I'll talk generally. There are some people who aren't governed by collective agreements. We do prime-time drama in Canada. We deal with ACTRA, WGC and the Directors Guild. There are projects that are done outside the protections that those guild arrangements provide, but we still have to come to an arrangement, and I assume that it's a market arrangement. Somebody's willing to provide those services, or get us involved in their content, based on the deal that we do. It's a purely contractual relationship.
The bulk of what we do is within the confines of very structured industrial relations, which deal with the base rates that you have to pay people. Everything's always in negotiation. There's a base rate in the Writers Guild agreement that says, “If you want a script, it's going to cost you x.” You may have a very hot writer who says, “I don't care. That's the base rate. I want two times that.” Then it's a market negotiation. If we can afford him or her, we'll do it. If not, we'll move down the line and find someone we can actually come to an arrangement with.
In those collective agreements that have been negotiated between the CMPA and the various parties, there are various types of buyouts you can do where you get paid up front from a budget. You get work even if the show doesn't get made; you still have a contract and a script fee, say. If it goes on, and you want to change the use that you negotiated, you may have to pay another fee to the particular party—say, the director. If you want to do a DVD buyout as opposed to just television, then there's a mechanism that says, “Here is the price that you have to pay to change that use.”
Most of the agreements also have some sort of formula that calculates when the producer has recouped the cost of production, and then there's a sharing of revenues, over and above. That's, again, a negotiation. There are some base rates, but then the marketplace takes place.
We did a show last year with David Shore, who I went to law school with, and who happened to create House. He now has a lot of leverage. We did a deal with him that was very, very expensive, but he was a very high-priced piece of manpower and he was able to get that amount.
There are protections in place with floors, and then the ceilings are all based on your negotiation ability, on how badly a person wants to work with us and how badly we want to work with them. I don't know if that's responsive.