Vanity Card

You’d think that a business famous for its double-talk and lack of candor would have more complicated and oblique jargon, but the entertainment business is pretty straightforward when it comes to that.

The “answer print” of a movie is the first basic version of a movie in post-production, and it’s called the “answer print” because it answers the question: is this movie terrible?

“Favored nations” is a provision of a contract that guarantees that whatever you give one person, you’ve got to give the other one the same.

But my favorite is “vanity card,” which is that image that appears at the end of a television show – after the studio gets its logo – from the producer or creator’s production company, which is rarely a company in the business or tax sense, often just a guy with a studio deal, in a studio office, who has a friend who’s good with graphics and who made up a logo and an image and said, hey, this should be your vanity card.