If They Won't Open the Gate, Build Leverage

Companion: Follows Sixty Seconds →. That essay diagnosed the disease. This one is the treatment.

Last time I wrote about the sixty seconds a colleague of fifteen years couldn’t give me, and about the credits that didn’t come even when the praise did. I got a lot of messages after that piece — most of them a version of yes, me too. Which tells me the diagnosis landed. So let’s talk about the treatment, because a diagnosis without one is just a longer way of complaining, and I’m done complaining.

But first, one more story — because I kept the biggest one back, and this is the essay it belongs to.

Four in the morning

The other day I watched a clip of Phil Collins talking about the Tarzan soundtrack — how his songs were translated into five languages, and he sang every one. And when the Spanish version played, I winced. The lines didn’t rhyme. The phrasing fought the melody. The English was so obviously better that I found myself thinking: someone signed off on this, and it wasn’t someone who lived in that language.

Which took me straight back to Glee.

Season three, the Spanish teacher episode — the one with Ricky Martin. Fox was set to have the translations done by Claudia Brant, and let me say this clearly before I say anything else: Claudia is one of the very best songwriter-translators in the business, for good reason. I’ve worked with her. Nothing here is a knock on her. But Adam Anders — the executive music producer running Glee’s entire music department, the man who took me from an audition to over a decade of work — trusted my ear enough to ask a question. Does this look right to you? And I told him the truth: it felt traditional, a little old. This was a show for kids as much as adults; if you wanted to reach the young, hip crowd, the lingo needed to be current. He said: why don’t you take a stab at it.

So I did. Multiple nights, working until four in the morning, to get it right — the translations for the episode’s songs, and I sang the demo vocals too, on “Sexy and I Know It” and “La Isla Bonita.” Adam loved it. Preferred it, in fact. The Fox executives loved it. Ryan Murphy loved it. And Ricky Martin — in the session, in person — complimented the work to my face. Every single gate that was supposed to matter opened. Every person whose approval the industry says you need, gave it.

Then came the credits. Everybody gets some kind of credit on a show like that; I had my engineering and editing credits, Adam had his producer credit, the machinery was in motion. And Adam asked the question I will never forget him asking: why is Deyder not getting a translator credit — or lyricist, or anything, for what he did? He fought for it. He fought again. And the answer came back that it wasn’t necessary. Not important enough. Not to them.

I need to stop here and give Adam what he’s owed, because it matters to the story and to me. He put up a real fight — a diplomatic one, the kind you wage inside a studio system where relationships are the currency, but a real one. He tried. And that’s precisely what made the whole thing so shocking. If Adam Anders — my mentor, one of the people I look up to most in this entire industry, the executive running the show’s music — is fighting this hard for a credit, and it still doesn’t come, then something is deeply wrong with how this business works. I felt defeated in a way I hadn’t before. Not by a person; by the shape of the thing. I remember thinking: how am I supposed to persevere to the levels I want to reach, to the depth of career I’m working toward, when my own mentor can’t get a gate opened for me? I felt powerless. And I think — in a way none of us said out loud — we all did. We did what people do in that position: we focused on what we could control and got back to work. Which is a survival skill, and I don’t regret it. But I’ve come to understand that “focus on what you can control” is only half an answer. The other half is: expand what you control. That’s what this essay is about.

It was important to me. I was the one awake at four in the morning — not just for the episode, but for the reason under every episode: the hope of building a family, providing for one, leaving something behind that outlasts me. I come from an orphaned grandfather; my own father abandoned me. A generational legacy, for someone with that history, isn’t a slogan. It’s the entire point of the work. And to pour skill and heart into something, to do it well, to be told by everyone that I’d done it well — and then to hear that the record of it didn’t matter enough to write down — was crushing in a way I’m only now able to write about with a steady hand.

I tell you this not for sympathy. I tell you because it’s the cleanest specimen I own of the disease: praised, approved, advocated for by the most powerful person in the room — and gated anyway. If that can happen with Adam Anders fighting for you, understand that no advocate, however senior, is a substitute for leverage. Which is what the rest of this essay is about.

Here’s my position, plainly. Gatekeeping and withheld credit are a culture, and cultures change slowly, if at all. I hope this one changes. I’ll keep doing my part — the sixty seconds, the names in the credits, the education handed over with grace instead of hazing. But I’m not going to build my life on the hope. If this is how the industry is going to go, then we have to become more sovereign, and sovereignty in practice means one thing: leverage.

What leverage actually is

Leverage is the reason the gatekeeper answers your email. It’s the difference between asking and negotiating. Every gate in this business — the credit you didn’t get, the rate you couldn’t push, the call that didn’t come back — was a gate someone could afford to close because closing it cost them nothing. Leverage is whatever makes it cost them something. And the beautiful thing about this era, the thing my more fearful colleagues keep missing, is that leverage has never been cheaper to build. Let me name the forms.

Leverage is an audience you built. A social following isn’t vanity; it’s a negotiating position. The producer with thirty thousand people who trust their ear walks into every conversation differently than the one whose entire value is known only to the five people who’ve hired them. The gatekeeper can withhold the credit — they cannot withhold the audience you already have. And the credit they wouldn’t give? Your audience saw you do the work in public. That’s a record, too.

Leverage is a portal you own. A following on someone else’s platform is leverage you rent. The step that turns it into leverage you own is the list — the email addresses, the customer records, the direct line to your people that no algorithm change or policy update can take from you. An owned audience is the single most valuable asset a creative can hold in this business, because it’s the one thing no label, no platform, and no gatekeeper controls. I’ve built my entire ecosystem on that principle. Every article on this site ends with a door to it. That’s not an accident; it’s the whole model.

Leverage is business fluency. Negotiation. Contracts. Leadership. Communication. How to value your own work and say the number without flinching. These skills were once gatekept too — absorbed through expensive years of proximity to people who had them, or never learned at all. Now they’re available to anyone who decides to learn them, and every one you acquire removes a place where someone else was making decisions about your life. I say this as someone who spent years being talked past in rooms where I was the most skilled person present, because skill without fluency is a car without a steering wheel.

Leverage is drafting your own deals. And here’s where I’ll say the thing that makes some people uncomfortable. I’ve been able to do a great deal of what a lawyer used to do for me — the work I’d have paid hundreds, sometimes thousands for — with a thirty-dollar-a-month AI subscription. Split sheets. Collaboration agreements. AI addendums. Safe-harbor letters. I didn’t just draft them for myself; I built a full set of them and put them in the hands of other producers. If you need to check with a lawyer, wonderful — do that, and I mean it. But I want you to sit with the size of the shift: the legal literacy that used to be the industry’s most expensive gate is now something a working producer can build in an evening. Understanding your own deal is no longer a luxury. It’s a Tuesday. I know how I’ve chosen to run my business, and I’m at peace with it, and I’m telling you so you know the option exists.

Leverage is the record itself. The industry taught me nobody keeps the credits, so I became the keeper. Every claim I make in public runs through a governed register — verified, versioned, verbatim. A publication I control. A body of work anyone can inspect. The gatekeeper’s power was always partly the power to be the only record of what happened. Keep your own, and that power evaporates.

Why this is a community problem, not a personal one

Everything above sounds individual. It isn’t — and this is the part that matters most.

When one producer builds leverage, that producer gets better deals. When most producers build leverage, the culture changes — not because anyone had a change of heart, but because withholding credit and closing gates stops being free. A gatekeeper facing a community of people with owned audiences, business fluency, and their own paper is a gatekeeper facing people who can walk away. And people who can walk away get treated differently. That’s not cynicism. That’s how every industry that ever became fair became fair: not through the generosity of the powerful, but through the leverage of everyone else.

So this is an invitation, and a slightly impatient one. Stand up against this — not by fighting the gatekeepers, but by making yourself impossible to gatekeep. Build the audience. Own the list. Learn the business. Read your own contracts and, when you can, write them. Keep your own record. Do it for yourself, and understand that you’re also doing it for the next green kid who deserves to be educated instead of berated, credited instead of erased. Every producer who becomes sovereign raises the price of treating the rest of us badly.

A word to the fearful

I understand that some of what I’ve described — AI drafting contracts, AI accelerating the audience build, AI collapsing the cost of a skill that used to cost a career — is exactly what frightens the people who are most invested in the gates. I’ll say what I said in the last essay and mean it just as much: your reaction to these tools tells you where you stood in the old system. If they feel like a threat, ask honestly what they threaten. If they feel like a door, that’s because you were on the outside of one.

I was on the outside. Now I’m not — and it wasn’t the industry that let me in. I built my own building. That’s what sovereignty is. That’s what I’m asking you to do. And when enough of us have done it, the gate stops mattering, because nobody’s standing in line at it anymore.

Why I’m saying this out loud

One last thing, and it’s the reason I told the Glee story in public instead of keeping it where the industry prefers these stories kept.

What happened to me on that episode is not rare. It’s routine. It’s exactly the kind of thing that happens behind closed doors every week in this business — the uncredited translation, the ghost-written hook, the engineer who fixed the record and didn’t make the liner notes, the session player whose part became the song. And it stays behind those doors. It gets shoved under the rug, absorbed as the cost of doing business, and traded for the next gig by people who can’t afford to make noise. That silence is why the industry doesn’t change. A culture only pays for its habits when the habits are visible, and this one has spent decades making sure they aren’t.

So this is the part where we stop cooperating with the silence. Not with bitterness — I’ve tried to write this with none — but with clarity. Verbalize it. Put it into the world. Name the pattern, tell the specific story, keep the record the industry wouldn’t keep, and let the sum of all our stories become the pressure no single one of us could apply. That’s how the gate gets pried open from the outside: not by one person’s grievance, but by the visible, documented, undeniable weight of everyone’s.

It’s time for creatives to step up and speak up. To build the leverage, and then — this is the part people skip — to put it in motion. Because the alternative is to remain at the mercy of everything we’ve been at the mercy of: the credit someone else decides you deserve. The rate someone else sets for your worth. The call that comes only while you’re useful. The memory of gatekeepers who get to be the only record of what happened in the room. The platform whose policy changed overnight. The algorithm that stopped showing your work to the people who wanted it. The mentor’s advocacy that turns out not to be enough. The deal you signed without understanding. The future you postponed because the ground was never yours.

Every one of those is a place where someone else holds the lever. Every one can be taken back. That’s the work now — and I’d rather do it out loud, with you, than quietly, alone.

— Deyder Cintron