Apple has inspired a lot of people to do a lot of things, but recently
it stoked a debate about how music video directors should participate
in sales of clips on iTunes as well as downloads to cellular phones and
DVD compilations. The call to arms came with Apple’s announcement that
in 20 days its iTunes store sold 1 million units, predominantly music
videos, at $1.99. This proved that clips weren’t just commercials for
recording artists and that the revenue they generated could be tracked.
Directors of clips have taken a strong position with an online petition
posted at MVDGA.org by a group calling itself
the Music Video Directors Alliance. The document asks DGA head Michael
Apted to open a discussion with record labels about creative rights and
union benefits for its members who shoot music videos. The group has
been working on the document since May, but felt syncing up with
Apple’s announcement would give them more momentum. "Almost overnight
we have gone from making commercials for albums to sellable content,
from which a lot of people stand to make a lot of money," states one of
the petition’s drafters, who wished to remain anonymous. The MVDA
claims the petition had been signed by nearly 360 directors as of late
November.
For 20 or so years, music-video directors signed work-for-hire
contracts that often gave them as much as 10 percent of the cost of
production. In the days when budgets reached $1 million for big
artists, that was a nice chunk of change, but it came without union
benefits or back-end participation in revenues. Today, $175,000 is a
generous budget and three to seven percent is a more realistic
director’s cut. Meanwhile, the scrappy industry, represented by the
Music Video Producers Association, has come to the table to negotiate
with IATSE and, more recently, the Teamsters. The directors behind the
petition maintain that the director is often the most poorly
compensated member of music video crews. After writing treatments,
shooting and posting a clip, often a 30-day process, DGA members
working on a music video set don’t get pension or health-plan
contributions.
The petition guarantees signers that their names will only be shared
with members of the DGA. The drafters say it’s a precaution to make
sure supporters "aren’t blacklisted" by the labels. Only one signer,
still photographer and director Stéphane Sednaoui, talked to
Film & Video for attribution.
Sednaoui says he immediately sympathized with the petition’s drafters
because he’d dropped out of music video production for a year after
trying to galvanize some friends to push for residuals. That was about
10 years ago (and it didn’t work). Are the signers no-names? Sednaoui
says no. "I know that I contacted a lot of directors, important
directors," he says, "and most of them signed."
Sednaoui notes that, as a photographer, he owns the negatives for every
job he does. "It’s weird to do music videos because you’re being paid
peanuts, and usually a dedicated director is going to use his salary to
put back into production or post," he says. "After that, sometimes if
my salary was $5000, at the end it was $500, or $100 or zero. That’s
because directors use music videos as a way to promote themselves."
When asked what he’d like to see happen as a result of rethinking of
music video directors’ rights, Sednaoui says first that any agreement
should be retroactive 20 years. He says it with a laugh but lays out
his terms, "It would have to be close to the attitude that we have in
photography, where we own part of the video. Maybe we don’t own the
master but we own part of the copyright and when it’s not used for
promotion but sold, then we should have a certain percentage of the
sales like a producer has points in a song."
The agenda for the MVDA casts a larger net as a spokesperson says,
"Precedents are being set here on a completely new distribution format.
Today it is our music videos being sold for download; tomorrow it will
be our feature films."
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