There's a very big difference between negotiating to borrow billions of dollars on behalf of MCA and negotiating to borrow 28 cents in connection with making independent pictures.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I'm not big with negotiating.
Certainly it is much easier to think about negotiating and having deals when there is a singular represented point of view. That pretty much is a given.
Everything is negotiable. Whether or not the negotiation is easy is another thing.
The model today is that as much as 70 percent of the financing of the picture would come from overseas. Now we're beginning to run out of suckers, because there are not that many people overseas who are willing to put up more than half the money for a movie.
But what's interesting is now - and not only in horror, but across the board - the studios basically only make B pictures with A budgets. That's the biggest difference.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In the nonprofit world, the right picture is worth tens of thousands of dollars. I use PhotoPad to sync our Samasource Flickr account to my iPad and slip it out of my purse at cocktail parties to tell our story.
So when we go into a large hardware bid, there is usually a services component that is part of that. So as we enter these deals, we tend to talk about the capabilities and what else needs to be done, and from there the bid might expand beyond hardware to the services.
Every time someone downloads a picture, the photographers get paid about 30% of what we charge.
The marketing costs are insane now. So even if you've got a picture like 'Flipped' which cost under $14 million, or $13.5 million, you're still going to spend on an national basis, if you release with a good national release, you're still going to spend, you know, $30-$40 million.
It's a lot easier to negotiate and be skillful from the majority. I want Paul Ryan negotiating with us. I don't want to have to negotiate with Paul Ryan.