All new writers (at least those that I have met) look forward to landing representation. We want an agent. We want a manager. We want a lawyer. We want the access and presumed instant success that all of those pledge.
The reality, for any of you hoping to land a combination of the above representatives, can paint a very different picture. For one, you feel compelled to run ideas - even just a kernel of an idea - past them. Something that's already in the works or too "out there" might not be worth their time. If it ain't worth their time, it most likely ain't worth yours (skip the part about it being inappropriate for the market; if they're not behind it, how hard do you think they will try to push it?).
Then, there's the whole process of - once you've gotten the idea approved - moving forward. Your rep might want to see a synopsis. Then an outline. Then pages. Only then, unfortunately, might he or she decide it's not as viable a spec as originally presented. Or something else is out there like it. Or they don't dig it. Granted, this can happen with anybody weighing in on your pages, from producers to writers group members, but it is somehow more frustrating, in my opinion, when it happens with your rep.
None of the above takes into account the fact that it can be difficult getting a response back from your representative. You might recall from earlier posts that I fired my first manager, because he would go months without getting in touch about whatever I had asked him. My current rep is better, though I feel like my project is cooling, and the response time is dragging out a bit. The only thing I can do is choose an idea and go forward with it; however, I'm reluctant to get too far into it, lest he say "oh, Universal's acquiring something just like it," thereby undoing all my progress. At the end of the day, progress undone is probably better than no progress at all, so I will sally forth.
I write the above not to be pessimistic or discourage any of you from getting/seeking representation. I hope you find it when you're in need and wish you a very healthy relationship with your agent/lawyer/manager/whoever. I also just urge caution, patience, and the knowledge that landing a rep doe not equal landing a sale, and that the battle is still uphill after that fortuitous day.
You know, the screenwriting market is a fickle thing. One day, something's a good idea, and the next, it's decidedly not. On paper, in logline format, and idea sounds great, promising even. In reality, the full script presents marketing issues. Unfortunately, it can be tough to tell what the case is going to be, until the pages are all there to be read and judged.
This, sadly, is something I recently experienced. I had turned in a copy of my Medieval spec to my manager. He gave me a ring late last week. While he liked it as a first draft (I knew it needed a lot of work, and sent him an email to that effect when he indicated that he wanted to set up a call about it), he didn't think it was the kind of script the market would really take to right now. Not that it's a bad idea - in fact, we had both agreed on it as the idea I should most ardently pursue a few months back. Rather, it just doesn't offer enough of a hook to set itself apart in the industry right now. And, there's little that can be done about that without altering the entire story, which neither of us want to do and is a bit beyond the point anyway.
Does that mean the idea will never be a valid one? No, of course not. However, right now, after reading the draft, my manager just didn't feel as though it has the necessary components to work in a very competitive market right now. What are those components? It's becoming increasingly difficult to tell. But this is a pretty straightforward revenge story set in the Middle Ages. Knight and king stories haven't done remarkably well recently, so despite the fact that the logline was promising, the more full execution proves itself difficult from a marketing point of view.
Whether this is the end all and be all answer remains debatable. You might disagree. Other representatives might disagree. Even I have the right to disagree. At the end of the day, though, if this isn't material my manager feels very strongly about - and he has his reasons and insider knowledge - then it's probably not one I should pursue. At least not right now. (A quick aside before I go much farther - I don't advocate sending material out when you know it needs a lot of work; I did this, because I was confident that the second draft I presented to the League was strong. It was, well, stronger than the first, at least. When they pointed out some things I hadn't previously seen about it, I sent a follow up to my manager letting him know I would be doing another overhaul of the script.)
My main concern these days is my lack of production. By that, I don't mean not having a movie produced. Rather, it's almost a year to the day since I landed my agent at UTA. When that happened, my manager promised him I would deliver two scripts a year. To date, he has seen nothing new from me. I've developed a lot of material and did two drafts of the Medieval spec. But nothing completed has gone out. I have that - and the sense that my "one shot" might have peaked - hanging over my head. The only thing I can do about it, though? Keep writing. I have to develop new ideas, ones that my manager will take to again, and push through with them. To the end. To my agent. To, hopefully, a sale.
It is, without a doubt, a different ballgame trying to launch a writing career from the East Coast than it is from the West Coast. For all intents and purposes, "East Coast" in this argument can be expanded to include anywhere not LA. Now, though, we'll stick with the East Coast, and New York City in particular, because that is what I know and where I am trying to kickstart my career from.
I've done a lot of thinking about this recently - whether a beginning writer should be based in Los Angeles or not - and the cryptic answer that I've allowed myself is that it would probably help. Whether it makes an actual difference in terms of results at the end of the day is harder to determine. The fact is, a good writer with a strong script and the know-how to get it seen can get his or her script into the industry from virtually anywhere (and by "know-how," I don't at all mean "connections"). With the internet, geographical location is less crucial than it used to be.
Take my experiences thus far, for example. Once I believed my script to be ready for agents and managers to read, I sent a dozen email queries. I was particular - very particular - about where they went. But I was also consistent, sending a few a week for about a month. Part of why I only sent twelve (many how-to guides or teachers will tell you to send a hundred or more), is that I specifically targeted New York based representatives. That naturally required me to cast a much smaller net. I knew, though, that starting from New York meant that securing New York based representation was a sound idea - not only would their contacts be in New York and LA, but they would be here for me to meet with. I liked the idea of having direct, personal access to my first representative.
My line was in the water, and a fish bit it. That wound up not working out, and within six months after first meeting that rep, I was with an LA based manager. Two years have since passed, and my lease just recently came up for renewal, so I got to thinking, "Should I move to LA?"
I was tempted... to a degree. To be honest, I don't really want to have a car, my friends and family are here, and I'm reluctant to move anywhere without a friend coming with me. At the end of the day, I find it's easier to have someone I know splitting an apartment with me, and I don't want that to be someone I met through a Craigslist posting. But that's just me. More realistically, though, I also don't have any concrete reason to make an official move west yet. My job allows me to write and I have a solid understanding of what the workday has in store for me, so any large change to that routine would jeopardize my writing. And at this point, writing is the thing I need to do every single day. To throw that into flux would be a large mistake.
Do I think it would be easier if I was a West Coast aspiring screenwriter? Sure, sometimes I do. Right now, my manager is looking into whether or not I should head west in a couple weeks for a few meetings. The meeting slate isn't huge, but there are a few producers and directors who liked my writing and would be worth taking a general with. However, they read the script in question half a year ago, and there's little doubt in my mind that if I was out in LA, I would have already had face-time with them. And maybe work that came out of those meetings. Is New York killing my chances? No, I wouldn't say so. Would opportunities have arisen if I was there and not here? Probably; I think they might have.
At the end of the day, the decisions is a big one, and it's something that each of us who is not currently in LA has to grapple with. Maybe the advice I got from the chairman of my writing department in college will clear things up for at least someone out there; "don't go to LA until you have at least one ready script, a treatment for another, and a pitch for a third. It can be hard to make a life out there, and you risk losing all the free time you have to write."
At first, when I was still in school for writing, I openly doubted the importance of outlines. To me, they were suffocating documents that hampered my experience writing a script; I preferred having the story unfold for me as I went along, each day a surprise as to what came next. An outline meant that I would just sit down and bang out the details of a scene that I had already figured out, with little surprise of what was to come. The budding, less-wise writer in me thought that took any sort of art out of writing.
More recently, as I have improved as a writer, I've come to see the great importance that outlining plays in my technique. Some writers refuse to use them; others outline until there's no room left for changes, and burn through writing the actual script. I, on the other hand, think I've come to learn that there's a comfortable middle ground to work in. I'll outline until I have more than just a loose structure of the film. The document I prepare gives an overall sense of what beats fall where and what happens in them, so it's pretty detailed. However, it's also fluid; that means that when I sit down to produce actual screenplay pages, I don't take the outline as gospel. Case in point: when I wrote my firefighter spec a while ago, I realized before I had even finished the first page that an entire component of the story was missing from the outline. Luckily, the structure I had mapped out was successful enough that it afforded obvious places to include these new characters I was adding, and allowed certain beats to be molded to incorporate them. This flexible outline approach is great - it gets me writing with little hesitation about what the next day will bring, but it also allows me time to problem-solve as I go along.
I've spent the past few weeks talking about various stages of the multiple outlines I'm working on, but I realized I have yet to really delve into what that looks like on the page. For a quick snapshot of what those look like - and, mind you, I have submitted both forms to my manager, so this is what people in the industry have seen - there are two main types of outlines I write. Often, I'll do one of each for each project I'm working on.
The first type of outline is a pretty straight forward, scene by scene breakdown. It will look something like this:
ACT ONE
-Vietnam, 1972. Mark stands at the edge of a battlefield. He and his buddies are tense. They pass a joint, trying to calm down. Hushed small talk.
-BOOM a mortar round lands not far off. The trees erupt with gunfire.
-In the battle, Mark goes down with a shot to the gut.
-Later, in the field hospital, Mark recovers. A nurse stands nearby. He checks her out.
I tend to conceive of these lines as shots, almost, multiple beats within a sequence. The guys hanging around talking might be a page or two. The mortar round might be a half page. The battle will be a few pages, culminating in Mark's injury. The next scene we see opens in the hospital. Depending on the detail I put into each scene, this type of outline might be 6-10 pages. I'll mark a few tentpole scenes for myself with the following: ACT ONE, PAGE TEN (or INCITING INCIDENT), ACT TWO, MIDPOINT, and ACT THREE. More than anything, those demarcations are to help me with my page count targets. Acto Two should begin between 25 and 30, midpoint will land at 50 or 60 (depending on total count), and Act Three at 75-90.
The other kind of outline is all prose. This approach will convert the beats into a narrative that reads like a short story. Again, this might be 6-8 pages. My goal with this is to see how the story checks out as a narrative. Sometimes, the beats make sense as bullet point, but reading and writing it the other way makes it easy to see where something's missing or redundant. This approach is also the one my manager tends to favor, and converting the outlines has proven helpful for me. I tend to think out my story in narrative terms a lot, and then convert it to the beat format, so half the work is already done by the time I sit down to work it out as a short story.
Anyway, hope that's helpful. What approach to outlining do you take - if you take one at all?
Continuing with the focus of the past few weeks, I thought I'd turn a bit of attention to what, exactly, it is that I'm submitting to my reps. Before I had my manager and agent, I didn't quite know what it was a writer would share with his/her "team" when sussing out new ideas. Whole scripts? That sometimes seemed unlikely. Outlines? Verbal pitches? A logline?
The answer, I've found, can be all of the above and, often, a combination of them in a certain order. When working with my manager, as I have been the past few weeks on these ideas, we tend to start off with very general, very short bits of ideas. I'll send him a sentence or two, sometimes without much more than a vague setting, theme, or approach. For example, "Kevin, what about Gladiator underwater; a deep sea diver has to rise up against the king of Atlantis when he is taken captive." Essentially, it's a logline, but it doesn't even have to be that yet. (I'm always wary of giving what I consider to be an extreme idea, since someone out there is likely to see it and want it; if in two years, scuba-Gladiator is on the big screen, please give me a shout-out.)
From there - and consider, we'll do this with a handful of ideas - I'll distill the approved concepts into actual loglines. The goal here is to make them more market ready, clean up the language, decide on protagonists, and make sure they read tightly. Next, we either go to the agent (or producer, etc.) with the loglines or, if we need more, I'll hit the drawing board for a bit and come up with a paragraph or two for each idea. The one or two sentence loglines become 3-5 sentence paragraphs expanding on the concepts, painting the worlds a bit more vividly, and elaborating on the protagonists' goals.
Next, it's off to the agent or producers. The ideas only go out once. If a logline is returned without interest or fanfare, it does not become a paragraph, at least, not any time soon (for now). If the idea garners interest, the outlining phase begins. In recent years, I've really stopped writing without an outline. I find I don't have the time to spend on a draft that wanders aimlessly. That's just me. Some writers manage quite successfully without outlines, storing entire plots in their heads until they write furiously or just waiting to see where the characters take the script. That no longer works for me.
Once an outline's approved, that's when I'll start writing. By "approved," I don't necessarily mean that my reps pour over each outline and sign off on each plot point. I have to like it, for one. More though, at this point, I'm writing a product that other people are (theoretically) saying they will stand behind. If it goes way off course of delves into the realm of "unproduceable," they let me know. Mostly, and I don't always show my reps the outline, this step is to guarantee that the larger picture still matches up with what everyone thinks is sellable.
Granted, you say, I haven't made a sale yet. True, but hopefully these steps will bring that first paycheck about sooner, rather than later.
Here's an interesting paradox: new writers tend to think that getting an agent or a manager or a lawyer is the end all and be all first major goal of breaking into Hollywood, that once that is accomplished, everything is smooth sailing ahead. (If I'm the only writer to have ever thought that, I'll need some help picking my jaw up off the floor.) The truth of it is, though, getting an agent or a manager is not a perfect cure. It is not a guarantee.
If you've been reading my posts for a while, you're aware of the fact that it has been over two years - two! - since I've been repped up. Those two years, the hours and rewrites and development calls, have, for our purposes here, all been related to my post-Apocalyptic spec. My second and current manager, who I have been with for over a year and a half now, has helped get the script to some very important and influential people. He's helped further it along to places that still really exist first and foremost in the realm of dreams to me. Producers have come on board, and, through them or with their help, my agent and current lawyer.
Still, it's been over a year and a half, and there's no sale to show for our work. (This is a point, not a complaint. We're still waiting to hear from a major studio any day now and have a meeting with a production company before this month is out.) Before him, there was four months with my first manager, and two month after him in which I wasn't with anyone. The point in all that is that these things take time. Lots of time. Landing an agent or a manager or a lawyer or a big time producer does not mean your script will necessarily sell tomorrow. Especially with the state of the industry still being the rocky, insecure, ghost of its former self that it is now, buyers are acting with much more hesitation than before. The thinking that, "I got an agent, time to quit my job" is no longer anywhere near logical (not that I'd have advocated such rash behavior before, either).
The truth of my situation now is that I'm still trying to come up with the project that really tantalizes my agent. I've sent him a few ideas that I thought were slam dunks, and they were both received luke-warmly, at best. He knows the market now; I have to trust that. Still, the difference is that, in the past, I was writing for myself. Now, I'm also writing for him, and if he says something might not fly, or isn't for him (and he's the one who is going to try to sell it), I have to listen to that. Was I wasting time before, when I was writing whatever I wanted to? No, I don't think so. At least, no more than I sometimes feel I might be wasting time trying to develop yet more ideas, when I have pages that I feel equipped to begin working on now. The game has changed for me, and I recognize that.
I say it time and again, and I'll do it once more here. If you're reading this, I hope it might be because you're looking to break into screenwriting as a career, and are interested in what it takes, what to expect, and how to go about getting your foot in the door. Well, the two biggest things I can advocate for emerging writers are: patience and managed expectations. Be patient with the industry (readers, agents, producers, everyone). It might take them a long time to read your script, to get back to you, to sell material to people who are interested. Put it out of mind and work on something else in the mean time. And, so as to not drive yourself nuts, do enough reading and preparation to have reasonably managed expectations. A meeting does not mean a sale. A sale does not mean a million dollar. Know what to logically expect, and train yourself not to deceive yourself. This is a tough business, and, I've found, patience and managed expectations are two of the most valuable tools you should bring to it.
Hollywood is closed. Until January 3rd, very little will be happening in Tinsel Town. People will be reading a lot of scripts, but in terms of deals and meetings, there will be next to none of that going on - especially officially.
Because of the two week break at the end of the year, this is a difficult time to really break in. It is, on the other hand, an amazing time to get some major writing done. With the industry going silent for a bit, we writers - especially those of us who are still trying to get our names and work out there - have the perfect opportunity to polish off current or start new scripts. Managers and agents won't be clamoring for new material, and the buyers are out of town (or at least away from the office), so there's no pressure now to go to the industry. It's an amazing time to just focus and write.
That said, just to continue relaying my experiences to other hopeful scribes, I'll give you my year-end update. I spoke to my manager at the end of the day yesterday, and 2010 ended on a fairly positive note. There was some positive feedback from a production company, though again nothing concrete beyond that until after January 3. We also have a read at one of the studios over the holidays, which is great. Beyond those, my manager's also been in touch with a head of development at a company here in NYC, looking to arrange a general (i.e. meet and greet meeting) for me come 2011. All in all, a few nice things to look forward to after ringing in the New Year.
One other important realization I had yesterday while talking to my manager, which I'd stress to anyone with or hoping for representation. Last week, I wrote a lot about being a proactive client. This week, I'll put on the other shoe and discuss being a patient client, a bit. I know that my manager's doing a lot - trying to set up meetings, determining if my ideas for other projects are already out on the market or not, building contacts for me. I might not hear from him, but in reviewing everything with him then, I was reminded that I don't need daily or weekly updates to know he's on the case. (Mark this under the category of "obvious, but bears repeating." If/when you have representation, just because they don't reply immediately or the meeting they're setting up doesn't happen in a day, remind yourself that they have your best interest in mind. I know my rep does, but I felt that such a crystal clear indicator of that was worth mentioning. If months go by, that's a different case. But representatives - agents, managers, lawyers - do a lot. Would you rather have them calling every hour to let you know there's no update, or out on the phone and in meetings trying to sell you and your work?
Proactive and patient - that seems to be the best way to go. And I'll throw in a final adjective to round out the "three Ps of being a client;" pleasant. Be pleasant to work with, to give notes to, pleasant in meetings, and to develop a script with. Saying "yes" or knowing how to say "no" in a kind way will make people want to work with and for you. It will make them want to protect you. As a writer, that can be invaluable. Proactive, patient, and pleasant. That'll do it.
Screenwriting is a business. When you're a writer, you (your work) are your product. Your ideas and your talent are the good you sell, and your ability to deliver on time and be a pleasure to work with helps put you above the rest of the competition. And, like in any other business, in order to stay afloat in it - or in cases like mine, where the writer has yet to make a sale, but is trying to wiggle into the industry - you must know both the market value of the product and the market trends.
I've talked a lot in the past about the importance of knowing the market. Sites like Done Deal Pro and Deadline Hollywood help track sales and industry happenings. Track this information closely. You can tell what the value of your idea might be based on whether or not something similar (i.e. teenage vampires) has sold recently, and what it went for. If twelve teenage vampire scripts sold last month, there's probably a good chance that by the time your idea hits the right agent or producer's desk, the trend will have passed, and the next hottest tween 'tainment craze will have begun. On the other hand, if space seems to be the next frontier for Hollywood, and your agent just happened to have received the next Star Wars from you, you could be in a good spot. Similarly, if a couple big action movies just sold, and you have a tentpole action out to representation or studios, you can guesstimate what its worth by what the others went for. (Of course, your representatives are the ones who will negotiate the terms of the sale; their job is to know that X scripts are going for Y money these days. A writer in the know, though, is always a smart businessperson.)
The downside to all this information can be equally as obvious. Research done at Box Office Mojo and via the trades can and often does shed some light on the climate for certain pictures at the moment. For example, the past week, I've been developing a Middle Ages idea. Over Thanksgiving, I watched the new Robin Hood movie. It wasn't very good. More than that, it cost a lot of money, and it was not considered a huge box office or critical success. Failing on one of those two points might not be so bad, if the other lives up to hope. For both to fall short, though, can be bad news - not only for the companies and talent involved, but for the genre itself. I had a hunch that Robin Hood might have made Middle Ages movies a bit risky now, so I called my manager last week just to follow through. Sure enough, he was keen on everything about the idea, except for the fact that it was set when and where it was. Audiences did not receive the last Medieval movie well, so all future projects are (almost immediately) dubbed too risky. Especially when written by still-unknown writers.
On the other hand (and back to the positive), tracking the trend like that allowed me to get a jump on debating the viability of the project, before getting too far into the script. Imagine if, three months from now, I sent my manager a completed draft of a script, just to hear, "I like it, but we shouldn't do the Middle Ages now." That would be bu hao ("no good"). So, in addition to all the writing you're doing, if you don't do so yet, try to follow the market, as well. It can give you a much needed leg up in this difficult industry.
To say that it's been "quite the week" would be an understatement. The past four days have been some of the most important in my screenwriting career so far (if it can in fact be called a career). I met with some very well respected, very important people in Hollywood on Monday, and I'm pleased to say that things went incredibly well.
The agenda was simple: meet my manager face to face for the first time since we began working together in June of 2009, meet with my producer and the production exec we've been working with (both of whom I had met previously), and - most crucially - meet with an agent and a lawyer who were both interested in my post-Apocalyptic spec. In preparation for the meetings, I had a couple key jobs. First, I promised my manager a draft of the firefighter script by Friday, so that we could address the best way to talk about it in any meetings and go over points for the next draft. Next, I had to come up with three pitches for the agent - 3 or 4 sentences that I could go through in under a minute each to give an idea of other projects I've been thinking of. The overall goal for the meetings was to not only present myself as well-spoken and capable of taking a meeting, but also trying to prove that I have the potential to be more than a one-time writer. While both the agent and lawyer liked my post-Apocalyptic spec, they each would (rightly) want more from me than just that. On Saturday, I flew out to L.A. for the first time since I was in fifth grade and on a family trip to visit my aunts in Pasadena. Sunday was the meeting with Kevin, my manager. We'd spoken on the phone and via email countless times, but our faces were still a mystery to one another. We met for coffee at noon at my hotel and talked for the next two hours. Kevin prepped me a lot for the two meetings I had on Monday - an 11am with the agent and the lawyer at 5pm. We discussed the first draft of a new spec (the firefighter one), which I managed to get to him Thursday night. We went over the three pitches I prepared. We talked movies, getting me a couple talking points (what I've liked most recently, what I most enjoy or most frequently see in theaters, basically what I'd want to write).
I spent most of my free-time Saturday and Sunday running over the pitches, repeating them like a mantra. I'd shuffle between them, making myself repeat any of them at any moment. If I got so much as one word wrong, I'd start from the top. Doing some vocal work, I added crescendos and falls here and there, trying to make them as engaging as possible. By the end of the night Sunday, I could have repeated them in my sleep.
Monday was the big day, and it started with an unnerving, Murphy-esque realization. I woke up at what I thought was 8:30, ready for a slow breakfast before heading to the agency. When I turned on my phone and the morning news, thought, every other clock was telling me it was 7:30. Two hours later, I was still holding onto a shred of doubt as to what time it actually was. Somehow, as I slept, my alarm clock decided to jump ahead an hour. Better than falling back an hour, I suppose, but still a jarring way to start such a monumental day. I donned my Converse sneakers, jeans, and black dress-shirt, and I was ready for action.
Kevin accompanied me to the agent meeting. We waited a few minutes to be called in, making small talk as we sat there. I was still going over the pitches in my mind, cycling through them as quickly as I could. Finally, the agent's assistant came and got us. We thought a junior agent would be joining, but it wound up being just Kevin, the agent, and my self. The next 25 minutes were a combination of me trying to hold my own, absorb everything that was said (and not said), and trying not to sound too much like an idiot. Kevin prompted me to go through my ideas; the constant repeating of each 45 second pitch paid off, as I got through them without a hitch. Of the three, the agent latched onto one in particular, putting the first idea on the backburner for the time being. Unfortunately, that one that was tabled was the firefighter idea - which I'd just cranked out the first draft of - but we all agreed the idea he liked most was the most compelling. At this point, it's also the one that I have the most work to do on.
At about 11:30, we left the office. A lot of hand shaking and "nice to meet you" escorted us out the door. Kevin and I stood in silence as we waited for the elevator to take us down to the ground floor. My neuroses kicked in as soon as we stepped outside, and I needed Kevin to reassure me no fewer than six times that the meeting went well. He's done this much more than I have, so I trusted him when he said he thought it was a meeting to be proud of.
I had about 5 hours to kill before meeting with the lawyer (a meeting which Kevin would not be at with me). At many times, I was one of the only people standing vertically and not encased in an automobile (typically a Porsche, Lexus, Mercedes, or Jaguar) as I walked around Beverly Hills, coming down off the meeting and getting some exercise. It was rainy/dreary pretty much the entire time I was out there, so I didn't spend too much time out and about. But those walks after/before a meeting were a good way to calm down.
At 5, I was in the reception area at the law firm, drinking a Diet Coke (which I took the third time it was offered), and reading a Hollywood Reporter. I was soon met by the lawyer - one of the partners in a firm that almost exclusively handles writers - and we spent the next hour talking one-on-one. We discussed everything from how I got into writing to what I wanted for my career, who the lawyer's clients are and what kind of situations he's dealt with to what he would do for me. We talked about my script and what I could reasonably expect (all types of scenarios) from future progress on it. It was another very solid meeting, and an hour definitely well spent.
The promising thing about both men I met with was that neither tried to sell me an immediate fortune. They were both realistic in that, while everyone would hope to sell the script sooner than later, the post-Apocalyptic project might not prove to be the one that fills my bank account with more zeros than the number of women I've been rejected by. Still, they were both hopefully for this project, and would do what they could - should we all wind up working together - to get it somewhere.
That night, Kevin, my producer Gretchen, and I all had dinner to celebrate the meetings and the potential for the project. It wasn't until the next morning that I found out just how successful the meetings were. I landed both the agent and the lawyer (will name drop if/when I'm positive I can), and the team is going to start discussing strategies for the script within the coming days. It looks like we'll try to package it, but that's all up in the air.
As my agent said to me during the meeting, my "job is both very simple and very difficult right now," I have to keep writing. I owe him a new script come winter. Time to get cracking.
Big week! After months and months of drafts and re-writes and notes and tweaks, I got an extremely exciting email last night. The production exec we're working with in LA read the most recent draft and thinks it's ready - the draft we're going to go out with.
This week and the next are all about preparation and strategy. First, some time in the next 24 hours or so (possibly even later this evening), I should be getting a Word doc listing any typos or grammatical errors that need to be addressed. Granted, after reading the script so many times, these should be very few and far between. On the other hand, after reading the script so many times, there's a chance that I have read over the same typo a dozen times and failed to see it, as I'm looking for the content that comes before or after it. So, one of the first steps is to just make sure that the script is fully proofed and edited.
Next, the production exec and my manager are supposed to talk about which agencies to go to with the spec. We have a few goals with the agencies. First, obviously, is the desire to get me repped up. We're looking at the four biggest houses, I think. I should get more info about the strategy and the why and why-nots of it all later this week, but a lot of it is figuring the best angle and person to go to. This, because the point isn't just to get me an agent. Part of this process is to determine ways to package the script - get actors and a director on board (perhaps) before we take it to studios. This takes a lot of work off the studio and makes the script a more guaranteed (but never fully guaranteed) sale. A vehicle (script) with all the elements (talent) in place around it is a much more attractive prospect to a cautious studio than a script with no actors interested, since it shows a lot more interest. Especially the case if we can get big talent attached.
In the meantime, as I'm implementing any minor edits and my manager and the exec are strategizing, we'll be waiting for the head producer at the production company to read. He's out of town at the moment, but the exec is giving it to him next week when he's back in town. Hopefully, this all means that the script gets some major traction in the coming weeks and that the end of the summer could see me out in LA taking a few meetings and, possibly, with an agent. Of course, since there's never any promising anything, I allow myself to be at best cautiously optimistic now. Nonetheless, it looks like we're finally moving onto the next step (knock on wood). As you can well imagine, I'm stoked!
Should writers follow the current Hollywood trends? Do they make the trends? Should they even worry about them? These are questions that I never really thought about recently, at least not so far as they dictated my writing. Recently though, I can't help but seriously consider what's being released and what has recently sold when trying to determine which idea I should work on next.
While it's worth noting that all aspiring writers ought to have multiple ideas in the queue - this isn't so much to gauge your seriousness as a writer, as it is your future success as more than a one-trick pony – this post assumes you have a few ideas. (It’s fine if you don’t yet – focus on finishing your first script before getting too far ahead of yourself.) So now let’s say you’re trying to decide which script to write next. Let’s also assume that all your ideas are of equal urgency to you. Whether you’re repped up or not, you might wonder how much Hollywood’s current trends should affect you decision.
Of course, my voice is just one out of many (and one that is not too well known in the industry – yet). Still, I can tell you that both my current and previous manager have been very hesitant about giving me the green light to work on specs that are similar to something(s) that has just sold. Any studio that doesn’t yet have a vampire movie (hypothetical – I’m sure they all have 6) will most likely not want to risk their neck-biter flick on an unknown writer. That means, they’re going with the big guns, and you and I do not fit the bill. So, I doubt I’d write a vampire script right now if I had other ideas rattling around there. (I know this sounds like a bit of hypocrisy. After all, I’m trying to sell a post-Apocalyptic spec on the heels of not only The Road, but also Book of Eli and 2012, to name but a few.)
Granted, there’s the flip side to trends. Now might be the PERFECT time for you to write a rom-com about a woman who goes to Europe and meets the perfect man. When in Rome and Leap Year both look terrible, and studios might just be looking for “the movie those should have been.” Likewise with my post-apocalyptic spec, Eli and The Road both got middling reviews, so I know that part of the train of thought is that people still want to see a more successful version of that world. On the other hand, a couple flops can kill a genre.
We seem to be back at square one – should you follow the trend? Maybe. I can tell you now that I’ve met with incredible resistance to trying to establish a franchise. If you’re hoping to write your own superhero movie, because superheroes are all the rage, you should know that hardly anyone will want to risk $150 million on your self-created superheroes (believe me, I’ve tried). And unless you have something incredibly unique to say about zombies, now might not be the best time. We’ve seen every form of zombie there is recently – except ballerina zombies, which I just copyrighted – so studios are likely to edge away from that soon.
Maybe a better question is: should you determine the trend? If you can’t quite determine it, can you at least get ahead of it? Maybe you remember watching some sasquatch movie when you were a kid, and a generation later, there’s been no sasquatch movie. Well, it might be perfect time to unleash your sasquatch thriller on movie-goers.
Ultimately, what the answer comes down to is money. Studios don’t want to spend money, but they have to in order to make it. And they love making it. That means that right now, they’re looking for the “sure” things. Unfortunately, that means sequels and franchises. It does also mean trends, but only to a certain extent. Slasher films are usually a low risk venture because of the unknown talent and low budgets that can carry them. A new writer attempting a low risk venture like that can really distinguish him or herself by writing a knockout script. A new writer attempting a $100 million futuristic caper is facing much more of an uphill battle. If you can write a smart, relatively inexpensive, yet unique script that fits into the current trend, then go with it. Know that by the time your script is ready for production, the trend might be over, and your project could stagnate. For the most part, though, I think that what you and I have to do is write what we feel we can write most effectively right now, avoid the trends that just died, and just make sure that we’re breathing new air into whichever genre we tackle.
If for no other reason than we have to throw out our calendars and open new ones to January once again, New Years celebrations tend to go hand in hand with evaluation (or re-evaluation) of one's life. As far as my writing life went, 2009 was a pretty interesting (and sometimes frustrating) year. Actually, you could say the same thing for my personal life, too. I really learned a lot about the business in 2009, and though I didn't find "success" in terms of a major sale, I continued to fight my way toward Hollywood's door. Hopefully what I went through will help shed some light on your situation or reassure you that you're not the only aspiring screenwriter fighting an uphill battle.
It was just over a year ago that I officially signed with my first manager. I pitched him ideas for follow-up projects to my post-Apocalyptic spec when we met in late December of '08, and I spent my holidays working on the one we settled on. By February, he was transitioning out from the company he was with when I signed with him, and he was making the move to someplace else. Agents and managers hop companies all the time, so that wasn't a red flag for me. I did, however, grow suspicious when he had me emailing his private email because he couldn't tell me where he was going or what the situation was. At the same time, a manager at his former company was embroiled in controversy regarding slander and a lawsuit. I quietly (and not so quietly to The League) hoped that this was why my manager was leaving.
At that point - two months into our manager/client relationship - I didn't have anywhere else to go. My manager had contacts I certainly didn't, and I wasn't an in demand writer. So, when he asked if I would go with him to his new company, I quickly said yes. I had to officially fire the first company, which I did via email (as per my manager's instructions). I hated the place that put me in; after sending the email, his former colleague told me that I had to inform them which projects he had repped me on, where they had been submitted, and that any sale made on them would mean 10% for the old agency. My manager's response when I worriedly asked him how to deal with that - "ignore it."
Things got more and more unsettling. March came, and still no word about where he had transitioned to. In fact, I had very little word from him at all. I enquired about the status of my script a month after he supposedly submitted it nine places, and he said he would check in a week. Finally, a mutual friend who we had submitted my script to emailed me; she'd received an eblast from my manager informing his friends and professional contacts of his new home. Right then, I did two things. I emailed my manager to see if he would finally tell me what was up, and at the same time I googled the new place. The new agency - primarily a literary one - very clearly said "we are not the right place for screenwriters" on its homepage. They repped writers for almost every other medium, but were adamant about that. When my manager did get back to me, he did so with no explanation. All he said was that I should email him at his new address from that point on.
By the beginning of April, I'd had enough. I felt like I was doing more work for myself than he was. It was also right aorund that time that a family friend - Gretchen Somerfeld - read my script. Gretchen's an LA based producer with recognizable credits to her name, and she was into my script. Smartly (though certainly not advisable in many cases), I slipped her the script wihtout going through my manager. I was growing so displeased with his actions that I didn't want to cut him in on 10% of a potential sale made from my direct contacts. Within the span of just a few weeks, I fired my manager, found out that a production company with a first look at Warner Bros had strongly considered my script but ultimately passed on it, and I agreed to work with Gretchen.
May passed by pretty quickly. I scrambled for a lawyer to take a look at the option agreement Gretchen sent me. The phone calls to entertainment lawyers were all over the place. Some of the larger companies refused to have any sort of conversation without a $15K retainer, while others gave what little advice they could before telling me that I would have to pay $200 to $600 an hour to speak further. One junior at one firm actually agreed to look everything over and take me on at the standard 5% of the sale, then got back in touch a week later and said he would have to do it at 7.5%. Finally, I managed to get some help from a very kind woman at the WGAEast. Though she prefaced that she's not a lawyer, she works closely with contracts and option agreements, and she assurred me that my agreement was one of the more favorable she'd seen.
I went on vacation at the end of May, and I signed the agreement with Gretchen upon returning in early June. By signing with Gretchen, I also acquired a manager in Kevin D. - Gretchen's manager who would rep me for the project (and then potentially longer, based on our work together for the first spec). With that, the re-writes began. The first major change was the title. For the record, I either hate titling my scripts, or I love it. A title can make or break interest in a project (and sometimes a project itself), so unless I get a great one, I'd rather hit myself in the crotch than give my baby an unworthy title.
After weeks of waffling and tossing while trying to fall asleep, I settled on a new title that Gretchen and Kevin both really liked. Kevin started talking the script up to a few people around town, while I spent the summer re-writing. The script underwent some major changes, finally settling into its second real incarnation by the third week of September.
We sent it out to a few places, including giving an exclusive to the production company with the Warner Bros deal that passed in the Spring. Since I'm an unknown writer, my "team" and I agreed to try and attach an agent first, and then go wide. Unfortunately, after a long day at work, I found out that the production company passed a second time, and the agents we were hoping to hear from either hadn't read or also passed.
Finally, in October, a bite! Another production company, this one with a first look at Universal, was interested. The head producer (Oscar nominated) hadn't yet been made aware of the script, but one of his right hand people had read and liked it. She had some notes, which would ultimately send the script into its third major revision, but was offering us an exclusive deal. In a money-less handshake agreement, we agreed that I would do re-writes per her notes. If she liked the new draft (which she has not gotten yet), then it was off to the producer and, fingers crossed, to Universal with an A-list producer attached. I've been working on the new version since, and just about finished the first stab at the revised Act Two today.
So, 2009 has been quite the rollercoaster ride. I don't mean to belabor my first failed management experience, but I do think that it's important for all new writers to know that they don't have to take someone's crap just because they're unproduced. Don't get me wrong - the key to my relationship with Gretchen and Kevin so far has been my willingness to work with them and take their feedback, and I'm sure they'd tell you the same. On the other hand, though, if a working relationship isn't, well, working, then you're not obligated to stay in it. This is your career, so you have to do what's best for that. And for you.
All in all, though I didn't make a sale and am not yet an in-demand writer, I would say that 2009 was a very good year for me. I got closer than I have ever been to launching my screenwriting career, and I did manager to land on a few people's radar, if only for a few minutes even. I've been working on this post-Apocalyptic spec for two years now, and I know there's still a lot of work to go.
So please, if you take nothing else away from this post, take these two things: work well with others, but make sure that they're working well for you, and be patient. Some people might have the great fortune of being a legitimate overnight sensation, but if you read between the lines in most articles on "overnight" screenwriters, you'll see that they worked in the industry (as a producer, reader, grip, caterer, etc.) for years and had been writing for more years than that.
If you've been following my Writing Weeks, you'll know that the past few weeks, my manager and I have been working on nailing down my next project. At this point, since I've taken no meetings and am still not on the industry radar, that project will be a spec. (I've got so many ideas that I want to work on - hell, I gave my manager 10 loglines to sift through - that I'm happy to have the time to work on an original idea again.) We narrowed the idea list I sent him down to four, and from there focused on our collective top two. We still have yet to cement what my next script will be, and are developing the two finalists to see which one bites back as more urgent.
This isn't the first time I've gone through the "what's next" process with a manager. If you haven't done it yet, I hope you get the opportunity to. I can also see, however, how it might seem like an odd or unwarranted process. I mean, your manager is just that, right - your manager. He or she technically works for you. so why do you let him or her tell you what to write next? It might seem odd and possibly a misdirected approach. Keep in mind, if you're like me, you read the daily script sales and keep your ear to the ground about industry trends and news as much as you can. the plain fact of the matter, though, is that your manager knows industry trends better than you do (or should, at least; if he/she doesn't, maybe you should think about looking elsewhere). I am still an outsider. You are probably still an outsider. Your manager isn't.
When last I went through the process, all the way back in December 2008, I pitched my manager four ideas. He jumped on one big time and informed me that of the other three, one was currently too big and possibly out of my league and out-of-the-box, and the other two were similar to projects already in development. While I obviously didn't want to be deterred and chose not to believe that anything was beyond me (then it would have been a struggle, and it still might be; but one day I'll do it), I put the other two ideas behind me. It would not be worth my time to write something that's too similar to two projects already in development at major studios to get greenlit. And it wasn't worth his time, either. A good manager will know what's coming up in the industry, which trends are on the rise, which are fading out, and where you can best wiggle your way in.
Of course, you can't lose sight of the fact that your manager does technically work for you. he or she makes money when you do, in no small part because they help you make that money. their contacts become your contacts. If they're not helping you, you totally have a right to move on. But it's a two-way street. In exchange for their connections and their industry insider knowledge, you have to represent them in as best a light as possible. That means not only comporting yourself professionally, but trusting them to guide you in the best direction. for both of you.
The ideas that my manager and I were working on are all my original ideas. He had some thoughts on some them and was rightly hesitant about a few others. But I was always free to comment, to defend one that I thought he was shortchanging, or to guide him away from one that I didn't feel committed to at the moment. It's a balance, but it's also a working relationship. I'd caution any new writer from feeling like they owe their manager anything and everything, because in the end, who has to write the script? Know that you can speak up - the dialogue goes both ways.
I’ve encountered a weird sort of conundrum in my recent searches for legal representation. On the one hand, I find it’s often overwhelmingly difficult to get anyone to offer help without being directly referred to them. On the other hand, certain attorneys seem more than willing to help, but then disappear off the radar.
My guess is that I’m subscribing to the same belief that a lot of young/new writers do that you have to get people behind you almost from the get-go – not just people who support you, but a team to work for you, i.e. lawyers, managers, agents, etc. To a degree, this is true. I wouldn’t suggest that any writer sign a contract or anything other than a release form (maybe) without having an entertainment lawyer take a look at it. Yet that doesn’t mean that the very same writer should pay a retainer or get a full-time lawyer on his or her side.
I recently had a producer approach me regarding a potential option on one of my scripts. At this point in the game, I still had a lawyer. (In case you’re wondering how I got this lawyer – she was a friend of my boss’s. As a courtesy to my boss, she looked over my initial agreement with a manager I was about to sign with. Then, as a courtesy to her, I agreed to remain with her, using her for future services.) When I got in touch with my lawyer about the option agreement, we had to first get the little issue of her fee out of the way. This wasn’t something I had discussed frankly with her before, which was probably a mistake on both our parts.
Before speaking to managers/lawyers/agents or anyone who takes a chunk of your sale, know what they are entitled to. Managers and agents typically take 10% (some managers go higher to 15 or more). Lawyers, even the top of the line ones, are either hourly or take 5%. Because I knew that lawyers get 5%, I knew to be on high alert when my lawyer said that she would take a little money upfront, and then 10% off the sale. Red flag. I like her, and she did me a big favor helping negotiate with my manager (a lot of managers will bypass signed documents in favor of a handshake agreement, which can be a lot nicer). However, I knew that I was being asked to give more than she was entitled, and the producer I was in connection with had mentioned I might need someone with more experience negotiating big deals, so, as I had done with my manager a month and a half earlier, I moved on.
To date, I haven’t been able to secure a new lawyer. Some firms wanted $600 an hour. Some wanted a $15K retainer just to talk to me. Others agreed to take me on – provided they liked my script- at the standard 5% but then never got back to me. I spoke to someone at the WGAE who was kind enough to read over my option agreement for me and gave me some pointers about it, with the caveat that she’s not legal counsel. Confident in the revisions and with assurances from other paralegals who did take the time to look at the agreement, even though I did not sign with their firm, I sent the revised agreement to the producer who was agreeable to the changes.
In the end, I realized that the world’s not as united against young writers as we might be made out to think. People were eager to help when and where they could, and encouraging when they couldn’t. Just don’t be afraid to make the phone calls. And know what’s standard. You’re your first line of protection.
The phrase “Fired My Manager” seems a bit harsh to me. It is essentially what people do when they change representation, but it makes the whole action seem much more hostile than it is at times. Nonetheless, that’s basically what I did this week. I was surprised to find so little info on how to go about doing this, so hopefully this post can be of some help to any of you in a similar situation.
In order to follow along, here’s a short timeline of how things went down. For courtesy’s sake, I’m not going to name my manager or the companies he worked at. Let’s just call him Z. Z signed me when he worked at Company 1. He was excited to push my script in what he thought was a good chance of a sale. A month and a half later, he got a pass on my script, and soon found himself moving companies, to Company 2. He submitted my script to nine production companies, yet after two months, I still hadn’t heard from him. He also failed to tell me that he moved to Company 2 (I knew he left the first company, but a friend had to tell me where Z moved). I found the lack of information from him – regarding the move, and, in particular, his destination company – especially unprofessional. On top of that, Company 2’s homepage specifically says that it is not the right company for screenwriters. Big problem. When I asked Z about Company 2’s reputation, he said that it's based on his credentials, and was therefore a great reputation.
I still have a few contacts in the film industry whose opinions I value. Those contacts have agreed with me that my manager’s responsiveness and his answers to questions that I’ve asked have been less than professional. I’m relatively new to this, I won’t lie about that. However, I know enough to know what desired behavior from a manager is and what isn’t. My manager (unlike others) did not try to get me an agent, did not get me any sort of meeting, and left me without updates for months at a time. My initial excitement gave way to restlessness, disappointment, and ultimately frustration. I knew that if I reached a point of no-return with how I felt toward him, it would be overwhelmingly hard for him to climb back into my good graces. Perhaps I should have tried to clam myself. Maybe I could have given him more time to get his stuff together, but since he technically represented my career, I thought it unwise to remain with someone that I did not feel pleased or comfortable with.
So, I sent him an email, asked for an updated submission list, and after letting the weekend come and go, told him that I no longer needed representation from him. The initial email was somewhat short – I thanked him for his initial excitement and told him that it was invaluable to me as a young writer, but that I would be moving on. When he asked what had led to that decision, I decided to answer gracefully but honestly. I knew I was not obligated to offer an answer, but part of me wanted to get my frustrations off my chest; another part of me felt that, for some reason, I owed it to him. I have no hard feelings toward him now, and do not want to sound as if I'm attacking him here. This is just part of the journey we've sworn to document here at The League.
I understand that many of reading this might feel like I’ve made a huge mistake, or made mountains out of molehills. I’m well aware that a newbie writer is fortunate just to land representation. The last thing one wants to do is appear needy or to have unrealistic expectations. But there’s a saying (which I know I’ll fudge and can’t remember who to attribute it to) that goes something like: it’s better to have no manager than a bad one. If something isn’t working, regardless of how new to the business or risky a client you are, you have to know when to cut it off. At least, that’s my take on things.
Right now, I’m the only one in the League who has secured representation - but the others are not far behind. Because of that, this whole querying through signing (and then the selling and everything beyond) is new to us. I’m sort of like the League’s guinea pig when it comes to dealing with people responsible for our careers. As a young, “emerging” writer, I can tell you that this has been both an exciting and, at times, stressful month and a half.
For Christmas, (as you’ll recall, I mentioned before) I got a copy of The Real, Low Down, Dirty Truth About Hollywood Agenting. (Read it if you haven’t.) That book, along with other things I’ve heard and read, gave me a fairly strong sense of what I could expect if my career begins to take off. But I still had questions on what if anything I could be doing now to help my career later, as well as other things I wanted to know about in terms of projects I’m working on.
Last week I was happy to have a brief but very helpful chat with my manager. I had a sort of laundry list of things to ask him. Hopefully, this will be useful to some of you, especially if you’re an action writer like I seem to be at the moment.
-My current project, the Roman-army spec, could really be a comic book series, if not a film. Since my manager works in comics also, I figured I’d get his take on it. His answer: there’s no point in sitting on an amazing script that’s written in order to make it a comic first. If people don’t bite for the screenplay, I can always go the comic route and come back to the screenplay when there’s source material on it. (Granted, if I really wanted to do the comic first, I could. But I’ll go with my manager’s inclination on this one.)
-What about my other projects? I have another complete spec and wanted to know if he wanted to handle one project at a time, or take a look at that one now. He said to send anything over once I think it’s ready. So, he now has two of my babies.
-Industry contacts: when I was an intern at one of the major companies here in NYC four years ago, I developed a pretty good relationship with my supervisor. I asked my manager if he thought it was worth sending to her, since her current company has a first-look with one of the big studios. I was particularly concerned about maintaining credit as a first-time writer and thought that working with her might safeguard me a bit. He said that would be a fine route to go, that honoring relationships like that is always a good thing to do in this biz.
-Finally, one of the things I asked was about retaining rights. I’m no legal expert, but I know that it can be hard if not impossible to secure the rights to characters and franchise elements that you’ve created (I’m talking rights to royalties for toys, posters, video games, etc. based on your material). Both projects I’ve give him have big franchise potential, and I want – reasonably, I think – to have access to part of any spinoff, especially things like comics or TV shows based on the film. (Yeah, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here, but I think this kind of thing is important for writers to be aware of, at least. I have zero negotiating power at the moment, but it helps to know what I can fight for, especially if other people are seeing dollar signs.)
My manager said that the best way to secure those rights is to find your script in the middle of a bidding war, which is why I’m a bit relieved that the company we gave an exclusive to passed. At the end of the week, my manager emailed me the Solicitation List for companies we’re going to target next. He covered basically every major studio in the nine spot-on selections he made. Now, the waiting begins again. I hope it’s worth it.
Yesterday, I found out that the production company my manager gave an exclusive early look at my script to passed. This company (which shall remain nameless) has a first look deal at one of the big studios (Warner, Fox, Universal, etc.). I don’t know whether it acted on their first look option – i.e. whether they took it to the studio. If they didn’t, then the pass came from this smaller company and not the big studio (which would be better for me). Either way, working with that production company – for the time being – is closed.
Some people would think that this pass would come as a crushing blow. Honestly, it didn’t. For one, I have to remind myself that I’ve managed to achieve something good in attaining a manager – that alone should keep my spirits up. (My buddies here at League HQ know that has been somewhat frustrating, since as someone whose patience levels could be a lot higher, I now wait second hand. Instead of finding out directly if someone passes, I wait while my manager waits, then wait for him to get back to me.) My manager’s enthusiasm about the script is another support. Sure, we got passed on by one company (and its A list actor), but I wasn’t sure that the actor we were targeting was best for the script anyway. I wouldn’t have said no to him, but if I could cast whoever I wanted, I don’t think he’d wind up at the top of the list.
In a business where money = king, getting rejected by the company that had an exclusive does another thing; it opens up the possibility of much more money. It’s like eBay – if only one person bids or there’s a buy now option, the seller only makes so much and doesn’t have the option to make more. If, however, the item (or script in this analogy) becomes hot, then you get yourself a bidding war, and might wind up making much more than you thought (or maybe deserve).
As much as I’d have liked to be able to put in my two weeks’ notice at my job today and have A-list talent attached to my first spec, I’m not bummed it didn’t happen. The future is wide with possibilities, and I have a call set for Monday with my manager to find out more. Have you gotten passed on by companies before? How’d you take it?
As a welcoming for 2009, I thought I would go back and evaluate all that I had done over the past year. I distinctly remember walking with a friend back home in Arlington, Virginia last New Year's Eve on our way back from picking up some cheap beer (or cheap champagne). We got on the subject of New Years Resolutions, as I think most people do at that time of year. Hers was to stop dating douche bag guys. Mine was to do everything in my power to sell a script, though that did not mean that I specifically had to sell anything in 2008. I wanted to stop being so timid and actually submit to a competition or, dare I say it, two. I wanted to complete a few scripts, and then send out query letters for those. I wanted to call in whatever favors from whatever contacts I had and try to push my work into the industry. Did I meet my writing goals? Could I have done more? How much time did I actually spend working on material?
By January 7th, 2008, I'd written 3 pages of my post-Apocalyptic spec and my first Writing Week. That draft would be completed in the first few months of 2008. After that, I put it aside to work on a new idea I had, to gain some distance from the script that I was told needed some major fixes, but which I was in love with. The second project flew by, yet remains untouched since the FADE OUT at the end of that first draft.
By June, I was in a bit of a rut, along with the majority of the League at that time. We kept tossing ideas back and forth to one another, but not many of us were doing any substantial writing to speak of. Ultimately, I got around to working on the post-Apocalyptic spec again over the summer - the big impetus for that being that I had finally taken the plunge (probably because Onyx twisted my arm so much) and submitted an action spec to two different screenplay competitions. I wanted to be sure that I had another action script to follow it up, should I be so lucky as to attract attention that way.
The summer ended, and with it, my hopes (and those of everyone in the League) for screenplay competition success. Not a one of us advanced in the Scriptapalooza competition, though each and every one of us who submitted made it to the quarter-finals in the PAGE International Screenwriting Awards. Disappointed and a little dejected, the writing slowed once more as the last of the summer days turned into Autumn evenings. I received my third round of feedback from the League on my post-Apocalyptic spec and submitted it to an outside working writer, who also gave me feedback.
With the competitions behind me, I turned my attention elsewhere, to another approach new to me. October was Query Month. Zombie was the only one of us to have tried querying agents and producers before that. As roommates, we often time things to correspond with one another, and we did that for query letters. We each compiled a list of people - I stuck solely to managers, while he incorporated a few agents, as well - work shopped our loglines and query letters with the Leaguers, and sent off about a dozen e-queries, choosing only those companies at first who permitted and made e-querying easy through their websites. A dozen emails went out, and the waiting game began.
By late October, I'd heard back from the assistant at one company who really liked my writing. I went on vacation and came back to a rejection letter that he'd had to send on behalf of the managers he worked for. He did, however, send encouraging notes, which gave me hope. As the line between 2008 and 2009 narrowed, I began to push the notion of getting signed that year out of my head. After all, I'd written two new screenplays and finished one of them, done the competitions (and would probably do so again), and sent out my queries. I'd done all I had planned.
Then, in mid December, that call came. The call we all hope for and, no matter how many times we dream about, can never plan for. A NYC based manager called me up and offered me representation. A week later, not even, I'd signed with him and my script was on the desk of a pretty big actor. And just three days ago, at the very last twilight of 2008, I received a bite from another manager, which I had to reject.
If you're reading this blog, I'm going to assume that you're a writer. And, if like us, you're young and still trying to get your foot in the door of this industry, I'll assume you probably have goals for 2009 like I laid out for myself a year ago, like Onyx lays out for himself every summer when his birthday rolls around. If you're wondering how to go about it or if it works, just read through the Writing Week segments I've put up each week, or that anyone in the League has written over the past year. My manager says that the first step is just "writing a great script" and adding to that, to paraphrase Jeffrey Nachmanoff, "great scripts do not lie hidden. Someone will find them." Don't listen to all those people who tell you that queries and competitions don't work, that you must know someone or else you can't break in. Just keep writing and, when your material is ready, get it out there however you can. Copyright it to protect yourself and go on the offensive. If it's ready, people will notice.
The Screenwriters League is a collective of NYC-based writers sharing their experiences as they build their careers from the ground up, and hoping to impart any knowledge they gain along the way.
