Q&A: How would my payment for this film script be split and taxed?

Question by Lily R: How would my payment for this film script be split and taxed?
Okay, I’m very new to the film industry, my first script in fact and to be honest I don’t know a thing about how payment is split and what makes it even more confusing, is my payment for my script will be split between four parties who live in two different countries if I’m correct.

Right, I’m 17 years old (18 in October) and I’ve got permission off of an author to adapt her novel into a film script and sell it on and the author of the novel is sorting me with an agent (I do know that the agent and the author will obviously get a cut of my money). Anyway, the author of the novel already knows, I’m not to good at writing film scripts, I can write a script for a play but not for a film, so to fix this my ex-girlfriend, who has a good knowledge of how to write film scripts is going to fix up the script so it is presentable as a proper film script and obviously she’d be entitled to a cut because on the script she’s credited as camera angles (that’s the part of a film script I can’t do).

Now the two countries matter, the author of the novel is of permanent residence in the USA, I’m assuming it will be the same with the agent, me and my ex-girlfriend on the other hand are of permanent residence in the UK.

Basically, I want to know this:

How will the payment be split between each party, like percentage wise? And with the parties being in two seperate countries how will the payment be taxed?
Just out of curiousity though, before split down between each party, how much is a script writers payment on average?

Best answer:

Answer by Move on
This is a dog eat dog business. GET EVERYTHING IN WRITING. For tax issues consult a tax expert.

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