Do business on a nobody-needs-to-know basis

Hollywood producer and writer Rob Long explains how things work in showbiz

Now that the shouting and the stress is over, we can revisit, in the quiet of our laboratory, some of the lessons of the recent unauthorised release of Sony Pictures Entertainment executive emails.

Not to point fingers or make fun, because, let’s be honest, that kind of exposure and embarrassment is going to happen to most of us at some point. It’s just a fact of the digital, portable, unlimited-bandwidth age.

We thoughtlessly tap out our most personal feelings and most treasured data, sending them floating through multiple unsecured Wi-Fi hubs and strings of unprotected servers – and we do it daily, sometimes hourly.

Eventually, we’re all going to have our private emails distributed across the web. So, your wife will read that you called her fat in a message to an old friend, and your boss will discover that you and your co-workers think he’s “brain-dead”, and when your bank information is made public it will seem like a relief, because no one will have hacked into your Google search history to discover that you’re unusually interested in male cosmetic surgery.

Still, there’s something about business and negotiations that we can learn from the unearthed Sony emails, so it’s worth taking another look at what is, essentially, someone else’s private communication.

Here’s what I noticed: when a Sony studio executive was trying to make a deal with what we in Hollywood call, without irony, “a piece of talent” – an actor, director, writer or producer – there was a habit of sending a swaggering and overconfident email to the lawyer in charge of the negotiation and saying something like: “This deal is going to close. Let me tell you something, he needs the money.”

Deal-making in Hollywood is a complicated business. The studio or network executive picks the talent, but it’s a lawyer working in a department called “business affairs” who makes the actual deal, who wrangles and argues and haggles and threatens the agent representing the talent.

This is designed to keep the crucial relationship between talent and executive on a happy and warm note – all of the real street fighting and trash talk is done by their representatives.

So when the talent calls his or her agent to say: “Please make a deal with the studio”, they usually add something like, “and get me lots of money. They love me. I’m the only one who can do this project.”

And when the studio or network executive emails the business affairs lawyer to set a deal in motion, they – according to the Sony emails – often say: “Don’t pay the talent too much; I hear he’s broke.”

That’s what people say to each other, and themselves, when they’re trying to muster some confidence for a sure thing. He (or she) needs the money. They’re broke. They need this. They don’t have any other choice.

It’s remarkable how many times I’ve heard that said – or, humiliatingly, said it myself – about actors or writers I’ve tried to hire and networks I’ve tried to sell projects to. But the truth is, if you find yourself assessing your chances to close this or that deal or sell this or that script based on your totally flawed and delusional measurement of the other party’s needs and desperation, you’re probably in for a sad shock.

Because – and here’s the nasty truth underlying pretty much every transaction in the entertainment business, and probably every other business, too – there’s always an alternative, somewhere in the shadows.

“Here’s what’s working for us,” a network president once said to me, about the programming on his network – a network that had just fallen four places in the rankings.

“Nothing is working for you,” is what I wanted to say. “You need me. You need what I’m about to pitch.”

And sometimes what you want to say leaks out, somehow, in your tone or your body language. What I said was: “Great, yeah, let me know what you guys are finding success with.” But what the network president heard was: “Gimme a break. You’re desperate and you need me.”

There were an awful lot of deals hashed over in those pirated Sony emails, so it’s nearly impossible to know which ones got made and which ones blew up. Past experience suggests that most of them didn’t reach an agreement.

The network president in my meeting didn’t buy my pitch. He needed something, I guess – everyone needs something – but he didn’t need what I was pitching, or if he did he didn’t need it from me.

However, I’m absolutely certain that if, when I went in, I’d remembered that there’s always an alternative, that they can always say no, that no one needs what I’m about to pitch, he would have heard my pitch and thought: “Hey, we need that.”

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood