Part two of two. Thursday was who each one is and which you call first. Today, the money.

Do you need both. No. There are two roads. One distributor takes everything in an all rights deal. That's what happens when a film premieres well and a buyer wants the whole thing. No agent in the middle, and you negotiate it with a lawyer or a producer's rep. Or you go territory by territory. The agent carves the world into pieces and sells each piece to a different distributor. One agent, a dozen distributors, which is the whole reason you hired the agent.

Do you pay both. That depends on the deal, and I got this wrong the first time. When a foreign distributor takes your film for their territory, they pay a license fee or a minimum guarantee. Your agent commissions that payment and sends you the rest. Mark Litwak puts a foreign sales agent at 15 to 30 percent of gross. Guerrilla Rep sees 20 to 35 and calls anything under 25 a good deal. I said 10 to 25 last week. That was low.

You don't pay that distributor's margin as a line item. But it isn't free. Their margin is already priced into what they offered, which is why a soft territory comes back with a small number.

Where it stacks is a revenue share. If a distributor takes a percentage of gross instead of paying you a guarantee, that fee comes off your money first. Litwak has theatrical at 35 percent of gross. Put an agent on top of that and you're paying twice on the same dollar.

Then expenses, which is where the money goes missing. Both sides recoup them. Get a number into the contract. Whatever survives reaches the producer, then goes into the financing waterfall and pays back debt and equity before anybody sees profit.

And if you're a writer and not a producer, none of this touches your fee. Your writing fee is a production cost, paid long before the waterfall starts. What these commissions eat is your backend. Which is why writers who've been around a while shrug at net points and negotiate the fee.

This is not legal advice. For your own deal, I'd get one who does this for a living.