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Let's Raise the Playwright's Minimum Wage by Doug Rand Are you sitting down? Because I have a story for you... Back in 1966, if you wanted to stage a performance of an immensely popular play at your local community theater -- say, The Miracle Worker -- you would have paid $50 in royalties. But now it's 2006, and inflation has jacked up the consumer price index by about 600% over the past forty years, so if you wanted to perform that same play today, your royalty bill would be a whopping -- wait for it -- $50. For some reason, this baseline royalty for amateur theaters has barely changed in nearly half a century -- and that's the case for most plays in the catalogs of most play publishers. As a playwright, I'd always thought that royalty fees seemed rather low, but until recently I had no idea that they'd been frozen for so long. Actually, "frozen" isn't the most accurate word. The catalog price may be frozen in time, but this means that playwrights' real revenue is in fact going down. After all, $50 in today's dollars would have been worth a lot more in 1966 (over $300); next year, $50 will be worth even less. Inflation is working against us -- with each passing year that royalty prices don't change, our minimum wage is effectively falling. The playwright's royalty compensation may be one of the only things in our entire economy that hasn't gone up in the past forty years -- or maybe much longer, since 1966 is just the year of the oldest catalog I happened to find so far... What's going on here? Let's look at three possible explanations for publisher behavior: 1. Necessity. "Royalties are as high as the market will bear," this argument goes, "If we squeeze schools and colleges and community playhouses any harder, we'll be hurting The Theatre. Do you want to hurt The Theatre?!?" This argument is emotionally compelling, but it's undermined by a few important facts. First of all, as we saw above, royalties are cheaper now than they've ever been, and they're only getting cheaper still. Theaters certainly aren't paying 1966 prices for lumber, costumes, and rent (not to mention desks and textbooks). Compared with everything else in the production budget, royalties are a steal! It's also important to consider musicals, which for some reason have a completely different royalty tradition than nonmusical plays. Even the tiniest theater groups have long been accustomed to paying quite significant royalties for musicals -- often $300 or more per performance, and that's not including many hundreds more to rent the score. They're paying 6 times more in royalties for a musical than they would for a nonmusical play, even if the production loses money. In short, if theaters really want to stage a play, they'll pay for that privilege. The "right" royalty is mostly a matter of tradition, not market forces. If royalties had risen with inflation over the past 40 years, theaters probably wouldn't think twice about paying $300 to perform musicals and nonmusicals alike. So why didn't they rise? On to the next hypothesis... 2. Neglect. Here's an interesting fact I haven't told you yet: If you peered into that same 1966 catalog where The Miracle Worker cost $50 to perform, you'd see that one book of this play used to cost $1.25. Today one book costs $6.50, which only makes sense -- surely the costs of paper and printing have gone up considerably over the past 40 years. So why haven't royalty prices gone up along with book prices? If you were a publisher who didn't raise book prices to keep pace with printing costs, there would come a day when you actually started to lose money on every book. Clearly you wouldn't let this happen, or you'd go belly-up. But royalty fees have no intrinsic costs to keep pace with, so you could conceivably ignore them for long periods of time without obviously losing money. But what business would be satisfied with merely not losing money? Why not raise royalties when this would benefit publisher and playwright alike? Time for a fresh hypothesis... 3. Conflicting interests. Ever heard this factoid? "Play publishers make much more money from licensing performances than from selling books." Sounds reasonable -- theaters are surely paying more for royalties than for books -- but it's actually not true. How do I know? This is the part of the article where I whip off my playwright hat to reveal, just underneath, my hitherto-concealed publisher hat. I co-founded Playscripts, Inc. six years ago, and I have certainly noted that our revenue from royalties outstrips our revenue from books -- but the opposite is true when you look at our actual profits. Sure, it's nice to get a great big check from a great big theater, but most of that money goes straight to the playwright (as it should). On the other hand, like other publishers, our company gets to keep the vast majority (90%) of book revenues. Much of that money goes straight to the printer, of course, but we're still making a much greater margin on books than on performance royalties. So here we have a case of mismatched incentives: At the end of the day, publishers profit much more from books, while playwrights profit much more from performances. If you're a playwright and you want to maximize your income, then you want theaters to pay the highest royalties possible -- and if you could double royalties without sacrificing half the theaters, this would be in your rational economic self-interest. But if you're a publisher, and you only get to keep a slim commission on royalties, perhaps you'd rather keep those royalties at bargain-basement rates, to encourage as many theaters as possible to stage productions and buy lots of books from you... Now, I have no idea which of these hypotheses is correct -- maybe none of them are. But whatever the cause of the problem, my playwright self thinks that it's high time for a solution. What can you do? (1) Call the Dramatists Guild (800-289-9366), and let them know that you're a member who's concerned about the chronic undervaluing of playwrights' performance royalties. (2) Call your publisher, and ask them what they're going to do about fixing this problem, and how soon. (3) Compare the going rates across various publishers for plays comparable to your own, determine what you consider to be a fair and reasonable minimum royalty, and then plug this language into your next publishing contract:
Note that I'm not nearly as concerned about royalties from professional productions, which are usually a percentage of box office revenue. That's inherently inflation-proof. But no significant number of playwrights can possibly make a living from the professional theater circuit, where zillions of authors are clamoring for just a few hundred production licenses each year. Meanwhile, there are tens of thousands of community theaters, college theater departments, and school drama programs in America, all of them being asked to pay a vanishingly small amount to perform playwrights' work, for no particularly rational reason. Imagine if that was a pie large enough for all playwrights to share... For anyone who's lamented the flight of talented playwrights to Hollywood and TV-land, here's a concrete way to help writers make a living within the theater. Clearly the process of increasing royalties and changing theaters' expectations needs to be reasonably gradual -- we can't undo long-term mistakes overnight. But there's no time like the present to start raising the playwright's minimum wage. Doug Rand is the president and co-founder of Playscripts, Inc., and is a member of the Dramatists Guild. Please email your feedback. |
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