Webshow: "I wrote it, now what do I do with it? Part 5 - Asking for a read."

It's not uncommon for me to get a question along the lines of, "I wrote it, now what do I do with it?" It's a good question, and one with no easy answers. So don't think of this continuing series AS those easy answers. There are merely points to ponder. This week, let's talk about the politics of asking someone for a read.

Webshow: "I wrote it, now what do I do with it? Part 4 - Twitter networking."

It's not uncommon for me to get a question along the lines of, "I wrote it, now what do I do with it?" It's a good question, and one with no easy answers. So don't think of this continuing series AS those easy answers. There are merely points to ponder.

This week, let's talk the art of networking via Twitter and social media.

How to get read

Jeffrey sent in this question a while back, and I'm embarrassed to admit it languished in my inbox a bit longer than I would have liked:

I guess what it boils down to is... how can we get people to read our stuff? Is sending queries the best way? We do have some industry contacts and we're even working with a story editor on a popular tv show on a joint project (not for tv), and hopefully something will come from one or more of these contacts in the future.

We just really need a manager so we can get our career off the ground, and it just seems like we're floundering in figuring that out. We can keep writing good tv specs and pilots and screenplays until the cows come home (and will!), but if nobody reads them that's a problem. This step has always stymied us, especially now that we're here. I hate not knowing what to do next. Any advice you have would be greatly appreciated.

This is kind of a perennial question, but there are a couple of tactics that bear repeating.

First, if you're in L.A., you've got a leg up because the best thing you can be doing is going out and meeting people who either share your interest in writing or who work in the business.  Make enough friends and you'll probably find yourself a few degrees of separation from someone with the ability to pass your script on to a representative.  We've talked about networking a lot before, so I won't repeat most of it - except to underline that you shouldn't expect favors right after you meet someone, and try hard to not be too pushy or phony.  No one likes to feel like someone is just trying to use them.

This includes Twitter networking.  If you're really good, you can find some agents and managers on Twitter and some of them have been know to do open calls for Twit queries.  But again, the key is to not be too pushy and desperate.  I interact with a lot of great people on Twitter and even made friends with some of them, but I can tell when someone is "trying too hard."  Most of you guys are great but a few people are bad at taking the hint that I'm not inclined to read their script, look over their query or whatever.

The query letter/email query method still is known to work, but note that the success rate is usually pretty low, so do your detective work and target your queries.  An IMDBPro account can help.  Don't just blindly email people and ask them to read your script - go after reps who manage newer talent, or keep an eye on the trades and note when someone gets promoted from agent to assistant.

Here are some good things to keep in mind when composing those queries.

Then there are those who try more creative methods.

It's not easy, and to be honest, even if you have a contact who's in your corner, or if you get a read request, it's still going to come down to if that person likes it or not.  If they read the material and it doesn't fit their needs, then it's back to the beginning.  Because of this, I suggest not putting all your eggs in one basket. Always be trying to meet new people, keep improving your material, and keep working on getting that material into the hands of people who can do something with it.

Tuesday Talkback: Death of the Slush Pile

Our old buddy Dan Callahan sent me a link to this Wall Street Journal article last week, entitled "The Death of the Slush Pile". It paints a pretty bleak picture.

Getting plucked from the slush pile was always a long shot—in large part, editors and Hollywood development executives say, because most unsolicited material has gone unsolicited for good reason. But it did happen for some: Philip Roth, Anne Frank, Judith Guest. And so to legions of would-be novelists, journalists and screenwriters—not to mention "D-girls" and "manuscripts girls" from Hollywood to New York who held the hope that finding a gem might catapult them from entry level to expense account—the slush pile represented The Dream.

Now, slush is dead, or close to extinction. Film and television producers won't read anything not certified by an agent because producers are afraid of being accused of stealing ideas and material. Most book publishers have stopped accepting book proposals that are not submitted by agents. Magazines say they can scarcely afford the manpower to cull through the piles looking for the Next Big Thing.

I bring this up not to scare you, but to remind you of the importance of networking. Even if the old-style slush piles are on their way out, there's still the "screened" slush pile, which is my term for all the scripts that make their way to me through favors and personal connections that have been cashed in with agents and producers.

The days of sending out a script and waiting for it to get you discovered are gone. You need to be your own advocate, essentially being your aggressive agent before you have an agent.

Thoughts?

Where do these terrible scripts come from?

Josh sent me a question via email last week:

Please help reconcile these two thoughts, seemingly at odds:

1. You (and all script readers) frequently gripe about the horrible shit you've had to read set in non-Courier fonts, riddled with typos, and bogged down by trite cliches, exclamation points, song playlists, lengthy descriptions of the ingenue's cleavage, and so many other red flags.

2. It's virtually impossible to get an unrepresented script onto your desk.

Therefore, by law of modus tollens, are these affronts to screenwriting being delivered by managers and agents? How and why does this happen? How does my screenplay, unrepresented but otherwise respectable, land on a gatekeeper's desk?

First, good question, Josh. When I first started working as a reader, I had plenty of days where I thought to myself, "How did this manage to squeak through the system to the point where I have to read this drek?" I'll try to explain the most common reasons a really amateurish spec can get to someone reading for an agency or production company.

Favors. Yeah, you knew this was coming. The Development VP's college roommate's kid just wrote an "awesome" sci-fi adventure; or maybe that junior agent at International Creative Artists Agents for the Performing Arts has a friend who persuaded him to submit his script. Either way, you're the one stuck reading it. I'd probably guess that 3 out of 5 times, when a reader complains about bad formatting in a spec, this is the cause.

Queries. It's rare, but it happens every now and then that a query from a newbie might find the right executive or agent at the right moment. Maybe the writer knew how to pitch the script but not to write it - and if you're the poor bastard reading for agent or executive, you'll find that out really fast.

I'd also group the Slush Pile in with these, as there may be some smaller agents and managers who will accept anything so long as it comes with a release form. (Whether those managers are at all useful to one's career is another matter.) The Slush Pile is a curious entity. At times it's unclear just where all these scripts came from, or why we're wasting resources on reading them. My own theory is that bad scripts often mate and spawn in there.

Contests. If you're reading for a smaller agency or management company, it's possible that your bosses will either sponsor a screenplay contest, or at least work out a deal where they read the Top 10 scripts from said contest. A lot of these contests, quite frankly, aren't that good. The quality of submission is often as poor as anything you'll find on the slush pile.

Now, you might be thinking "Yeah, but aren't the readers supposed to weed out the bad ones?" It doesn't always work that way. My first internship was with such a company and they had the INTERNS doing the reading. People almost as inexperienced as the writers were making the call as to what made it to the final rounds. You'll also often see internet ads seeking contest readers, and often, their criteria for those readers might be lax. Usually, the less they pay, the worse you can count on the readers to be. I've seen some places advertise that they pay the readers $20-$30 a script for coverage. That's close to slave wages for readers - and so a lot of good readers don't apply. Thus, you're left with people who might not know what to look for. The same thing goes for peer review contests, like the late, lamented Project Greenlight.

Also, when I read for Big Deal Agency, they requested the Top Ten Finalists from a competition that I'd describe as a mid-level contest. I read at least four of those and a lot of them were as weakly written as material I'd seen back in screenwriting classes, and they included a generous helping of Our Favorite Mistakes.

Readers working for script consulting companies, like the ones mentioned here, probably see a lot of scripts that treat script formatting like Ned Beatty in Deliverance. (Too old a reference? Then assume I said, "like Zed treats Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction." If that's not clear enough, then I can't help you.)

And though it's rare to find major formatting issues in scripts sent out by agents and managers, I've seen it happen. There are a lot of bottom-of-the-barrel agencies out there, and if my experience when reading for a producer who loved horror is anything to go by, they lack a critical eye towards the material and sometimes the formatting of said material. You might not find mechanical formatting errors in these scripts, but you'll find damn near everything else - including long descriptions of cleavage, song selections, and all our other favorite red flags. Sad as it is to say, there are some agents who just don't care.

I hope this answers your question, Josh.

More on networking

meansheets commented on one of my posts last week:

interesting moral dilemma...so what's worse? dropping your script on a successful writer you don't know at a party OR "cultivating" a relationship with a successful writer you don't know at a party and then dropping the script on him/her a few months/years down the road after you're "friends"? i think the second option could be even more manipulative than the first, depending on the intent.

I think you're reading a sinister intent in my advice that isn't there. Is it mainpulative to go to a singles bar hoping to meet someone for sex, striking up a conversation with an attractive person, getting to know them, going out on several dates, getting married and so on? Would you say that the marriage is based on a "manipulative" motive?

All I'm saying is that if you're in a social situation and you're presented with an opportunity to get better acquainted with someone who works in the business, take it! But have some social graces when you do it. I don't think anyone is tenacious enough to maintain a false veneer long enough to get to the point where asking a favor like reading a script. If that's really ALL you care about, the person you're attempting to "exploit" will see through this. If you're genuine, don't worry about being seen as manipulative. People can always tell when you're out to use them.

You're never going to get favors from people you don't know, and asking someone to read a script and give you notes can be an imposition. However, just to give an example of networking via blogging, if Carson over at Scriptshadow, or Amanda the Aspiring TV Writer, or Scott over at Go Into The Story were ever to ask me if I'd look at their latest spec and give notes, I'd only be too happy to do it. (Not that I think any of them ever would, and I'm sure that they have plenty of people to read their material.) Why? Because I respect them as fellow bloggers, and from reading their own writing I can tell they'd have some insight into how to make my own scripts better if I were to reciprocate with my specs. Beyond that, they've all been pretty complimentary of the blog and in the cases of Scott and Amanda, even did me a great favor in the early days of this blog by promoting some of my content. They certainly helped me draw new readers to the blog and I've learned a lot from their blogs. .

And these are people I haven't even met! So the next time you're out at karaoke night and find yourself in conversation with an agent's assistant, take advantage of it

Now, a lot of people on the outside are heard to whine about how "it's all nepotism. You have to know somebody to get anywhere in this town." Most of the time, the people you hear using this aren't talented enough to sell a script if they were Steven Spielberg's son and protegee. It's their excuse for why someone hasn't yet recognised the "brilliance" in their latest spec about a killer Scarecrow.

However there is a little bit of truth to this in the sense that people on the inside can be of help to you. They're the first ones to hear about job vacancies at their companies. They can pass on that resume along with a personal recommendation. That friend who's a junior development exec at New Line might hear what the brain trusts over there are looking for in terms of projects and know that you just wrote a spec that fits what they're looking for to a T.

Networking helps build careers. Meeting people can help you in the long run and it's no different than going to a freshman mixer your first week of college and getting to know other people.

Tuesday Talkback: Networking screw-ups and Ron Moore

Yesterday, I chastised overeager writers who jump the gun in pushing their script on someone, while failing to be more strategic in cultivating their relationships before asking such a favor. Today, I'm going to teach by example through an instance where I failed to do just that myself.

Back in school, I had long wanted to be a screenwriter and a director, but hadn't given much thought to TV writing. All of that changed when I - being a fan of Deep Space Nine - came across a bulletin board one of the show's co-executive producers/writers, Ronald D. Moore, frequented. He regularly answered questions submitted by fans, often dealing with the production process and the evolution of storylines and character development. It was my first real in-depth look inside the process of creating a television show. I learned a lot about writing just by reading his posts.

These days, Moore is probably best known for being the executive producer of the new Battlestar Galactica series, which I am currently catching up on via long DVD marathons. (That's my brief plea for no BSG spoilers.)

After Ron left the Trek franchise, he also gave a very interesting five-part interview on his time working on those series. This interview is notable because he talks often of finding the "truth" in writing, and how a writer has to respect his audience. Interestingly, a lot of the criticisms he lobs at Star Trek: Voyager presage creative decisions he would later make in the Battlestar Galactica reboot. You can find the interview here:

Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI

I was in college at the time of this interview and roughly a year later, I found myself with the opportunity to create a TV show for a student-run cable network that we were attempting to get off the ground. I immediately latched on the idea of doing a teen-drama type series set on a college campus, and soon went mad with delusions of writing episodes with the same character complexity and compelling stories as on my favorite shows Homicide and Buffy, among others.

This endeavor was a total grass roots effort. There was a dedicated group of students trying to make this work, but the school administration wasn't exactly behind us and none of the media-related departments wanted to get saddled with us either. That meant that all of our work ended up being done on our own time and we were responsible for finding our own equipment - including cameras and editing facilities, and all of this had to be done on our own time. This was no mean feat, as DV was just on the verge of breaking through AND Final Cut Pro was still a relatively new and expensive program that wasn't yet owned by every wannabe filmmaker. Had we been working on this three years later, it would have been twice as easy. At the time, we were shooting on VHS and sneaking into editing labs during late nights and weekends. In one semester, we shot and edited about ten half-hour episodes of our little college drama. Considering the restrictions on our time and the limitations we had, that was pretty impressive.

I say all of this mainly so you can appreciate how unusual this was at the time. This preceded YouTube by at least three years, so we were nowhere near the time where every aspiring filmmaker essentially had his own laptop studio, with easy distribution via video sites like Break.com, YouTube or Funny Or Die. Had I done this three years later, it probably would have been a lot easier, but also would have been much less impressive to anyone "in the biz." However, I'd have made that trade in an instant. I'd have killed for greater access to Final Cut and it would be nice to watch the episodes and not cringe at the shity VHS quality. (Yes, I said VHS. Feel free to shudder.)

As long as I'm on this tangent, I might as well say that while some of my writing in that show was of questionable quality, the experience was invaluable. I learned a lot about staging scenes, shooting coverage efficently and writing tighter dialogue. When you're forced to hear poor dialogue many, many takes in a row and realize that it's not poor acting, but your overwritten verbiage that's causing the problem, you're motivated to overcome your weaknesses.

So feeling proud of myself, I finally got up the nerve to write Ron Moore a letter telling him all about what I was doing in college and how I had learned more about character writing and TV production from him than I had from any professor. (This wasn't smoke - many times that season I found myself drawing inspiration from his writings and interviews.) Eight weeks later I had nearly forgotten all about this letter - until I returned home one summer afternoon to find a message from Ron's assistant on Roswell, where he worked at the time. She said that Ron had been very touched by my letter and asked me to call her back so that he might thank me himself.

Considering I hadn't included my phone number in the letter, I was rather impressed that this message had found its way to me. I assumed that this assistant had spent the morning tracking me down. Thanks to a journal I kept at the time, I have a pretty detailed account of how this went. In all its embarassing glory.

So after I pick my jaw up from the floor, I dial the number and get transferred to Ron. He actually sounded excited to be talking to me! "I wanted to thank you for the very nice letter you sent," he said. I reply with something like "well, I have been a big admirer of your work for a long time."

Then he says to me, "So tell me about this show you're doing. I want to hear all about it." (My mind at this point is screaming "My idol just asked me to tell him about *my show!* This has got to be a dream!")

So I give him a Cliff Notes version of what we're doing, how many eps, and all that wonderful stuff. He sounds genuinely impressed. "Wow, I've never heard of anyone doing anything like that!" he finally says.

Then he says, "Hey, I'd love to see an episode sometime if it wouldn't be too much trouble for you to send a tape." Excitedly, I assure him that there'll be a package arriving at his office soon. (I sent it priority mail on Saturday. I sent him a copy of episodes 5 through 9, with the tape cued to ep 9. In an enclosed letter, I told him that ep 5 is the place to start if he is more interested in following the story, but ep 9 is the one he should look at to get an idea of the level of acting and production values we achieved in the end, and what we hope to maintain next season.)

All told, we chat for about 15-20 minutes. As the phone call concludes, he tells me "Stay in touch."

For an embarrassing insight into my naivete, take a look at this excerpt from an email I sent to my fellow writers about this phone call:

How cool is this? A Hollywood producer has a copy of our show! Now, the likelihood is that he'll probably watch it and maybe be entertained. But imagine if he's impressed...either by the acting or the writing or the directing. What if he shows it to other Hollywood types and they like something in it? Sure, it's unlikely, but this could be how we get our foot in the door in LA. Think about that for a few minutes.

Yeah, to use the analogy I coined yesterday, I totally thought I was gonna get to fuck the bar hottie 30 minutes after meeting her.

I should also mention that Ron's very friendly assistant had also sent me an email that same day, and I spoke to her again after talking to Ron so that I could get a more efficient mailing address, sending the tape directly to their production offices on the lot as opposed to the general network address. And this, dear readers is where in retrospect, I totally dropped the ball.

A few weeks go by. No word from Ron. But I figure he's a busy guy and he probably hasn't had time to watch the tape yet. After about three months, I'm starting to wonder if he saw it and he didn't like it. Or maybe I dropped the ball by not following up with him sooner. What if he's completely forgotten me? I didn't want to be the kind of pest who bugged him a week after sending it, but he did say to "stay in touch." Eventually, I start trying to figure out a non-desperate-sounding pretense for contacting him again.

Fortune smiles upon me when a throwaway mention in an early episode that season seems like it could have been a shout-out to my show. I decide to send him another letter. Within a week, I have my answer, an email from his assistant:

"I just wanted to write and let you know that we received your letter, and the tape you sent earlier of your campus television show. Ron has been unable to view the tape, at this point... (due to the CRAZY hectic producing schedule I keep him on-- balancing his time between writing, story-developing, and post-production.) As you know with making a television show, it can be quite busy!

Ron extends his best wishes to you in your television-writing ventures.
Take care."

So... the brush-off. But hey, I still think that was pretty cool of Ron to track me down in the first place and chat with me on the phone. I might not have gotten everything I hoped out of it, but it gave me a pretty cool story and left me secure in the belief that Ron Moore was a pretty cool guy. Anyway, after that last email, I took the hint and decided to leave with some of my dignity intact. Now class, can anyone tell me what I did wrong, and how I overlooked another opportunity that was right under my nose?

That's right - the assistant. I totally overlooked the opportunity to cultivate some kind of relationship there. Here's a secret about the industry - while everyone naturally resents being used, most people are only too happy to lend other up-and-comers the benefit of their experience. To put it another way - there are few people who don't enjoy talking about themselves. Use that to your advantage. If you ask the right questions, you might learn something.

So what I should have done is sent that tape, then emailed the assistant to not only thank her for making that contact possible, but also to ask her for advice. I could have said that I was considering moving out to LA in a little over a year, just after graduation, and asked if she had any advice about making that move. I could have asked about what areas are good areas to live in, how much an apartment costs, how hard it is to find a job, how she got hooked up with her job, when's the best time to move to LA, and so on.

There are probably about a hundred different things I could have asked this assistant that not only would have made her feel like an expert, but would have benefited me in the long run. As a bonus, it would have maintained that relationship. Who knows? Maybe when I moved out to LA, I could have used that to meet with her for lunch, perhaps finding a way to approach Ron eventually. Or she might have been able to submit my resume for any open PA positions on the show.

The point is, I overlooked an opportunity to ingrain myself with someone who might have been lower in the ranks than I wanted, but who still could have taught me a lot. Today's writer's assistants are tomorrow's writers - and had I thought of it like that, I'd have realized it might not be a bad idea to make friends with someone who was climbing the same ranks I wanted to.

So this leads me to my first official "Tuesday Talkback." Tell me your tails of networking successes and failures. Do any of you have stories of shame from your efforts to climb the ladder or get someone to read your script?

And if you see Ron Moore, tell him I finally get it. Tell his assistant too, for that matter.

Why he shouldn't HAVE to read your F*ing Screenplay!

I really hadn't planned on writing a response to the Josh Olson screed "I Will Not Read Your Fucking Screenplay." Considering that within a few hours of it being posted it was already being discussed on several other screenwriting sites that I read AND that it got forwarded to me via email at least twice by personal friends, I figured I would have nothing new to add to any discussion. Besides - I agreed with a helluva lot of what Josh said.

So when I saw the venom being flung at him over at Deadline Hollywood. I was a little surprised. Outside of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Keith Olberman, I have rarely seen anyone so willfully miss the point of something so that they could instead bitch about a completely different issue than the one being discussed. There are a lot of commenters over at DH agreeing with Josh, but a fair number of them are also calling him a "dick" and flinging variations of "Where would YOU be, Josh, if someone hadn't once read YOUR script?!"

Read Josh's article again, people. Pay attention to a few key phrases like, "I was recently cornered by a young man of my barest acquaintance. I doubt we've exchanged a hundred words. But he's dating someone I know, and he cornered me in the right place at the right time, and asked me to read a two-page synopsis for a script he'd been working on for the last year."

And I fully agree with what works out as his central thesis: "You are not owed a read from a professional, even if you think you have an in, and even if you think it's not a huge imposition. It's not your choice to make. This needs to be clear--when you ask a professional for their take on your material, you're not just asking them to take an hour or two out of their life, you're asking them to give you--gratis--the acquired knowledge, insight, and skill of years of work. It is no different than asking your friend the house painter to paint your living room during his off hours."

I'd argue that Scott's house painter analogy isn't entirely applicable to this situation. It's like meeting someone at a party, learning they're a house painter and asking them to come by and touch up some rough spots in your living room for free. For a close friend, maybe that's not an imposition. To ask that of someone you just met - that takes BALLS.

A lot of people invoke "networking" as a defense and say that Josh clearly had to get someone to read his script in order to get where he is. Thus, he's a hypocrite for not accepting every script handed to him in the name of paying it forward. There is an etiquette to asking a favor from someone - both in this business and in the real world. You EARN favors, you're not given them.

Think of it like this. You're at a bar and amazingly, the hottest girl in the place ends up next to you. Through an even bigger miracle, you somehow find yourself in an engaging conversation with her. She's paying attention to you and even laughing at your jokes. You can't believe your good fortune - this sort of thing never happens. So what do you do? Before you've even finished your second beer, you're asking her to go back to your place and fuck. You figure "I might never get this chance again so I might as well go for broke." Then, when she reacts badly to that and starts to give you the brush-off, you decide to take a shot at stealing first and second base because odds are you won't engage a girl this stunning again.

THAT, in essence, is essentially what you are doing when you push your script on a writer to whom you have only the barest connection. Would the hottest girl at the bar fuck you within ten minutes of meeting you? No? Well then why would Steven Spielberg want to read your script after having known you for five minutes? You have seduce the bar hottie, i.e. Steven Spielberg. Cultivate a relationship, get to know them, build up some trust and a repor.

No one likes to feel like they're being used - like you see them as a mere hurdle to leap in your quest to get to the next level. I have plenty of friends who have connections with people more successful and more famous than myself. And I won't lie, when I pass those friends the latest draft of a script, it would be great if they'd come back and say, "Do you mind if I give this to Mr. Big Shot? It's just what he's looking for and I know he'll have his agent working day and night to sell this for a cool $2 million." But I'm also a realist. I know that these people are all trying to build their own careers and that they're not going to be inclined to burn a favor that might be better spent on them. I'm sure that if they thought the writing was really awesome, it wouldn't be an imposition for them to pass it up, as discovering good material might also increase their own esteem in the eyes of their colleagues.

The thing is - I ask these people for their opinions not because I see it as a rest stop on the highway to success, but because I genuinely value their insight. I have a lot of respect for every person I've ever dropped a script on. It's amazing the things that they'll find in my own writing, or the left-field suggestions that they'll come up with that inevitably improve the script.

So when you seem to get that professional "in" don't be so overeager to cash in a favor you haven't earned. Know how to build relationships that might serve you better in the long run. Several years ago, I had such an opportunity placed before me and in retrospect, I could have played my cards a lot better.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow, and we'll kick off a new segment I call: Tuesday Talkback.

Interview with COLLEGE and DEMOTED Screenwriter Dan Callahan: PART II – Getting an Agent and Selling the Script

Part I – The Writing Process

Our chat with screenwriter Dan Callahan continues as he answers the question most aspiring writers want to know: “How do you get an agent?”

Dan Callahan: There’s all these levels to writing movies. First is coming up with a good idea, or a simple idea like College, that’s so simple that people are like, “Why didn’t I think of that?” That’s hard enough as it is. It’s hard to come up with something that’s original, or something that’s not so original but that you can put your own twist on it. Then you’ve gotta [write it up], and then you have to finish the draft, which a lot of people don’t do. Then you have to show it to people, and get notes, and make all those changes. Then finally it’s like “Okay, I did ALL that stuff and I have a script” and then it’s, “Shit. I don’t have anyone to send my script around. I don’t have an agent. I’m just sitting on material that I’ve worked months for and how do I get it out to the community?”

Getting an agent is impossible because there’s that Catch-22 everyone complains about where production companies won’t look at your stuff unless it comes through an agent. If I can’t get an agent, how can I get it in front of [them?] It’s very rare you can just query an agent – specifically at the big agencies – and they’re gonna take a look at this thing. It’s happened, I heard a story… I think Hitch was a query letter, so I’m told. So it does happen, but I think it’s very difficult.

Query letters for the most part don’t work. A lot of times there’s legal reasons for that…. At the same time [agents] are working with professional writers, trying to get them work, so do they really have time to read some dude from wherever who says he wrote the next great script?

The long story short is that Adam had a friend at an agency. It’s one of the easiest ways in – checking all your contacts and all you need is one. Whether it’s a friend of a friend of a friend who works at a production company or is already a screenwriter, or a director, producer… It’s finding someone you know, or have a connection to who’s in the business.

The fact that Adam and I moved out here, and lived out here for some years… we had contacts. One of the reasons he knew the girl at this agency [was that he lived out here in LA.] If he’d been in Chicago, he wouldn’t have known this person. So it’s important that if you want to be a professional screenwriter, you gotta live in LA. Spend numerous years out here and over the course of those years, you’re gonna meet people in the business. You’re gonna have other friends trying to do the same thing you do and eventually one of those people are gonna be in a position where they can help you out or they can at least pass the script along to somebody.

And that’s exactly what happened. We gave it to a friend at ICM. She had read pages earlier and liked it and then when we finished the script we went back and gave it to her. And it was sort of bad timing because she liked it… and then told us she was quitting [the agency business.] We were like, “Ugh… just when we think we’ve got an agent at a big agency, she says, I’m leaving to be a writer.” She’s gone on to a very successful career of writing books.

What was nice of her was before she left, she passed the script off to a colleague of hers at ICM. He was from Chicago. Adam and I are both from Chicago, so she thought we’d all hit it off. We thought that a guy would be good for something like College… She gave it to him, a guy named Nate Ross. He read it on vacation and came back and was like, “I’ll take it out next week.” It literally was that quick. He read it. He knew what it was. He liked it. I don’t even remember if he had any notes. If he did, they were minor. Stuff we could fix in a week. He basically said, “Fix this. Get it ready. We’ll take it out next week.”

Bitter Script Reader: Wow.

DC: But the reason we had our agent was because we felt we wrote a strong piece of material that was professional in every way, that was funny, and all that stemmed from all that stuff I was talking about. That all lead to this moment and we got our one shot with this guy and he felt we delivered and because of that, he took us on. Now, if he’d hated College… it would have been “Okay we need to figure out another way into the agencies.” Maybe we wouldn’t have ended up at a big agency. Maybe we would have ended up at a smaller agency. It might never have sold. But the fact of the matter is, when we had that opportunity, the script delivered and that was the start.

BSR: Did it sell fairly quickly once you went out with it?

DC: No. It didn’t. You’ll hear these stories about how something was a hot spec and every studio is bidding on it, but that wasn’t our situation at all. It went out to everybody and the way it usually works is your agent takes your script and he sends it out to various producers he has relationships with and the ones that like it come back and say, “We like College and we have a relationship at studio A… We’d like to bring the script into Paramount… or Sony, and that’s how it works. Generally scripts don’t go to studios. They usually go to producers first, who usually have deals or relationships and they bring it into the studio and say “Hey, this is a piece of material we’d like to do. Will you buy it for us?”

So we had multiple producers taking it out all over town. College took quite a while [to sell]. At the time there were a couple teen comedies floating around that we were competing with. A lot of studios had teen comedies that had been sitting around for a while that they were having trouble getting made, so why add another one?

BSR: Yeah, “We already have ours.”

DC: When American Pie hit there was a flood of teen scripts and it never stopped. So the studios were sitting on piles of teen comedies. They weren’t making them, but they had plenty of them so they didn’t need another one. And there were people that just didn’t like the script, for whatever reason. It’s a mixture of timing, finding the right producers and finding a studio that’s looking for a funny teen comedy.

BSR: A lot of stars have to align.

DC: And it didn’t for a while. What eventually happened was there was a producer named Rene Rigal who worked at a company called State Street, that did the Barbershop movies. He read College, thought it was funny… He actually called me and Adam and was one of the most passionate producers about it that we had talked to. The script had been dying down and we weren’t sure it was going to sell so, yeah, if there’s anyone that’s this excited about our work – that’s the kind of guy you want out there.

So Rene and State Street had a deal with Fox. They took it to Fox Atomic, who at the time was trying to do a Revenge of the Nerds remake, so they passed because it was the same thing. Then [State Street] took it to a company called Element that was independently financed. They did Waiting… they were working on Mr. Brooks at the time. And they liked it. They had money. Rene and State Street were the ones who got the ball rolling with Element and they essentially bought it.

And it’s not like they just buy it. They optioned it first, which is the normal process that happens. Now it’s “Can you get the script to where they want it?”

BSR: And it’s on you to bring it up to snuff.

DC: The general process is: agent takes script to producers. Producers take script to studios. They option the project. The reason they don’t buy it up front is, what if they don’t make the movie? The purchase price of a script can be very expensive. So generally studios don’t want to put out hundreds of thousands of dollars, or whatever it is – six figures generally – on something they may not make. What they generally do is put out a couple thousand dollars to option it, control the rights of the script for a certain period of time.

BSR: And you get paid when it goes into production.

DC: And you get paid when it goes into production. It’s not like people think when they read in the trades that something was just flat-out bought…

BSR: Yeah, Paramount just bought it and you walk in and they hand you your Ed McMahon-sized check…

DC: Yeah, [the perception is] they hand you a big check. [In reality] that’s not the case and it’s not smart business on the studio’s part. Why put up [a lot of] money when I could put up this much money, take the option and put the script in development? Now let’s see if we can get actors and a director. Now let’s get a start date. And they literally wait until that start date before you see any purchase price, because anything can happen before that.

There’s a lot of work involved when you get to that place and it’s one of the reasons you see writers making sacrifices, doing things in their script that they might not totally agree with because at the end of the day they want to get it made. At the end of the day, it’s a much larger payday.

BSR: The difference between five figures and six figures is kind of a motivating factor.

DC: Right, you want credit and you want to get paid. Now, there can be six figure options, so it can happen that you do hit the lottery on the option.

BSR: But not with two first-time screenwriters I imagine.

DC: In our case, that wasn’t it. There weren’t studios clamoring for the project. There were people circling but it wasn’t a case where people were so hot on the spec that people were just throwing money at us. We got a very small option and now it was a matter of us getting the project in a position where we could get a director. Because this movie wasn’t about cast.

Tomorrow: Dealing with notes and rewriting, and we’ll discuss casting and the comparisons to SUPERBAD.

Part III – Notes, Rewriting, Casting and SUPERBAD
Part IV – More Rewrites
Part V – Release and Reaction

Anyone here from out of town?

Screenwriter John August has an interesting post about the reaction to an earlier post that argued that screenwriters from outside of L.A. have no right to be frustrated when no one takes them seriously. It's definitely worth reading for any aspiring screenwriters who secretly hope they can merely work from their home in Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, etc. (the Midwest is usually employed for this example) and never have to worry about moving to L.A. I understand why this is a popular fantasy - if all the person is doing is writing, why can't they just conduct business by phone and email?

Unfortunately, I have to agree with Mr. August. Like it or not, screenwriting is a career tied to an industry centered in L.A. It's extremely unlikely that any writer will be able to establish himself if he's not in the thick of things. One has to be available to take meetings with prospective producers and agents. One needs to be able to network and make the connections that can lead to meetings that would open the door for that next job. A lot of screenwriters make their living "on assignment" - usually work like rewrites and in cases like that, a producer or a studio is likely to go with a commodity they're familiar with, or at least one they can feel out. It's hard to establish that sort of connection from out of town.

I don't doubt that there are working writers who live outside the L.A. sphere, but I'd bet that the vast majority of them paid their dues and worked in town before retiring away outside of California. Having read plenty of scripts written by writers who live all over the country, I can attest that there are talented writers bred outside Southern California - just as there are an even larger number of writers whose work is amateurish and sub-standard. (That isn't terribly remarkable, though... L.A. is filled with wannabe writers whose work is just as bad.)

Given the current economic climate, I don't recommend anyone moves to Los Angeles on a whim unless they have enough money saved to survive for at least 6-8 months, should it take them that long to secure work. Instead, hone your craft. Read as many screenplays as you can, study them inside out, and apply what you learn to your own writing. Then, take a good hard look at your abilities and as yourself if they're on a par with professionals. Once you reach that point, then you're ready to come to L.A. and hit the ground running. Make friends, get to know people in the industry and do everything you can to get your work in front of people.

Wannabe writers living in L.A. aren't always taken seriously, but they're definitely taken more seriously than wannabes outside of L.A.