A colleague of mine has asked me to rewrite and reformat a 60 page screenplay for him. English isn't his first language and he wants me to brush up his dialogue and descriptions and correct the formatting.

I read a sample and it's not too shabby but it does need work and it'll probably take a fair amount of time to fix up

Basically, he's aksed me to name my price but I've got no idea what to ask for. At first I was gonna say I'd do it for a credit but then I realized it was quite a lot of work and it'll keep me from completing other stuff I'm working on.

Anyone have any advice.

I'd ask him for a grand and credit if he ever sells it, the money being for the time spent away from your work and the credit for all the work you put in to make his story better than he could ever dream up.

Just my thoughts though.

For that type of work, a thousand dollars is actually reasonable, especially because of the time you'd be taking away from your own projects.  If this is a project which you're personally artistically motivated to work on, it's immoral to ask for much more than two hundred bucks.  Good luck.

Or, if you don't want to charge a flat fee, how about an hourly rate?


Phil

Thanks for the replies, people. I'd love to ask for a grand but since it's a friend I might just ask for an hourly rate and a bottle of Jack Daniels. See how far that gets me.

Make sure you get the Jack Daniels at the end or you may never be asked to re-write something again.

I recently did a re-write for a small independant production company. Basically I did the re-write for free, but I get credit and some backend money if the picture gets made.

Good luck.