No, my headline isn’t referring to the election. I don’t want to talk about that.
I haven’t written about screenwriting for a while because most of my audience is here for film music—and also, I haven’t really wanted to share anything.
In recent months I’ve been getting deeper into trying to get film and TV projects off the ground...and yes, per my headline today, it’s dumber than you think.
I have to be careful that any of my current contacts and project stakeholders might see this and think I’m talking about them. I’m not!
What I mean is that the process by which things get made are probably 95% relationships, 5% material. And I don’t know if that’s the ratio that people think it is—especially in the Facebook, Reddit and Twitter discussions about screenwriting.
To be sure, material matters. You can’t just take a random amateur script and say, “Let’s make this” because it’s probably terrible, and at least one person has to love it.
Unless, that is, there’s already money behind it—people will take the money no matter how what the script is. They’ll just plan on fixing the script so that all the stakeholders are eventually happy with it.
What really matters is that there are a bunch of people who bring certain ingredients to trigger financing and get everybody paid. Movie stars. Repping movie stars. Famous I.P. Celebrities. Financiers. Distributors. It’s all about connecting these elements.
And among those people, it’s kind of shocking how few have any real sense of taste or ability to identify good material or talent. Certainly they don’t know how to develop material or improve a script.
But they do know each other. They know what their relationships will like, and how to push things along to unlock the paydays.
Breaking into this system basically means somebody who is already on the inside who will vouch for you and lean on others to help you as a favor.
For that to happen, you have to have a solid piece of material that makes sense for everybody to get paid.
And somebody has to like you, find you charming, endearing, funny, or whatever.
Amateur writers are convinced that what they lack is access, when what they really lack is actionable material.
And those heinous screenwriting services prey on that for their $60 contests, $120 evaluations and $250 “access meetings.”
Anyway, don’t despair. Just remember Taylor in Planet of the Apes:
Enjoy your weekend!