Courtesy of Spring 2006 Playmarket News

Storeman, packer and playwright Dean Parker writes

O, physician, heal thyself! I'm possibly not the best person to ask how playwrights earn their living, given my paltry income for the last tax year. In another way, of course, I'm perfect - this is a paid piece ...Courtesy of Spring 2006 Playmarket News

Storeman, packer and playwright Dean Parker writes

O, physician, heal thyself! I'm possibly not the best person to ask how playwrights earn their living, given my paltry income for the last tax year. In another way, of course, I'm perfect - this is a paid piece ...... and I'm writing it immediately to pay the week's Foodtown bill.

Image: Poster still from Dean Parker's most recent play Baghdad Baby at BATS.

It must have been the early '80s that I last had a proper job. Up to that point I'd written for the stage, quite a bit for radio and a bit of TV. The Writers' Guild had been formed in 1975 and finally dragged TVNZ and RNZ to the negotiating table in 1978 and doubled the going rate. But money was still sporadic and I supplemented my writing with the dole and jobs as a storeman. I presume young writers, starting out, all still do this. It's not a bad life.

I also applied for grants now and then and had a mate with a regular job who'd give me loans at critical points in my life. I recommend a friend like this as an essential writing tool. I also remember dear Chris Hampson, who'd gone from RNZ to TVNZ, commissioning me on the spot to write a TV play after I told him I had no money to pay a $1000 tax bill.

(I was once investigated by the IRD. I was called in and a young IRD officer asked me polite questions like, "Is this your signature, Mr Parker?" and the more alarming, "Do you have any receipts for this, Mr Parker?" A second officer, much older, sat and stared at me during the interrogation, finally leaning forward and addressing me by my Christian name, the way cops do. "Dean. Dean. Dean, when you write your stories -" [that's another trick of the cops - if you're a writer they always reduce your occupation to that of writing stories, that is, "born fucking liar"] -"when you write your stories, you pause every so often, yes? You pause and you look back and you take notes and keep a record of where you've been and how you got there. Armed with this, Dean, you can then plan forward. Dean, this is what you must do with your tax return." I nodded, but at the back of my mind was the knowledge that most writers I know, embarking on their stories, come up first with a good ending and then work backwards to rationalise it. I thought it politic not to share this.)

Anyway, what turned my life around from this bracing hand-to-mouth existence was I began writing a lot for TV and movies.

There's money in TV and movies. And it can come in big shitloads. I used it to buy a house and then pay the house off. No rent, no mortgage means beggars can be choosers. I know - easy to say, and done in the days of 3% State Advances loans before that fucking 1984 Labour government. But as your writing fortunes wax and wane, and wane, it's peace of mind to have no fear of being thrown out on the street.

As a playwright, writing for TV and movies is how you can sustain a reasonable standard of living. Unless you're a phenomenon like Roger Hall, or have the genius of Stephen Sinclair, you won't come up with the ingredients and craft and resilience to send a new play round the nation's packed playhouses every year or come up with an international concept that is a continuing earner. You have to write for other media as well as stage. You have to write for film and TV - and radio. A one-hour play for radio is worth $4000, but precious few seem to be produced these days.

Devise a TV series and you get a percentage fee for each episode, regardless of who writes it, and if you write an episode you should be able to score yourself $20,000 a pop. Films are worth a minimum 3.5% of the total budget. You ask the producer what the budget is going to be - and they'll probably inflate the figure - and charge them 3.5% of it. Now that's good dough, but the reality is it's only a notional figure. For all sorts of reasons, most films don't happen. And if they don't happen, you don't get the big payout. But you can get $10-12,000 a draft for three of four drafts as you work your way toward that final sunset and there are some writers who make a reasonable living doing this all the time.

And the thing is, every time you write for one medium, you find yourself getting better in others. Write for film and you realise the peculiar strengths of radio. Write for TV and you realize how the stage works.

If TV and film are so lucrative, why not just write for them?

First, because no writer worth his or her salt writes just for money. You write to find out something about yourself (you know there's something wrong with you) and something about the world you live in (you know there's something wrong with it - but you also know there are things about it worth celebrating). And since different subjects and treatments require different media, and since there are economic and conventional constraints around anything you write for the screen, sometimes you write for TV, sometimes for film, sometimes for stage. Sometimes you write a book.

Second, to write just for TV or film can be hellishly frustrating. I finished a stage play in February last year, written on spec, sent it off to a director and it was on in August. That doesn't happen in film or TV. Most TV and film projects just don't get made. I've written the odd stage play that never got made, but that's nothing like the norm for film and TV.

(One of my jobs as a storeman was working for Hodder & Stoughton, the magazine distributors. I had to work on a line, packing up magazines to send to dairies all over the country. Posters had to go out with the magazines and there were rules for this - one poster per 25 Women's Weeklies, etc. An old bloke, a pensioner, had a part-time job coming in to fold the big posters in four so we could the more easily slip them into the bundles of magazines. Now it was ridiculous sending a dairy three Women's Weekly posters because they ordered 75 copies of the magazine, so I would surreptitiously dump great piles of these folded posters into the waste bins. One day the pensioner found his folded posters in the bin where I had dumped them and he never came back to work. I feel my career with television has been repayment for this.)

The most available screenwork is writing formula TV, entertaining the audience to death, but I suspect unending exposure to it besides being tedious may affect your writing as well as your brain.

It needs to be said that, money aside, writing for film or TV, with all the restraints and frustrations involved, can be enormously satisfying. And for impact on a huge audience - and intimacy with it - you can't beat TV. I've always thought it the most important medium to get into and set up an advance post, but to do that these days and then keep some sort of integrity you've got to be bloody smart. Smarter than me, certainly.

Other ways I've made a bob as a writer is doing script assessments for the Film Commission's Development Panel. I think that's worth $300-400 a time. I write the occasional piece for the Listener and Metro and the NZ Herald. These pay about 40c a word, so 800 words = $320. Plus GST. Writing these pieces has the added advantage of keeping a bit of a profile up while you're writing those TV scripts and films that'll never be seen.

I'm hugely admiring of James Griffin who maintains a weekly column in the Saturday Herald, co-writes filmscripts like Sione's Wedding and the quite wonderful TV series Outrageous Fortune and bangs out stage plays. Now there's a writer who knows how to play the game. I don't know much about applying for grants. I did in the past but that was years ago. I applied for a grant in 1999 when I was really on the bones of my bum, but gave it back.

I've never taught writing. That's another avenue of income open to a writer. I've never written to a commission, but these are available from Circa, ATC and the Court.

For the last 15 years I've rented an office. I leave home in the morning and go there Mon-Fri and work office hours. So I'm like everyone else. Sometimes I don't want to trudge off to work but I do.

Writing is a vocation and a profession and you have to balance the two.

There's no point starving, then again if you're getting paid for writing and it's boring and repetitive writing because it's writing that has been programmed and commissioned and written for all the wrong reasons, you should give it away and write something else. If you can.

From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs. You have to get that balance.

And join your union.

www.nzwritersguild.org.nz

www.playmarket.org.nz

25/10/06