How is a Movie’s Revenue Distributed?

You spent 1,000 words describing a legacy process. You left out the one word that really mattered, which was "Netflix."

The best route to improvement is to boil down the existing description into the 200 words that were all you should have needed in the first place. That should be accompanied by 200 words describing what Netflix has done to the production system, and how that reconfiguration is faring in the ecology. Then there would be 600 words available to make an actual point, have the real idea, that all the running and jumping in this draft prevented you from refining into clear sentences and getting on the page.

The real idea here is the one that follows "So what?" "Hollywood has lots of hidden costs," is not that idea. "Next time you read X in the newspapers" is not that idea. That's exactly the sort of proposition that elicits "So What?" I don't need people to tell me what to think when I read the newspapers; I need ideas that I will myself decide to refine and generalize and reconfigure and apply where in my life as a persona and a lawyer I want to. So a draft that says: (1) here's my idea; (2) here's the way I came to it or the part of life around us that illustrates it; and (3) here are one or two ways that you the reader could take my idea farther on your own, is the sort of draft you should enable yourself to write.

A lawyer does not sell sizzle: he does in fact sell steak. Clients buy judgment, in the end, not cleverness, though if you turn out to be a tax lawyer, as I think you might, cleverness will do. But tax lawyer's cleverness too is steak: the math has to work and the assessment of the Commissioner's probable next moves on the chessboard has to be right too. So you should form your writing style, even when you are writing off-duty, to put substance—from the highest level down—simply and clearly, without promotional decoration. A fine steak well-grilled and timely served will naturally sizzle, but so what?