Know your three before the phone rings.

The long form takes four months. The deal memo takes an afternoon. Everybody treats the memo like a placeholder, and then the memo is what the lawyers argue from for the next year.

A deal memo is two or three pages that say who's buying, what they're buying, for how much, and on what schedule. It's short because it's meant to be. Most of them bind you on the points they name, which is why the points they leave out are the expensive part.

Watch what people fight over later. Credit, because the memo said “written by” and didn't say what happens when a second writer comes on. Rewrite steps, because it said one rewrite and a polish and nobody defined polish. Bonus triggers, because it promised a production bonus and never said whether a greenlight or the first day of photography sets it off. Reversion, because it said nothing at all.

Little Miss Sunshine sold to Fox Searchlight at Sundance in 2006 for around ten and a half million. Deals that fast get agreed in a hallway and the contracts finished later. That's normal and it isn't the problem. The problem is being the one in the hallway without having decided which three points you won't move on.

Know your three before the phone rings. It's hard to think about while it's happening.