the studios are until they finally kick me out of the business or put me in charge.
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If they posted the whole movie in one post they’d have to pay a residual to the cast & writer & director. By breaking it into short chunks, even still posting it all, they can abuse a contract loophole intended for playing clips on talk shows.
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Netflix limits theaters & weeks so a film can play enough in theaters to qualify for oscars, but slightly less than what contractually would make it a “theatrical release” by union rules. This allows them to avoid paying actors writers & directors higher theatrical residual rates.
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I pitched a NERF idea I loved a few back they didn’t go for. Get a Rock, a Hemsworth any big action stars. Hire a great action director & do a normal action movie but—every weapon’s a nerf weapon. Every bullet is foam. Never directly address it in the film & play it all straight.
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I have a Universal Studios season pass and sometimes I bring my laptop and work at Moe’s Tavern like it’s a Starbucks.
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Forget civics, we need to teach the children about depth of field.
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Here’s how screenwriting currently works. After months of free pitching on dozens of jobs, you finally sign a contract to get paid to write a film script. You‘ll be paid half when you start & half when you deliver the script. It’s due 12 weeks later. Seems pretty simple except….
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What I’ve learned from Drew Carey is that TV used to pay so well you could literally afford to buy lunch for everyone forever.
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My theory is he’s gonna sell/transfer/license in perpetuity the user data to X Corp, leave all the debt and unpaid bills at Twitter Inc., then have Twitter Inc. file bankruptcy & try to let the creditors have the “valuable” name and logo etc.
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Finally remembered to scan the QR codes in Megalopolis during this watch.
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@Jason It’s a 5 year 30 billion dollar contract for 340,000 people. They deliver 6.2 billion packages a year. UPS will pay less than $1 per package in wages under this deal. You are off by 10x!. You are taking the largest wage paid to the fewest drivers and treating that as the average.
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The studio counter was: no we won’t change anything about pay, but we will offer a free class for producers & execs where we tell them what they already know, they aren’t officially allowed to ask for free rewrites (wink). This is one of the many reasons we are now on strike.
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I want to take this opportunity to thank Bob Gale and Bob Zemeckis for dutifully blocking all BTTF remake attempts. We have probably unknowingly been spared from so many bad takes where a Tesla is the Time Machine and Doc Brown as an Elon type.
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Just got Disney+, gonna watch Mr. Boogedy first to throw off the algorithm.
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A producer friend tried to repeat the “young writers on the picket line are just there to network” line to me & I’ll say what I said to him. 1. That’s not true. 2. Even if it was, as long as they’re withholding their labor & walking a picket line I don’t give a shit about why.
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Fun fact the max app actually has all the credits they just aren’t displayed.
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All you need to know about Ben Shapiro is he’s a failed screenwriter who pivoted to right wing webcasting after nobody liked his TV spec about being a badass young outsider at Harvard Law school.
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I’m hearing the big change Elon bought Twitter for is to get rid of the Paul F. Tompkins “recommended topic”.
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When you are about to turn it in you get a threatening phone call, email, or in person meeting with a producer or exec who (acting unofficially on behalf of the studio) makes vague threats about your career & future writing on the project & demands months of unpaid rewrites….
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To take some of this pressure off of writers and stop their payments from getting delayed (sometimes for over a year) the WGA proposed that writers instead get paid half on commencement then have the other half paid weekly for next 12 weeks….
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I suspect CBS told Drew Barrymore her show could come back now or never. I doubt they made the same threat to Colbert, nor would it feel as credible. Don’t get me wrong—she shouldn’t do the show. I just want to acknowledge the Hollywood chauvinism that was likely also involved.
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It’s only week one and I don’t want to get overconfident but it does seem like it may have been a tactical mistake for the studios to treat every single worker in every single job at ever single income level like absolute garbage at the same time for 10 years in a row.
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Officially, the studios claim these producers & execs have no contractual say, so a writer can simply ignore their threats turn the project in & get paid. But the same studios also pay these producers and 90% of the time will only hire writers if one of these producers approves….
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I bet Elon Musk is too stupid to build his own submarine and visit the Titanic. He’s just not smart and cool enough. He’d also be too scared to use it himself. @elonmusk.
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The data I suspect Netflix wants to hide is that a majority of views are of library titles they don’t own. The top 10 numbers they do release make it seem like their originals are equally or more watched but I bet if you include ALL shows not just top shows, originals fair worse.
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@inobscurity no. MST3k and Riff Tracks pay for the rights to all those movies. That’s why the movies are so bad because those are the movies you can license really cheaply.
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My understanding of the Quibi business model is that by playing credits between each act of TV instead of commercials, you can claim a 10 episode $2,000,000 an episode season is actually 40 “low budget under 12 minute episodes” , allowing SAG and WGA minimums to be skirted.
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Netflix has already used Machine Learning based on their content library to train an AI to do match cuts. They are very excited about it.
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@AWorkmanWriter I mean a few things. 1. If it’s released too widely & too many days BEFORE it’s on streaming it can be reclassified as initially theatrical. 2. When it is classified as initially streaming, after 8 days, Article 15.B.13 theatrical use residual (150% relevant minimum) has to be
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@alecrobbins actual answer: not enough PCI lanes. (communication channels between the CPU and the expansion slots/ports. Intel artificially limits them to force enterprise users to buy more expensive server CPUs. Call your local chip designer and demand “I want more PCI lanes!”.
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@JohnDellaporta development execs seem wired to not get big ideas. On this I think they had issues w/ specific character arcs (which…who cares you fix that in the script) & a baffling concern of not “having stakes” w/o bullets. I got shut down before anyone with real authority got to hear it.
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@Ivymoon93 @MikenIke16 @DiamondSpiderP By making the “clips” under 5 minutes, this falls under a promotional use exemption in the contracts. That’s how they pull this off. If they posted the full movie they’d owe a residual.
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Fun fact, Netflix is (proudly) already training AI systems on every single piece of content they have and creating an annotated, searchable cataloguing of every single shot.
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The WGA strike is at a critical point. Our leverage & power have cumulatively built every day. Studios will make concessions previously claimed impossible, but not without testing our resolve. They’ll offer the minimum we might accept to guard the max they’re willing to give. 🧵.
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The fact that they are leaking this to the press instead of just doing it tells me that SOME studios and platforms are considering NOT doing it but hoping to get some more mileage out of the threat before it becomes clear it’s only real in some instances.
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An interesting test case would be to upload the shows HBOmax is pulling off streaming permanently and then fight the takedown as fair use. A lot of the arguments they would normally make against a fair use claim would get them in trouble with the IRS & jeopardize their write off.
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They moved so fast on this you’d almost think the legal department had probably already pointed out in advance this could be an issue…
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@345tommo I think you aren’t quite understanding the pitch. It’s not playing nerf scenes like they action scenes—they ARE action scenes, with action scene motivations and action characters but with all real violence “NERFed”. Also this was pre-tag, fwiw.
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I’m running for the WGA Board of Directors. I want to ENFORCE OUR GAINS, AUTOMATE COLLECTION OF LATE PAY, use BIG DATA ANALYSIS to locate underpayments, BAN IF/COME DEALS, and SUPPORT OUR SISTER UNIONS. 🧵
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Important detail: The WGA strike rules are still in effect until the language is finalized. Don’t get tricked into working on Monday!
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Instead of canceling most things after 2 seasons if they weren’t breakout hits, I think Netflix would be in a better position today if they’d instead made 4 seasons of all those “bad” shows & taken fewer shots. People love to watch bad old tv but not if there’s only 16 episodes.
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“New York’s hottest club is Megalopolis. Located in the Korean section of Cloud Atlas it has everything: crying statues, female dirt wrestling, canceled actors in drag, deflowered virgins singing heavy metal, octogenarian bankers with crossbows, Shia LaBeouf’s pubes—”
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Very disappointing comedy fact checking by the New York Times. The joke isn’t that this Hollywood power broker’s office is NEAR a Cheesecake Factory, it’s that her office is LITERALLY IN A MALL.
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If you're a WGA writer very close to meeting the health insurance earning minimums (<$5000) but nervous you won't get there in time because of the potential strike, please DM me. My company VAN BRAND is a guild signatory & I also run an indie streaming service.
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I’m running for the WGA Board of Directors. I want to end free work, get us a fair contract, and prepare the guild for upcoming issues like the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Read my candidate statement here:.
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@jailedamanda My guess:. yes (has every password memorized).no (has never used an app himself).
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For his 40th birthday I sent Nick Wiger 40 copies of ‘This is 40’ and his revenge was to not acknowledge that it even happened for months.
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The current crop of producers & execs are so unprofessionally terrified of confrontation they almost never actually pass they just ghost you. This used to be a real business….
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Watched Saturday Night & the performances were good but the writing was pretty unrealistic. For example Dan Akyroid has dozens of lines and yet never once mentions the clean taste and smooth finish of Crystal Head Vodka available wherever premium spirits are sold.
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Translation: Tyler Perry can’t borrow the money he planned to because of high interest rates and a tighter credit market, blames it on AI to save face.
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@1021129O @DiscussingFilm This is the gambit of every labor negotiation and historically labor wins because the cost to labor while high for each individual is dwarfed by the cost to the business not just in scale but as a multiple of a revenue/labor ratio . (revenue - revenue from labor) / labor cost.
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Tina Fey swipes her card backwards in all the Amex commercials and it's driving me fucking insane. How is this okay? http://t.co/O9Al1dhDDY.
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While it’s true most execs are bizarrely terrified of anyone in the audience ever being confused for even a second, it’s even more true that if an exec personally doesn’t get a joke or reference they ALWAYS pretend they did but give this note as an embarrassment coping mechanism.
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WGA Negotiating Committee Co-Chair Chris Keyser gives an update one month into the Writers Guild strike.
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I’m running for the WGA board. Last year I was the only nominee to mention AI, follow my candidacy to learn what existential threats are coming for you next!
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Finding masks in jacket pockets for the next 30 years will be a fun little treat!.
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@Clarknova1 Sure the actual imagery is hideous but don’t sleep on how bad and incomprehensible the entirely human made story and concept are!.
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This new Iger MasterClass seems unnecessarily specific and a little too mean.
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I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the Sonic movie and would like to confirm that yes, it does take place in the Doughboys/Bugmane Extended Universe.
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@Jason @maxfperry @nytimes Jason, stay in your lane. Hollywood media companies have desperately been trying (and failing) to get viewed as high growth “tech” companies like Netflix. The post you are replying to wasn’t claiming they ARE high growth it was claiming they aren’t but wish they were.
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They’d also rather all movies be free. Should we give them away too? It doesn’t matter what the people surveyed want to do, matters what they will do. If a good movie is only in theaters, they won’t actually wait. They lack the patience to stand by their conviction about waiting.
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The current goal of studio PR is to make WGA members & the town believe we’ve won & if we turn down any offer now, we’re greedy fools. Back in reality, the WGA will calmly make logical, rational moves—appropriate & normal for resolving a labor action—as they’ve done all along.
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Good luck to Lionsgate. This has been an open writing assignment for an entire generation. My screenwriting professor wrote a draft in the mid 80s. I’ve pitched on it or had it pitched to me like 3 times over the course of my career.
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On the picket line with my dad Van. He’s lawyer now but he paid for law school working as a Teamster in the 70s.
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Why do people think this is something that audiences want? It reminds me of choose your own adventure type interactive movies. Technically possible…not what people want! Most people hate making decisions. They can barely pick which movie to watch let alone who should be in it.
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Residuals from this selling even moderately on DVD and VOD will likely be more than would have been paid for the next 5 years just sitting on P+. As long as they end up somewhere else, shows leaving streamers is good and healthy for the business.
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@Srirachachau I mean no one wants to say it but the issue is they fired the main person everything was personal for… (lots of huggin boss).
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@NickCActor @ScriptsByJames If they posted the whole movie in one post they’d have to pay a residual to the cast & writer & director. By breaking it into short chunks, even still posting it all they can abuse a contract loophole intended for playing clips on talk shows. You regulate it in the next contract.
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Ad supported streaming is where the business is heading in the next 3 years. Very important not to lose sight of that in this negotiation. You don’t have to believe me you can believe Amazon.
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I hear Chapek is headed back to parks but in a new role (guy getting dunked into a well in Pirates).
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I’m no expert on the military but I’m from the south and every football coach acts like this.
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Leaving Twitter. I just can’t stay now that it‘s not owned by the Saudis and a bunch of investment banks.
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If I ran a studio I’d be concerned this has gone so off the rails, the incentives of the replaceable AMPTP in-house negotiators may have become unaligned with studios. It’s not the negotiators money being burned in exchange for a slim chance of breaking a union & saving their job.
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Damn. I guess we’re never finding out the lab results on those Cinnamon Toast Crunch shrimp…
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If you see white smoke coming from the AMPTP headquarters it DOES NOT mean a deal has been made, it’s a fire at PF Changs! Call the LAFD!.
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