almdal bryell belief
Deidamia Bassiti
Videoport, of Portland, Maine, lasted longer than most. It was better than most. It owed its longevity to a single, engaged owner, to strong ties to the local film scene and a collection that put others to shame. I was proud to work there, alongside a staff that paired film knowledge and exceptional customer service skills like few other places I've known. We were a fixture in town, until we weren't.
It hasn't been so long since independent rental joints had the opposite problem. Before Videoport, I spent 10 years working at Matt & Dave's Video Venture. In retrospect, it's hard to believe that our downfall came at the hands of a buyout by a major rental chain. Suspiciously well-dressed guys with clipboards started dropping in; soon enough, we were gone, one of the estimated 30,000 video stores in America gobbled up by Blockbuster or Movie Gallery or Hollywood Video, each eager to dominate the booming VHS rental racket. If only those chains knew that within a decade, they'd be goners too.
I spent 25 years of my life in an industry that no longer exists. Maybe I'm not the most ambitious guy. But that time has provided me with an up-close look at not just how the industry is changing but how people's tastes, and the culture those tastes create, have changed with it.
That was flattering and sad, and ultimately all we could do was agree: Yeah, we wouldn't be there. There were tears and gifts and genuine concern (not unfounded) about what my coworkers and I would do to survive, a phenomenon both touching and illustrative of how identified we were with the role we played in their lives. A great video store is built on relationships, in some cases relationships that had gone on for years. Our customers were losing the people who'd helped shape their movie taste, who'd steered them toward things we knew they'd like and away from things they didn't know they'd hate. We were losing the people that we, in our small way, had been able to help. We were all grieving the loss.
If you think I'm overrating the power of these connections, consider this: Years ago, I helped a lovely, seemingly upstanding woman choose from several Shakespeare adaptations. The next week she returned, asking about the relative merits of zombie movies. Interesting, I thought.
She started coming in regularly. After months of recommendations and some earnest cinematic dismantling ("Like a handful of romantic comedies thrown into a blender," she said of Love, Actually), I became her go-to movie guy. A year later, I became her go-to everything guy when we got married.
This phenomenon isn't uncommon. We at the store ended up dating and/or wedding customers so consistently that it became a running joke from the boss that we were taking money out of his pocket. (Significant others got free rentals.)
Standing at the center of a video store is to watch the world change, a time lapse of people's taste. As the years pile up, some things, even popular things, simply fall out of the cultural consciousness. Videoport fastidiously stocked new releases, but the heart of our store was its permanent collection. Not just a "foreign films" header but subsections of Japanese and Hong Kong exploitation. A dedicated Criterion Collection section next to British comedy. Anime and Bollywood, documentaries, the dark, glittering jewel that was the renowned cult movies section. It took years to build that inventory: A great video store spends its entire life span building up a representation of film history shaped and curated and always there. Things left, of course, but always in response to viewers' needs and our design.
The final filter was the pull list. Every so often the list would appear, a printout of movies and shows that hadn't been rented in a long time, typically a year or more. Any titles crossed off the list were saved. Any still there at the end of the week were out.
There were different strategies for staying the execution of an underperforming title. On the earnest end were pleas for mercy: "I promise I can make it rent" was our version of, "I swear I'll feed it and clean up after it." At their most devious, staffers would simply cross titles off the list without approval, or wait until the movie had been pulled and then just put it back on the shelf.
(I was sometimes guilty of that last tactic. During one pull list session, I was complaining about the imminent execution of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, ready to launch into my reasoned argument about leaving a hole in our Robert Altman collection, when the boss smiled and said, "Well, I assume you'll just do when you usually do.")
By contrast: Netflix routinely adds and removes films at a whim based almost exclusively on licensing agreements. These agreements just don't mean that movies any respectable video store would have remain "unavailable for streaming," but that a substantial portion of Netflix's (rather small) 10,000 film inventory is garbage: direct-to-DVD movies (or movies that bypass DVD for streaming entirely) accepted as part of package deals to get the rights to titles somebody might actually want to see. Although not everything you might want to see. As of this writing, you can't watch Annie Hall, Argo, The Exorcist, This Is Spinal Tap, Taxi Driver, Schindler's List, The Muppet Movie, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Fight Club, or Frozen on Netflix. You can, however, stream Transmorphers or Atlantic Rim, two suspiciously titled low-budget knockoffs of the movie you meant to watch.
The dwindling number of employees who stayed through the ever-leaner years did our best to stem the tide. Being overeducated, underemployed movie geeks, this meant counting on the power of passionate reason to counter the flood of fleeing customers. I started a weekly blog/newsletter for the store. I intended it to be a place for customers and staff to continue the ongoing movie conversation through movie reviews, debates, and think pieces about the store and movies in general. In theory it was, apart from being a chance for me to exercise my brain and writing skills, a way to bind customers to the store by giving them a sense of ownership in the place. In practice, as the customers drifted away, it became more like a running, increasingly desperate 10-year argument as to why our video store deserved to exist, written by me.
But even in our small, art-friendly city, we were abandoned, at first slowly and then very, very quickly. By our last year, each month was down some 30 percent from the already meager takings of the previous year, and it became increasingly clear that there was simply nothing we could do to stop the slide.
Everyone wants their book to get turned into a movie. And lots (so it seems) of books get turned into movies, and/or they get \u201Coptioned,\u201D which is a word you\u2019ve probably heard if you spend anytime around publishing news/writers on twitter. But $5 says you don\u2019t know what it means. I really didn\u2019t understand what it meant until I actually went through the process with one of my clients! But let me demystify this for you here.
Today, we\u2019re going to go over the basics of what this means and how it may or may not lead to your book getting made into a movie or TV show. One thing is for sure: getting optioned isn\u2019t a guarantee your book will hit the big screen. But it\u2019s the first step.
An option is an agreement where author gives a producer/production company/screenwriter/someone the rights to try and get the movie \u201Cset up.\u201D There\u2019s a time period involved, usually a year with provisions for another year extension, and an amount paid to the author for each of those years. That\u2019s it. That\u2019s all it is. It is not a promise it will get made. It does not guarantee a big-name actor to star. It is not a guarantee it\u2019ll be on Netflix. It\u2019s just a start, something to get the ball rolling.
Why are so few books actually made into movies, even after they\u2019ve been optioned? Because it takes A LOT of things falling into place for a movie/TV show to get made. In this case let\u2019s say the person who optioned your books is a big name producer who already has a deal at Netflix (that means Netflix gets first dibs on the things she wants to do). That is LITERALLY half the battle, because a movie needs: a producer, stars, financing, a script, and a distributor\u2014at least. If you\u2019ve got a producer and a distributor (if Netflix likes it) then WOOO! you\u2019re ahead of the game.
But did you see all those other things? Someone needs to write a screenplay, and it is rarely the author, unless you are already an established screenwriter. And someone has to star in the movie, which often depends on the script/producer/money. Someone has to be on board to PAY for everything, which often depends on the script/produce/stars. Then someone has to distribute the movie or show, which either means send it out to movie theaters (in the After Times) or stream it online or broadcast it over the air. And you\u2019re not going to get that before you have a producer/script/star/money. These things come together like a complicated puzzle\u2014it\u2019s impossible until you get one part and then sometimes it all falls into place. This is all what getting \u201Cset up\u201D means.
Sometimes you get optioned and a producer but then the screenplay falls flat. Sometimes you get a big star but then it take a long time to get financing and they have another movie booked and can\u2019t do yours. Sometimes, with TV, you shoot a pilot and then none of the networks buy it. This is why I am not a film/TV agent. The upshot (i.e. money) is great, but whoooo boy there is a lot of disappointment.
I don\u2019t often like to state dollar amounts in regards to book deals or options, because every book is different and I don\u2019t have a crystal ball. I will say that options making a book into TV show are much lower than ones for movie. A $5,000 TV option is not unheard of. And movie options are not automatically six figures or whatever. Maybe you get $10,000 or $20,000 for a movie option\u2014or a lot more. A lot of the BIG money comes when something actually gets made, because, well, that\u2019s where the money comes from\u2014from ticket sales or streaming righs or ads or whatever. I\u2019m not going to go in to all the deals points of an option or purchase agreement (that when the REAL stuff starts to happen) because it\u2019s highly variable and every book is different. Just don\u2019t spend all your option money and expect the checks to start rolling in. It can take YEARS, if it happens at all.
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