Building a Screenwriting Career

Building a Screenwriting Career

Texas Greatest Writers

Literature’s Greatest Writers

“The writers who make it big are never daunted by the odds.” William Froug, Screenwriting Tricks of the Trade

There are many ways to “be” a screenwriter—including not “being” one at all!

For example, I am a playwright who also writes screenplays. I define myself this way largely to keep sane: the screenwriting business would drive me nuts if my major ego and financial energy were devoted to it.

Additionally, I grew up in Los Angeles, receiving my BA at UCLA, and no longer choose to live there. I realize that this is a serious professional disadvantage in screenwriting and therefore adjust my goals accordingly.

I am an artist (and artists have few homes in Hollywood) and a literary craftsman (and screenwrights get little respect down where movies are made). Rather than deal with these issues, I don’t put Hollywood in the center of my world.

Through most of my writing career, I was primarily a playwright, not a screenwright. This distinction lets me sleep well at night. Today I have returned my writing focus to fiction, where I began. I still sleep well at night. At the same time, however, I love the screenplay form so much and love movies so much that I am always working on a new screenplay.

Do you want to be a screenwriter? Make sure you understand what you are getting into. Richard Price puts it this way in American Screenwriters:

“Understand the nature of the screenwriter, that he serves people. You’re a service craft. If you want to feel good about yourself, consider yourself a craftsman. The most important thing in getting a job is not how well you write—because if they don’t know you, they won’t ask for you. For them to want you, you have to go in there with a great story.”

As we’ve seen before, “the idea is king” and success begins with a great story concept.

 

Alan Nafzger, Houston Texas writer

Alan Nafzger, San Angelo Texas writer

Alan Nafzger, Abilene Texas writer

Alan Nafzger, Corpus Christi Texas writer

Alan Nafzger, Corpus Christi Texas writer

Alan Nafzger, San Angelo Texas writer

 

• http://www.livesweden.se/members/macrgq27978388/
• http://www.livesweden.se/members/mabelfassbinde/
• https://sto54.ru/?option=com_k2&view=itemlist&task=user&id=5103056
• https://statesnews.in/vietnamwar-diaries-tip-number-28-from-978/

 

 

Other marketing strategies

Other marketing strategies

Let me mention two other ways to market your scripts. There now are services that will do email queries for you. They are reputable and result in some readings. One of this is Script Blaster. See

http://www.premisewars.com

for details.

There also are sites where you can post loglines, synopses and entire scripts, and producers regularly visit these sites looking for material. Probably the most successful of these is Ink Tip.

See http://www.inktip.com. They advertise 3 options and 1 representation a week from these scripts. Over two dozen movies have been produced from scripts found here.

http://www.moviebytes.com has a useful database (small subscription fee) that allows you to see which producers are buying what and which agents are handling what. You can search this database by genre.

There are fees for these services, of course, but they may be worth it to you to let someone else do the grunt work of marketing. There also are services like this that are new and relatively untested. I can vouch that Script Blaster and Ink Tip are reputable, and each has a documented track record of helping screenwriters. For others, research them before using them.

Texas Greatest Writers

Literature’s Greatest Writers

A MARKETING STRATEGY for screenwriters who don’t live in L.A.

A MARKETING STRATEGY for screenwriters who don’t live in L.A.

Greatest Texas Writers

Greatest Literature Writers

Screenwriters who don’t live in L.A. and who don’t have an agent still can market their screenplays to reputable producers. Over 90% of my students and former students who use the strategy outlined here get one or more requests for their scripts. This works.

In the strategy outlined here, queries are done by email. It’s a numbers game: the more queries you send, the better the results. You need to send at least 100 email queries to take advantage of this strategy.

Script registration

Before sending out your script, you must register it with the WGA (Writer’s Guild of America), which protects your authorship. You can do this online at http://www.wga.org or follow instructions in my book.

The query letter

This is your basic marketing tool. The email query is even more compressed than a standard query. You need to tighten your email so it can be read entirely on one computer screen without scrolling. Work hard on this.

A three-paragraph query is a good model:

Paragraph one, a strong hook in a sentence or two (“Can the first female NFL quarterback survive in such a macho world?”).

Paragraph two, a tight pitch (“When the owner of the Stallions sees Mary, a cheerleader, throw a football for fifty yards, he concocts a halftime girls game. The crowd loves her and calls for her when the regular quarterback and his backup are injured. Mary suits up to play – and the rest is almost history. MS QB is a comedy about a woman who learns to navigate a man’s world with surprising results.”)

Paragraph three, your credentials (“I studied screenwriting at Portland State University and am a published journalist. May I send you the script?”) (The example is from a former student’s script, which got many readings.)

Research

You next job is to find appropriate producers to query. Make as list of as many movies as you can that fill in the following sentence: “The producers who made [movie title] would do a good job with my story.” Consider similar genres, visual styles, or any other reason you can think of. List as many movies as you can.

Next go to the Internet Movie Database at http://www.imdb.com. Look up each title. In the left panel, you’ll find a link for production credits. Go there and list the production companies (not the studios) associated with the movie. There usually are two or more per movie.

The next step is to find email addresses for these prodcos. First, check the Tinseltown Independent Movie Production Company list at http://everyonewhosanyone.com/tt/tipc1.html (it’s free!). Make a list of the appropriate email addresses.

If you have a lot of missing addresses from the step above, you can expand your list this way. This next step takes some time and needs to be done within seven days. Take out a one-month subscription to the Hollywood Creative Directory Online at http://www.hcdonline.com. This is the bible of the industry and a one-month subscription is inexpensive. So you need to do all your work within the month, and schedule accordingly.

Look up each production company from your list in the HCD online. If they have an email, copy it into a new list of email addresses. If not, you can write down the land address if you want to do a letter backup. This is not necessary since you are going to find lots of producers to query by email. Go through your list and generate an email list. Call this List A. Send your email query to each production company on the list. In the subject line of your email, write QUERY.

Now generate List B this way: there is a link in HCD that generates all producers with an email address. There are over 600 of them. Open it. (Note: apparently this link has been discontinued, which means you need to browse prodcos manually for their email addresses.) Now go through each one (this is what takes time) and try to decide if they are someone to query. Look first to see if they make feature films (i.e. are not TV). Next look at their credits (movie titles) and try to determine if they are genre specific (some will be obvious makers of horror, adult entertainment, etc., from their titles). If you can’t find a reason to eliminate them, put them on your email List B. You also can add addresses to the B list by browsing the Tinseltown site above.

Test your query

Pick 10 or 20 addresses from the B list and email your query, with QUERY in the subject line. If you get at least one request for a script, the query works. If not, send out 10 more. If still nothing, revise your query. Punch it up, make it more eye-catching and irresistible. Repeat the process until you have a letter than gets results, at least 1 out of 20, preferably better.

Now send your email query to each address on the A and B lists, with QUERY in the subject line.

Results

You should about a five-to-ten percent request rate – for every ten or twenty emails, one request for your script.

When you get a request for a script, you usually will be asked to sign a Release Form provided by the producer. Sign it. They look scary but this is standard procedure. Send your script and release form to the address provided (to cover yourself, when you generate your email lists, also copy the name and addresses of the prodcos so you won’t have to go back and find them).

Keep track of the companies asking for your script. These are the first folks to query with your next one. In fact, keep records of all your queries (for most you will receive … silence).

Then you wait. More importantly, you begin a new script. Never put all your hopes in one script. Market one, then go on and write another. My former students who are successful are the ones with the most endurance, not necessarily the ones with the most talent.

This is a marketing strategy that works. You should get readings. That’s all a marketing strategy is designed to do – to give you opportunity. To make a sale, you also need considerable luck, which is being before the right producer with the right script at the right time. But it all begins with getting a reading.

 

http://rocknrollover007.tumblr.com/137049395485

 

http://rocknrollover007.tumblr.com/137054766170

 

http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/s/2390JS

 

http://russianwriter00.livejournal.com/107752.html

 

https://delicious.com/magical007

 

http://russianwriter00.livejournal.com/108007.html

 

https://delicious.com/magical007

 

http://rocknrollover007.tumblr.com/137064212770

 

http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/s/1klEZ8

Keeping the Faith

Keeping the Faith

It can be a long and thankless process, this screenwriting business. Perhaps no one has expressed the life of a screenwriter with more wit than Susan Cummins:

“You send the script to the agents & the agents ignore you. For years.

“You send the script to the producers & they ignore you. For years.

“ You write 4 more scripts. The agents still ignore you.

Greatest Texas Writers

Greatest Literature Writers

“The producers start noticing you. If you sent them a small character-driven story, they will tell you that they love the writing, but they’re only looking for special effects event pictures. If you sent them a special effects event picture, they will tell you that 4 stories like yours just went into production last week.

“Other popular responses include … “The second act drags,” “Your main character isn’t likeable,” and the ever popular “I don’t feel passionate enough about your script.”

“ So, here’s what you do:

“1) Write another script. 2) Query every agent & every producer.

“Repeat 1 & 2 as needed. Into infinity. Until you go insane.”

Any working screenwriter will quickly see the truth here, even in a wee bit of exaggeration.

Talent, unfortunately, often is not enough. Craft, unfortunately, often is not enough. You need something else:

ENDURANCE.

William Faulkner had it right at the end of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: we need to endure. In life. And in the screenwriting business.

I find the best way to endure is to keep busy, putting one foot after the other, daily, steadily—and enjoying my work every step of the way.

Later thoughts (2011)

Today I market passively. The Internet now offers legitimate ways to seek producers. The best of these new sites is Ink Tip at http://inktip.com. There, for a reasonable fee, you can post a logline, synopsis and script and hope producers fine you (hence passive) — and the track record of this site is just short of phenomenal.

Also today, with the progression of digital technology, it’s inexpensive to pitch your script with a trailer on YouTube or elsewhere. More creative ways of marketing are appearing all the time.

I’ve also developed an email marketing strategy for writers who don’t live in L.A. Here is the handout I pass out to my students.