You don’t hear about many “first look” deals these days. “First look” is show-business slang for a deal between a producer or writer-producer and a studio or network that stipulates, essentially, that in exchange for a certain sum of money—always more than the studio wants to pay, always less than the writer thinks he deserves—the producer or writer-producer guarantees that the studio or network will have dibs on any project or script that the producer or writer comes up with.
These used to be very popular ways for a studio or network to maintain close relationships with creative partners without being contractually obligated to fund every project they might come up with. In other industries and arenas, this might be called the right of first refusal, but that probably seemed too negative and pessimistic to the person who first coined first look. The word “refusal” seems so final and grown-up.
What show business has in mind is the kind of relationship that the captain of a pirate ship might have with his mateys—arrr, bring me everything, all of the spoils of your work, and I will choose which ones to take. Producers used to have wide latitude to cast a wide creative net: option books, magazine articles; talk to writers, explore many creative avenues, bring them to their studio paymasters for a first look, and whatever didn’t get snapped up they were free to shop somewhere else. “Listen,” a producer with a first-look deal at Paramount once told me, “we’ll take it to our guys first, and if they don’t want it, we can take it across the street.”
Across the street was an umbrella term, of course, meaning some other studio or network. Directly across the street from Paramount was a famous, creaky old Mexican restaurant, Lucy’s El Adobe, and a car-restoration outfit. But first look and across the street convey the jaunty, community vibe that used to define show business. They also capture the hum of activity that was practically audible all over town. People bought things and made things and gave first looks and took projects across the street because everyone was in business all the time. There were movie screens to fill and television channels to supply. There was always a buyer, either here or across the street.
What nobody ever specified, legally anyway, was what a “look” was or what “first” meant. The result was that for many years, you could get away with a lot in Hollywood.
For instance, back in the golden days of show business—which are traditionally thought of as the decade or two before you joined, no matter when that was—one of the most successful television producers in history, a legend of the business, somehow managed to maintain a first-look deal with two television networks. At the same time. While having a production deal at a third network. All three assumed, naturally, they would get the first look at anything the producer had in the pipeline. Somehow, he got away with it. Maybe because in those days everyone spent half their day in the car or at lunch or was otherwise unavailable, or maybe because assistants—the usual conduits of deal information and juicy gossip—didn’t have cellphones and email and Slack, but his triple dealing worked. Nobody ever found out.
Years later, when the producer had been enjoying his insanely rich retirement, someone asked him about all of those mutually exclusive deals. What was the plan, he was asked, if he somehow managed to sell the same project twice? Or worse, three times?
He shrugged. “I was worried about that for a while,” he said. “But I just always had enough stuff to pitch that it never came up. Studios and networks back then were always buying, buying, buying. Nobody ever double-checked to see if they were first. Everyone just needed new stuff all the time.”
Which makes sense, because from its earliest days as the dusty, sun-baked incubator of the worldwide movie business to the initial stirrings of the streaming era—about a century—everything in Hollywood got easier. Film equipment got smaller and faster to move around. Film distribution got more efficient and simpler. Audiences became less onerous to reach—first in movie palaces downtown, then in multiplexes in the suburbs, in living rooms, and eventually in your pocket. Visual effects, sound editing, budgeting software: All became digitized and faster. Making a big-budget movie is in many ways a very old-fashioned kind of manufacturing operation—there are cords and cables and chemicals, construction and little railroad tracks, hundreds of workers to feed and schedule—but from Charlie Chaplin to Christopher Nolan, the whole enterprise became nimbler and lighter.
My first year in the television business was 1990, and the writers would gather in the writers’ room and pitch out a script—dialogue, stage directions, everything—to a couple of assistants who would take it all down in shorthand, then go off and type it up in proper script format on early-stage word-processing software using complicated macros and keystrokes. Then, within five years, everyone was using a scriptwriting software program like Final Draft.
And I mean everyone. Composing a screenplay or teleplay and presenting it in the proper professional format was a big job, and the sheer complexity of it was enough to keep a lot of aspiring writers from any attempt. Those of us already in the business were pretty content with that, as you might understand.
But when screenwriting software came along, suddenly everyone had a movie script they were trying to sell, undergraduates were writing spec scripts for West Wing and Frasier, and Apple computers were shipped with iMovie and GarageBand as standard software. It all got so easy. And it was excellent timing, too, because there were more cable channels looking for shows and more movies in the theaters, and then, a few years later, the Great Streaming Wars began and across the street was about 10 times larger.
Michael Milken, the financier who is best known for the development of the junk-bond market in the 1980s, famously described those go-go years as almost entirely the result of the introduction of Lotus 1-2-3, which was financial-calculation software that allowed the user to make small adjustments to bond issues and calculate their downstream effect all within a few moments. What used to take long hours of tedious math became a couple of clicks on a computer keyboard. When something is easy, more people want to do it, whether it’s making Lethal Weapon IV or buying RJR Nabisco.
Until, you know, they do it too much, and then someone either goes to jail or goes broke. No one is going to jail in Hollywood, but first-look deals, and the breezy confidence associated with going across the street, are about as dead as MCI Communications, the long-distance company that Michael Milken, and Lotus 1-2-3, made possible.
Put it this way: Of the movies nominated for Best Picture this year, maybe one of them, Wicked, could have come out of the old system. The rest, almost to a title, were passion projects that took time and dedication and a singular stubborn vision to get on-screen. That may be a great way to make a terrific movie, but it’s no way to run a pirate ship.
Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images
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