Roy Gould
Thursday 9th September 2010 12:29pm
Norwich
80 posts
Quote: ContainsNuts @ September 9 2010, 11:09 AM BST
It is both what you know and who you know that will get you the best chance of getting commissioned. That's what I have learnt in the last year.
The competition is fierce out there, not in terms of quality submissions (quite the opposite) but in terms of the sheer number of scripts that are being sent out at the moment. Producers and the like are struggling to get enough time to read it all. Especially as they know a lot of it will be crap. They are actually human. So lots of them refuse to read unsolicited scripts for this reason.
So how do you become unsolicited? It really is piss-easy. You can sometimes just simply phone up the prod co or even email them. Some of them are on twitter - have a bit of banter with them first and then try. These are less effective methods though.
If you are serious about your writing career you really have to be pro-active. That's actually what they want. Anyone can email them a 45 page bag of shite. But they want committed and confident writers to find them. That's why they go to events, festivals, road shows or the such like. So you can meet them, so you can KNOW them, so you can be unsolicited.
If you are serious about writing then you should know about these events from various blogs, twitterings, websites that you should be subscribed to.
I went to the Cheltenham Screenwriters Festival last year knowing no one in the industry at all. Just some radio credits that had lead to a dead end. I walked away from that festival with three producers (one from Big Talk) and two agents that were interested in my projects and I know can contact directly. I'm working on a feature with one of them.
That was a priceless experience. There are cheaper, even free, events you can go to too. This years festival's a lot cheaper (see my signature). I'm involved with some website stuff only through contacts made last year. And now I've made even more.
Of course you can do nothing but send scripts out. But you risk it taking a lot longer and also for it get dated or already done as a result. Sorry for the essay!
Sound advice.
If you want to be a writer then you have to keep plugging away. As the above says, there are loads of scripts waiting to be read.
A little anicdote: When I was Comedy Consultant for Yorkshire TV (Posh name for comedy script reader...) I had 2 or 3 scripts landing on my mat nearly every morning for 2 years -about 500 scripts acually and in that 500, only 2 were seriously worth considering to put forward to the network (That's not to say that 498 were bad - some were very good but were not what the Network were looking for, rightly or wrongly - very strong comedy writers from the past were not best pleased to be rejected).
Execs want shows that they think will work - I've said it before in a forum, these people can't read scripts!! They will go with clones of what have worked before - that status quo will continue until somebody fresh breaks through - God alone knows how that happens -as Geoffrey Rush says in "Shakespeare in Love" 'It's a mystery'. At the end of the day, you have to tap into the zeitgeist and write what they want. If you don't want to do that, then that's ok, keep writing what you want to write and hope that the zeitgeist comes round to your way of thinking one day - it might. The bummer is, of course, that somebody else might be working on a similar idea to you and as they have a track record (or is called Ricky Gervais) and be first to get to the Controller of Comedy - that's showbiz.
Good luck
