An Idiot’s Guide to the Fix the broken system of the Thai Film Industry

Budgets are going down. Talents don’t have any loyalty to any agent, and production has trouble finding the talent they need and that are best for the job as some agents just sent anybody to the job.

On top of that new agencies are appearing out of thin air on an almost daily basis. That means, the competition for the agencies is high. If you don’t do it for that budget, another agent will and you’re losing out of money. And since talents just go with anybody the incentive to keep the budget up becomes one of ethics and not one of strength. (‘I won’t do it for that low budget’, instead of ‘if the budget is that low you won’t get my talents’)

How to fix it?

I am talking about the view of the talent here. There is only one way of fixing it:

Go exclusive!

Yes, going exclusive with one agent of your choice is the only way to give that agent leverage to negotiate for you.

Don’t respond just to any post of ‘agencies’ that you don’t know on Facebook.

To be perfectly honest, sending your profile just to anybody who doesn’t have a transparent profile is madness. Who is Rocko Vivaldi Modeling? Who was Ant Modeling? Who is Mountain Models? Who is Brendan Gallagher? Who are all those Pakistani and Iranian ‘agents’ that are springing up?

Who are these people?

They don’t even have a profile picture. They don’t publish their names. There is no phone number. No address. NOTHING!

Why do you expect that they will pay you?

2 years ago the situation was similar. Agents sprung up out of nowhere. There was Ant Modelling. Ant Modelling got a big job of more than 200+ extras with one production company. If the budget in hand is 2500, what the agent is getting is 4000 of which they give you 2500. So for this job Ant made roughly 1,000,000 Baht. And that is just regular extras. There were featured and mains as well.

Guess what happened?

She disappeared. She closed her Facebook profile and was never to be heard of again.

There were others as well. Some have resurfaced, but not working as agents anymore.

Sending your profile to somebody you don’t know entails just this risk. You don’t know that person. You don’t know who it is and you don’t know if they will ever pay you. Especially with payment terms of 1-2 months for some jobs, there is a good chance that you will be left waiting forever for the money that you earned.

What are my benefits of going exclusive?

Your benefits are: Going exclusive forces the production to redesign their practices. Right now, each production has 1 or 2 agents that they are friends with and that are being contacted for each job. Since most talents go with all agents there is no need for production to contact other agencies for the job.

In turn this means that the agent will and has to do anything to please the production. In fact the agents become and extension of the production, but are being paid out of the talent’s budget.

Many agents have rightly asked me: “But what can I do?” or “How can I stand up to the production?” This makes it clear who their real client is – the production.

They have more incentive to ditch you as a unruly or disruptive talent than to stand up to the one who is paying them in the end.

So my recommendation to fix this broken system is:

1. Go exclusive – choose one, or maximum two agencies and work exclusively with them
2. Don’t send your profile just to anybody

Yes, it will take some balls to do that and yes, you will miss out on some jobs, but this is the only way that I see that can bring change – and that we as talents can influence. All other ways you have to put your trust to somebody that does not have your best interest in mind – but their own.

If you don’t go exclusive you leave your agent weak and without leverage to negotiate, because if he or she is seen as unruly (standing up for their talent) they will not be contacted by any production anymore. You can ask Kaprice Kea from Fluid about this.

In my next article I will publish a list of agencies that have been working in Thailand a long time and that are reputable and that I can recommend working with.

Do you want to know how to become an actor / model in Thailand? Check out this video or this article How To Become an Actor in Thailand:

Do you want to learn more about me? Check out my website: http://www.robinschroeter.de

Initially I wanted to write about the budget and compensation for actors in their different position. Now I find another trend that is even more worrisome – the issue about working time.

What regular working time used to be:

When I first started working here in Thailand, regular working time was 12 hours including lunch and anything else. Working time would start from the call time – the time that production wants you to be on set – and ended when you could go home. You were always looking at the clock and hoping that 12 hours would be over and the 13^th hour would start. The 13th hour meant overtime.

What is happening to regular working time now:

In recent years that has begun to change. Somehow the productions decided that the 1 hour for lunch should not be on their time. So they said 12 hours plus 1 hour lunch. Making it in fact 13 hours of working time. And many times you would not have ‘1 hour’ for lunch, but would be rushed to continue to shoot.

Guess what, it didn’t stop there. The latest posts on this and other pages have asked talent to work for the same budget as before but now for 18-20 hours. This means the production is getting half a day of work from you for free. And because the conditions are known prior to the shoot, you have no means to complain, ‘You agreed to the conditions before’.

Another trick is what they call เหมา (Mau) which means paying a lump sum including everything. This lump sum leaves it up to the production to decide how many hours you may have to work – be it 24 hours, or maybe more in future – since you ‘agreed’ to that condition.

All of this is for one reason only: to save costs for the production so that the production can make more money.

What regular working time is elsewhere:

Like Damian Mavis described so elaborately in his article in Canada, regular working time is 8 hours. Everything after that is overtime, which is paid 1.5 times the regular pay per hour.

In Thailand regular working time is 12 hours; already 4 hours more than elsewhere. We have allowed this to become 13 hours in some cases.  Production can now argue ‘this is standard’ for their production.

What happens if we do nothing:

If you accept to work under these conditions, it will only get worse. In future we will have more and more posts of 18 hours regular working time until 18 hours of regular working time has become ‘the standard’.

What we are doing:

As such, we at the AAT have concluded to only accept posts in which the working day is 12 hours including a one-hour lunch break. We hope talent and productions will help uphold this standard. And hope that other groups will help us in this cause for the betterment of industry standards for the talents.

Do you want to know how to become an actor / model in Thailand? Check out this video or this article How To Become an Actor in Thailand:

Do you want to learn more about me? Check out my website: http://www.robinschroeter.de