screenwriter segregation / where to submit movie framework with various finished parts

Cafe Society
41

They tell inexperienced screenwriters that you never direct in screenplays. Yet, if you read a great script (which I’m assuming you haven’t), you can visualize everything in your head – how it looks, how it feels, how the actors deliver the lines, even what the actors look like. When you don’t know what you’re doing (emphasizing parts of dialogue, called giving line readings) you’re essentially telling actors how to do their jobs – who would enjoy that? But if you take the time to learn what screenwriting is and isn’t, really study the craft, you can tell the actors what to do (and directors, and cinematographers, and editors, etc) but make them think it was their idea all along.

You have no idea what you want the film to be (and you don’t, trust me – you can’t really know until you write out a few drafts, and really explore the subject). You have no idea what your pile of stuff is, or will consist of someday.

You consider screenwriting the enemy, when really the enemy is your laziness.

42

James Cameron has a long history of successful blockbuster work, strong working relationships with powerful Hollywood producers, a large creative teams who has worked with him for decades, and is richer than Croesus such that he can put is own money on the line to make the film he wants to make. Cameron is also intimately involved in pretty much all aspects of film production and has a demonstrated ability to provide a completed screenplay and follow through difficult projects through their end.

Joss Whedon has a long history of successful franchises, a loyal following that pretty much guarantees at least a minimum return on his films, and an ability to craft dialogue in a signature fashion that is distinct and yet fresh. The Avengers wasn’t new ground for Whedon; in fact, he’s been telling essentiality the same story for his entire career, e.g. a group of people from different backgrounds and values thrown together by fate and having to work through their differences to achieve a common goal. Whedon is also intimately involved in pretty much all aspects of film production and has a demonstrated ability to provide a completed screenplay and follow through difficult projects through their end.

Because you want someone to back your project. No studio or investor wants to see a jumble of “half-done parts” that you think can somehow be weaved into a completed tapestry. They want to see particular elements that demonstrate an ability to give a completed project, e.g. a strong screenplay or at least a solid draft that can be a basis of a good, salable film. If you don’t like this or aren’t otherwise prepared to go out and find your own funding and attract your own talent, the film industry is not for you.

Nobody is interested in catering to your whims, or looking through dozens of storyboards of your half-conceived story, or watching parkour videos with you narrating how they will be inserted, some how, into the story that you can’t fully describe, and they certainly aren’t going to listen to your mix tape of what music is going through your head as you describe a scene that isn’t coherently stated on paper. The world doesn’t care about your self-proclaimed ADHD-fueled unlimited creativity; they want to see objective evidence that you can put together something that they can actually use. If you can’t understand or accept this you are in for a lot of grief and disappointment. Well, you are, anyway–that is the lot of a screenwriter–but you’ll just see this as the world against you rather than understanding what you need to do to express your ideas in a useable form.

Stranger

43

squish, you have to finish something. Finish a draft of your script, it doesn’t have to be the final form, that won’t happen until way down the line anyway. Finish your storyboard, again a draft. Just finish something, or don’t expect to be taken seriously.

44

I just wanted to pop in and thank everyone for the extended equine bludgeoning - it may not be helping squish, but it’s really enormously informative to me. I didn’t know anything about the screenwriting industry and standards and I’m learning a lot of really interesting stuff.

Thanks especially to **Stranger **and **Hilarity **for the impressive amount of detail.

45

Which agencies and/or management companies have requested your material? Name two or three. Hollywood’s a small town, and most of the significant players in the representation game are known quantities.

Are any of these people charging you to submit your script? If so, they’re not legit. They make money off of submission fees and never deliver on any of their promises.

46

squish7, you keep saying that the world *should *work one way; we keep telling you that it doesn’t work that way.

The reasons why it doesn’t are interesting in themselves and the flaws in the system may tell us that the system will change sometime in the future. That’s not helpful to you today, I realize, but railing at us for telling you how the world works doesn’t help you either.

47

Two books to show you how to put it all together yourself:

Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices
The DV Rebel’s Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap

Here’s what you could do:

Get your script finished. This will just be the first draft, of course. You will have to get it critiqued by knowledgeable people, and then rewrite it from page one, two or three times.

Pick out some of the most amazing parts of the story, and shoot those scenes as a trailer to garner interest. You can do the most amazing special effects on your home computer these days. Did you see the clip from the Argentinean film student a few years back of an alien invasions scene? Amazing, and done on home computers.

Put the trailer on youtube, and market yourself in anyway you can. Go to film festivals, pitch events, cold call, you name it.

This probably won’t get you where you want to go, and it will cost you money that could have been put into a house or a new car. But this is how you do it if you want to do it on your own.

48

Here is a WGA-published list of almost 100 agencies that accept queries without charge. I’m not sure where you’re coming from saying people don’t do that. There’s no conspiracy that all these people don’t even read the letters they invite. I know nobody requests full manuscripts initially, so naturally I’m talking about after I’ve interested someone with an initial pitch.

No one’s who’s interested enough to request a full manuscript is going to refuse to examine the context around the screenplay; the opinions of prominent people, music and sketch art, applications to marketable products, etc., etc. People’s statements here that no one out there will engage in basic research seem delusional.

49

http://www.wga.org/agency/agencylist.aspx

[bolding mine]

Most of the agencies on that list only read work from writers referred to them by their clients and other Hollywood players. I don’t want to say that queries never work. Sometimes they do, but it’s rare. Generally speaking, querying by letter is not the way it’s done anymore. Email and phone are more common. Keep in mind that the major agencies don’t take queries, period. Smaller agencies and management companies do, but even here, the most common response to a query is no response at all. The next most common response is, Thanks, not for us.

WME and CAA are two of the biggest agencies in Hollywood. They represent bonfide stars, in front of and behind the camera. They won’t take your query. They won’t read your script. Any letter you send them will go straight into the trash. On the other hand, if your stageplay has just won the Pulitzer Prize, they will be calling you.

The great majority of agencies on that list don’t want your query. If you doubt this, call them up and ask.

50

Here’s a blog by a woman who worked as an assistant at a major Hollywood agency. She’s legit. The restrictions on access by newcomers have if anything grown tighter in the intervening years.

http://aspiringtvwriter.blogspot.com/2008/08/query-about-queries.html

http://aspiringtvwriter.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-actually-goes-in-query-letter-for.html

No one has requested your material.

51

Do you understand what a query letter is? It’s a sentence with an irresistible hook. Not a scene, not a video, not a script. You send out a hundred just to get one agent to ask you to send a screenplay. A screenplay, not a scene, not a video.

That’s the way the game is played. If you don’t want to play it, that’s fine. Nobody said it’s a good game. But it’s the only game in town.

52

My read of this is that you intend to submit other people’s free running footage as part of your vision. If that is the case, stop right now. Do not do that. If there is anything that movie studios hate more than unsolicited scripts, it is potential copyright violations.

53

Well you’re in luck then, because I’m one of a handful of people at PlayStation who screens pitches for first party publication. If you have an idea for a game and you’d like Sony to fund it, I’m the guy you pitch it to.

What constitutes “a pitch” varies considerably depending on WHO is doing the pitching. If you’re a famous game designer it might be enough to show us a few rough concept sketches over lunch. If you’re a normal industry veteran we’d expect a detailed pitch document and rough production plan. If you’re a first-time game developer, we won’t even take a look without a playable prototype. You see, we’re not just evaluating whether it’s a cool idea or not. We’re looking at whether or not YOU will be able to execute on it. If you have a long track record of making cool stuff then we’re much more willing to take a risk on something that’s still in the early concept phase. There have been games that we’ve passed on, not because they weren’t cool ideas, but because we didn’t have confidence in the people who were pitching them. Does this mean that we might sometimes miss out on something cool because it was pitched by a complete unknown? Absolutely. But we have to look at the balance between risk and reward. And we have to factor in the amount of extra work we’ll have to do to help an inexperienced team bring produce something we’re willing to put the PlayStation name on.

I’m telling you this because I want you to understand what the process looks like from the publisher/studio perspective.

You’re an unknown with no industry experience. This means that ANYTHING you pitch is risky. Are you a flake? A crank? Are you going to actually do the work you promised? Are you going to be a pain in the ass during production? There’s no way for a studio to know. What this means is that they’re not going to bother looking at your stuff unless you make their task as easy and risk-free as possible. And even then many studios won’t bother. They won’t bother because the odds of something amazing coming from a complete unknown are much lower than the odds of a complete unknown turning out to be a flake/crank. They’re willing to take the chance that they’re passing on something amazing simply because it’s not worth it to wade through the sea of flakes and cranks.

You’re not Peter Jackson or James Cameron. You’re not a powerful industry insider with tons of contacts and a stellar track record. You’re a complete outsider with no film-making experience. That means that a big part of your job is to convince the studio that YOU are worth taking a gamble on. Not your idea. YOU.

54

Same with him sending “mixtapes” of other people’s songs for purposes of mood-setting or creating a soundtrack. Both are gigantic copyright violations and will scare off anyone reputable.

55

Yeah, the plan to use other people’s footage with no deal in place is hilarious. He better forget about that, ASAP.
Hey, squish7, you should read this book:

http://goodinaroom.com/giarbook/

One of the points Meyers makes is that when you’re pitching, you should make it as easy as possible for the decision maker to say yes. Don’t make them do any research or any other legwork. Have all the information and materials ready for them, immediately at hand. Have all the research done, and presented in a way that’s easy to access and understand.

No one with the power to buy a script or greenlight a movie has time for anything half-done, or poorly thought out. They just don’t have time.

56

OP, it is possible (although very unlikely) to get a film out without a screenplay. Check out the wikipedia page for the movie Koyanisqaatsi.

I don’t know how they got this distributed, but the composer of the music (Philip Glass) was well known.

57

Right… For example, when NPR’s Peter Sagal (host of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me) submitted a screenplay about a woman witnessing the Cuba revolution and falling in love with a young Cuban revolutionary, he didn’t know that his serious political drama would be dusted off many years later and turned into “Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights” without a single line of his original dialogue intact, though with him listed a co-writer.(true story)

58

All the arts & entertainments are difficult to break into at almost any angle. I’d have to be in a complete hole if I thought there was anyone in the world dying to examine unsolicited writing and music. Beating me over the head with a cliche so large it’s a header and footer on every page of every book ever written about anything, isn’t useful.

The reason so much of this stuff gets tossed in the trash is because it’s trash. Agencies aren’t masochistically throwing out gold. If I am NOT producing trash, people may notice me. I don’t care how many other people are producing trash, I’m not. It’s unfair to *assume *that I’m trash and say these processes are built to keep trash like mine out. If I say I want to be a rock star, and you say well next to nobody makes it as a rock star, that’s not helpful, that’s waste. It would only be helpful if it was new information. I’m coming at you with a theoretical scenario, that I have something of value, not trash, but that’s in a very unorthodox format and hence extra hard to find a proper submission path for.

Look, if I had just a plain screenplay, and knew nothing about the field, and asked what I could do to promote it, it’s absurd to say “You can’t, because your work is trash.” It would be productive to tell me there are agencies who accept queries, or there are contests for screenplays, but to warn me that very few people succeed by those methods. Then I can use that information to make my own choices.

A *unique *project is going to result in a unique query, which is the general point of sifting through seas of identical letters, to spot originality. Forget my detailed specifics, you’re not even acknowledging the brain dead value of extreme theoreticals. If my query letter states “The theme of my film is the search for cancer cures… AND ten Harvard professors agree my formula will cure cancer”, they’re not going to say “Well your movie isn’t profitable” based entirely on my logline, they’re going to say “send us this manuscript!” (along with a willingness to evaluate supplemental context surrounding it; art, music, etc.).

You’re speaking against time-honed realities. Credentials and connections fly up queries to the top. Hence, the more professionals I interest, the more intrinsically notable my query becomes. You’re saying you have to have connections (i.e. inside Hollywood), that’s a stone’s throw from having connections *outside *of Hollywood, i.e. that exponentially up the value of a query and hence bypass this impossible lottery you’re speaking of.

You can query through email, I never said a printed letter.

59

The studios have a tried and true method of finding a product they want to take a risk on. If your work doesn’t fit that model you have two choices - 1) find an unorthodox method to get yourself noticed, 2) mold your idea into a format that they know how to judge. Most folks here seem to be saying that method #2 is far more likely to have success than method #1.

I think you overestimate how much any of this will matter to a studio. They may very well be interested in a story about how a cure for cancer was developed. They’re unlikely to care about getting involved in the actual cure itself. That’s not their business and they have no way of evaluating your claims. They may say “Come back once the cure is developed and we’ll talk.” I’m sure they get lots of wacked out claims that they are in no position to vet.

60

This is nuts. You might as well assume I’m a flying donkey sending these posts by telepathic waves, than assume I’m inquiring how to submit blatantly illegal projects to Hollywood for international release. I can’t even believe I’m even dignifying this with a response. I’m talking about obtaining the rights to the various components. What in the name of God would make you assume otherwise?