Selling Pilots?

Is there such a career in writing sitcom pilots and selling them on? Sure I'd love to take "my baby" and develop it in production myself, but I also need to earn a living and I thought pumping out a production line of sitcoms will A) Earn me some dosh B) Make a name for myself if any hit big.

Once I'm somewhat comfortably "well off", I'll make a at crack on my own and go all the way with it.

Of course all of that is in dream land, but still, back to my original question...

"Is there such a career in writing sitcom pilots and selling them on?"

There must be, i've seen lots of programes based on an idea by someone, but they don't go on to write it.

Yeah Jeffrey Leiber the guy who originally came up with the premise for Lost but then got dropped from the project when it was handed over to J.J Abrams and turned into a more mystery based show, he still gets paid shit loads, as his name appears as 'series creator' on every episode even though he has nothing to do with the show how it is now.

It'd be a great way to make a living, but I suspect you can only really succeed at originating ideas if you're already a player in the industry. It's a chicken and egg situation.

Like Martin said, if you can come up with a good idea and it has alot of potential, there's an industry for selling on scripts for more experienced writers to improve on.

Shakespeare In Love was taken on by another writer before it was made. And they both ended up making shed loads of money, but I think it's more popular in america.

(Yes I watched something on BBC1 about it)

How much did Will make out of it?

*bump*

Any more thoughts?

I don't know if that's a specific career choice. I suspect that if your ideas are good enough to sell then you'd be expected to carry on writing the series.

If you sold an idea, which would have to be with a pilot script attached, probably produced with the aid of notes from an interested producer and/or broadcaster, but subsequently failed to come up to scratch with further episodes, there would be a clause in the contract enabling the prod co to drop you in favour of someone else.

Depending on what you'd negotiated you may end up with a 'created by' credit and a portion of the writers fee, even if you didn't contribute to writiing any further episodes.

I had a pilot script comissioned and there was an allowance of, I think, 12% of the writers fee for me as creator, if they got someone else to write it. This is 12% of the episode fees, repeat fees etc so I'd have been happy with that!

Chipolata's spot on; writers with proven credentials often sell several scripts per year to production companies, most of which will never ammount to anything. Course, they still get their wonga.

Cool, cheers dudes!

Pssst - I got a 747 pilot going cheap. He can also do 777's. PM me if interested!

I had a Pilot with the BBC. A Pontious Pilot. They wiped their hands of it.

I've got one that wrote itself - automatic pilot.

I left my pilot light on....damn, that one doesn't work so well.

I promised the BBC two pilots for different sitcom ideas, but only sent one - I was a pilot light.