Minor Mogul glossary

This is a dictionary of terms and phrases used to discuss movies and movie-making. This page is continually updated and expanded.

To submit a definition, please email the Editor.

A

• “Art-first project” means “No pay.”

• “Award-winning Director / team” means “No pay.”

B

• “Be part of something important and meaningful” means “No pay.”

• The Best Boy is the Second Electrician on set, working under the Gaffer.

• “Build your portfolio / reel” means “No pay.”

C

• “Collaboration” means “No pay.”

• Craft Services refers to the on-set food, and to the team responsible for providing it. Some areas make a distinction between Craft Services as the open, buffet-style table of snacks at which cast and crew graze while working, and Catering as an actual meal served during a break; some do not make such a distinction.

• “Crafty, Credit, and Copy” means “No pay.” (See Three Cs.)

• Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas and turn them into something real that exists in the world.

  Note that second part! Creativity is not having ideas. Anyone and everyone can do that, and does, all the time. Ideas are worth nothing — nothing at all. Implementation is far more important. You can’t do anything with someone who had an idea for a screenplay; you can make a movie with someone who had an idea for a screenplay and wrote it.

  And note also that creativity is not magic. Creativity is a muscle: it gets stronger the more you exercise it. Inspiration comes from writing, not the other way around. Write that script; if it’s crap — well, you can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank page.

D

• “Deferred compensation” means “No pay.”

E

• “Easy / quick shoot” means “No pay.”

• Enshittification is a word coined by Canadian Writer Cory Doctorow in 2022 to describe the way online platforms degrade and die, becoming increasingly unusable as they do, as the platform owners increasingly claw all value to themselves. He and others expanded the term to describe the rent-seeking behaviour that makes anything it touches worse. Doctorow suggested in 2024 that we now live in the Enshittocene era, where absolutely everything is increasingly enshittified and unusable. (See the definition, with examples, at Wikipedia.)

G

• The Gaffer is the First Electrician — the senior lighting technician on set. They work with the Cinematographer, and help execute the lighting plan for the shoot.

• Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) is a chronic condition that commands the afflicted individual to purchase more and newer movie-making gear. There is no cure, but a treatment is to remember that buying gear is not the same as making movies.

• “Great opportunity” means “No pay.”

H

• The Haters who are jealous are a fictitious group of people that lazy, entitled, and / or dumb creators, usually future-never-was wannabes, blame for their lack of success. These creators also believe that anyone who voices any comment other than pure, unalloyed praise for their genius is motivated solely by hatred and jealousy.

  In the real world, nobody hates you; they probably never even think about you. Their reaction to any success you have is most likely to be “Tell me how you did that!” And until you are successful, why would anyone be jealous of you? You haven’t accomplished anything to be jealous of! (See Stupid audience.)

I

• IMDb is the Internet Movie Database. It was created by English movie-fan Col Needham in 1987, and expanded into a popular and useful resource on UseNet and then the World Wide Web.

  Since Amazon bought it in 1998, IMDb has been increasingly enshittified to the point that in 2025 it is almost unusable — full of tracking crud, ads, and things you didn’t ask it to show you, while making it unnecessarily difficult to find the information you’re looking for.

N

• “Networking opportunity” means “No pay.”

O

• “On-set / production experience” means “No pay.”

• “Opportunity” means “No pay.”

P

• “Passion project” means “No pay.”

• A Pre-fame celebrity is a creator, usually one with few or no accomplishments to their name, who nevertheless feels and behaves as if they were an A-list star and household name. These are usually people who want to be movie-makers rather than make movies (see this discussion of the difference).

  Online, these individuals often post things like, “As you know, I . . . ” and “In case you missed it, I . . . ” Why would you assume that we have seen, let alone remember, your previous posts? Given how enshittified social media has become, even the people who specifically sign up to follow you won’t be shown all your posts. There are easy tests of your status, eg. if you’re trying to attract an audience by posting on Facebook, you’re not famous.

  This attitude harms both the speaker and their projects. Egotism and “star shit” behaviour repels audiences and makes them think negatively of the creators and the project, and the creators’ assumption that the audience already knows them means their promotional efforts don’t include information necessary for the audience to follow their project or watch their movie.

  If you want to deflate such an individual, tell them, “You’re not good enough to be this arrogant.” That usually makes ’em really mad.

S

• Sides are script pages — usually not the entire screenplay, but the specific pages for the day’s shoot or the scene being planned.

• “Student project” means “No pay.”

• The Stupid audience is to blame for the lack of success by the lazy, entitled, and / or dumb creator. The problem is never that this creator made a bad movie, or marketed it poorly, or over-estimated the size of the audience, or just had bad luck. No, the fault lies with the audience who just doesn’t get it and doesn’t appreciate the ineffable genius of the creator in question. (See Haters who are jealous.)

• Sturgeon’s Law is named after science-fiction Writer and critic Theodore Sturgeon. The Law states that ninety percent of everything is crap. This is not an insult; it’s a statistical likelihood, based on the fact that there are more wrong solutions than right solutions for any given problem. (See the definition at Wikipedia.)

  If you think this doesn’t apply to you, know this: this applies to you. Ninety percent of the ideas you have are bad.

  The solution is to become prolific! If you have ten ideas, then given Sturgeon’s Law you have one good idea and nine bad ones. If you have 100 ideas, then you have ten good ideas. Have a lot of ideas! (See Creativity.)

T

• The Three Cs are Craft Services on the shoot, Credit in the movie, and a Copy of the finished project. This means “No pay,” and attempts to hide this fact. You almost always get fed on the shoot (and don’t work for people who don’t feed their team!), you usually get credit (in the movie and on the movie’s IMDb page, though there’s a good chance they’ll misspell your name), and you will rarely get the promised copy unless you chase them.

• A Totally Original Idea is an idea that everyone in the world has already thought of, but is new to the individual proposing it. These people are usually Unfinanced Wantrepreneurs who want to be in business, but have done no market research whatsoever and are largely ignorant of the field they want to enter. Beware if someone says something about how their venture will “circumvent the gatekeepers” or “disrupt / revolutionize the industry” or be “Netflix for indies” or anything like that. They quite literally don’t know what they’re talking about.

• The Tripod of Success is the necessary foundation of a successful career in movie-making (and in every other field). To succeed you need three things: 1) Be talented, 2) Work hard, and 3) Be lucky. More of one can make up for less of another — but unless you have all three, nothing will ever, ever happen for you.

  Notice that you have control over only two of the three. We don’t like to admit that a key part of our success is arbitrary, and that it’s possible to do everything right and still fail. Welcome to the real world. Not every story has a happy ending.

• “True artists” means “No pay.”

U

• Unfinanced Wantrepreneurs are individuals who believe they can go into business with nothing. Once the venture succeeds (which is inevitable, of course) everyone will be raking in millions, and they’ll throw you a few bucks. All they need from you is a little bit of free work.

  Let’s repeat that: They want you to work for free to establish their for-profit business. They have no money to pay you for your work, but trust them: they definitely have the skills to pull off this venture despite having no track record of business success, and they absolutely guarantee that they will pay you once the business succeeds. Pay no attention to the fact that over a fifth of new businesses fail in their first year, half fail within five years, and two-thirds fail within ten years.

  A common characteristic of Unfinanced Wantrepreneurs is that they have a Totally Original Idea for a venture, but have done no research into the field and market they want to enter. Never mind that this is the number-one reason that businesses fail; over 40 percent of businesses that fail do so because they didn’t research the market and try to sell a product or service that customers are not interested in buying. Unfinanced Wantrepreneurs feel very strongly that their venture will be a runaway success, but have absolutely no data to back that up. A dream is not a plan!

  These individuals also pay no attention to the fact that the number-two reason for business failures is under-capitalization, i.e. they didn’t have enough money to go into business in the first place, and went under before they could start making money. Incredible as it may be, Unfinanced Wantrepreneurs actually seem to believe that they don’t need money to start a business. That’s why they need free work from you.

  A business that can’t afford to pay you for your work is not a business that is destined for success. And if you can’t afford to pay your workers, your business is not destined for success; go away, and come back when you have some money. And for god’s sake do some market research to see if there are actually any people who want to buy what you’re selling.

• “Unpaid” means “No pay.”

V

• The Vanity-Press Scam is an old con game from the world of book publishing.

  The scam works by vanity-press companies promising newbie Writers that they can become “published authors” — for only a small fee. Once you’ve lightened your wallet to their specifications, they send you a box of perfectly adequate trade-paperback books that you now have to sell.

  Unfortunately, that’s a hard sell for the newbie Writer. You soon find that distributors and retailers are skeptical of vanity-press books. They fear that it means that the book couldn’t draw interest from a real publisher, and won’t draw interest from readers — either because the subject is too narrow to attract a large audience, or because the writing is of poor quality (and, alas, they’re usually correct; Sturgeon’s Law always applies). And of course, the newbie Writer doesn’t have the contacts and track record of an established publisher when dealing with distributors and retailers.

  Usually the only person who comes out ahead on this deal is the vanity-press company. Often they not only charge you for printing books, but for editorial and design services as well. The scam offers you nothing that you can’t do yourself, for less money and with more control. (Yes, you do have to hire an editor and a designer.)

  In real publishing, designing, printing, selling, and distributing the books are the publisher’s job, paid for from their share of the money the book makes. The Writer’s job is to write and to promote the book.

  Note that the Vanity-Press Scam is distinct from self-publishing, where a Writer controls the business as well as the creative aspects of their own work.

  In the movie-making world, the Vanity-Press Scam usually takes one of two forms:

  1) They offer to turn your screenplay into a movie if you fund the project. In real movie-making, the Writer gets paid for the screenplay; your investment in the project is the script — your time and talent. In the scam world, you are not only giving up your money, you are giving up control over your work. You might see your perfectly good script turned into an awful, unwatchable, unsaleable movie that harms rather than enhances your reputation. Also, you usually don’t get a share of any money the movie makes; the scam Producer keeps it all. So you are giving away your script and giving away your money so somebody else can make money from your work. If you can afford to fund your movie, make it yourself!

  2) They offer to distribute your movie by putting it on the scammer’s website or “streaming service” . . . for a fee, of course. These scammers are not distributors — that is, they do not make their money by charging audiences to watch your movie. Rather, they make money by charging you to put your movie on their platform, whether or not (usually not) the platform has any viewers. They also don’t promote and publicize your movie; that’s still up to you. So you’re paying them to show your movie to nobody. You can make your movie available on your own website, and keep all control and money for yourself.

W

• “Wonderful opportunity” means “No pay.”

X

• “X is for xylophone, because X is always for xylophone.”
    — Shel Silverstein, Uncle Shelby’s ABZs