Tag Archives: script options

Made it through about 8 pages of a script I was sent a couple of days ago. I had to stop reading. It wasn’t the story, I don’t think. I have no idea because I couldn’t wade through the misspellings and atrocious grammar to get to it.

Maybe some of them were typos. There’s not a writer alive that can find every single typo in a script. But most of them were sheer laziness and probably based on the attitude of “If they buy it, they’ll fix it. It’s the story that counts.” I’ve actually heard more than one writer say this or something similar to me in the past.

They are wrong. Spelling and grammar matter in a script. It reflects on how serious you are taken as a writer. Making the read as smooth and mistake free as you can is essential to getting your story told. Every misspelling or massive grammatical error takes the reader out of your story and focuses them on how poor the writer is for leaving them there.

Your writing reflects you. And getting anyone, besides your family and close friends, to read your script is an accomplishment. What you want is for them to want to read more, to love what you do and your style, to get them on board with you as a writer. Bad grammar and spelling does the opposite.

Yes, scriptwriting is different. We can all acknowledge that. You can write in fragmented sentences. You can break any and all grammar rules in dialogue if you have to. You can even break some spelling rules in dialogue to get a character’s syntax across. That works. But systemic spelling problems on every page will get your script tossed, in my opinion. Ur is not a substitute for Your. Twitter speak in your action lines is not the best way to get your story across.

Every program has spellcheck, so I’m kind of amazed that the spelling errors are still so prevalent. But they are and mostly all in bad scripts.

The excellent scripts I’ve read in the past and three for sure in the past couple of months were, not surprisingly, about 99% mistake free. (Thumbs up to Mike Maples, Emily Blake, & Eliza Lee)

I’m not reading the rest of that script I got 8 pages into. I’m calling the writer and telling her why, too. If she fixes it, I will happily give it another try.

Ok. Spelling and grammar rant over. Now... let’s talk about budget.

This is one subject that really gets some people in a lather. Should you pay attention to the budget of the script you’re writing? Or... should you just write the story you want to write and to hell with how much it will cost to make?

There are compelling arguments on both sides, but I come down on the side of paying attention to it, with a BIG unless...

If you are writing your big budget script as a writing sample, using it to try to get a big budget writing job somewhere down the line, I get it. That makes sense. I have a couple of those.

To expect to sell big budget scripts is a whole different matter. The truth is that there are very few producers or production companies that can make big budget scripts anymore that are pure specs. Maybe 5 or 6, tops. Maybe. And even those will make a script based on a sequel or a well known novel or a comic book or a cancelled TV show or a video game or an iconic cartoon or an amusement park ride or a board game before they’ll make a big budget spec. Hell… they’ll remake a previously failed film before they’ll make a big budget spec.

Now, before you fill my inbox with all the exceptions, I am aware of them and also know I can count those on my fingers in the last 5 years. You don’t even have to be paying much attention at all to see this trend. And add in unproduced writer to your resume and the odds go down a lot further.

But, as a writer trying to break in, if you write your scripts, or most of your scripts, with a budget of a million dollars or so, some maybe even less, there are tons of producers and production companies that want to read what you have and they can actually buy them and make them.

I am convinced that as a new writer trying to get noticed and optioned, right now, at this time in the industry, writing a great low budget film is the way. That may change, although I doubt it, with all the studios making safe tentpole Spiderman 14’s rather than something they have to take a chance on.

A great big budget script can help you if it’s for a writing sample, so you have to weigh it. But getting a big budget script read is also harder to do, in my opinion.

Write what moves you, but think about writing something lower budget that moves you, too. There are a lot more people out there who can read and option those.

 

It’s been more than a couple of weeks since I’ve last blogged. Not that there weren’t things to write about, but it’s been deadline-mania around here lately. The last one went in Monday and I find myself truly unemployed for the first time since January. During that time it’s been a cornucopia of rewrite work for Production Companies, Producers, Development Execs, and Directors. Work on five different films, four of which are my original spec scripts (one written with the wonderful Jeff Willis). Two of them for cable networks and two that are theatrical.

The other was a hired page one rewrite job on someone else’s script for a production company which I may or may not get screen credit for. (However, the checks cleared). And it looks like maybe three of them are heading for production this year, one starting July 30, for sure. The other two of the five put off until 2015. Or not made at all. That’s what’s so hard about this business.

And as I look forward to a little time off, I also worry about where the next job will come from and when it will come. That’s the lot of anyone who works as an independent contractor, like most film writers do. I may not work again this year. I hope so, but there’s nothing on the horizon right now. So I’ll be writing more specs, reworking my pilot, and rewriting older specs in the meantime. Use it or lose it.

As I have said before, all of my produced/credited films have been for Cable Networks, mostly for the Hallmark Channel, which has been interesting because my natural proclivity is toward darker material. All of my optioned feature specs… hell… my entire two foot tall stack of specs are all kind of dark and/or twisted, including the comedies. So having to NOT write like that for Production Companies and Networks with a narrow brand has been good for me, expanding my abilities to keep my own voice yet walk those lines drawn that you cannot color over.

Where is this going? To talk about what happens to YOUR original when you option it to a Production Company or Network who wants it to fit their brand. Which is all of them.

Jeff Willis, who is a VP at a very well known and large Production Entity, is also my sometimes writing partner. We met on an Internet Board years ago and a real life friendship came out of it. And out of that, and I can’t remember which of us said it, came, “Hey. Let’s write a script together.”

We proceeded to write three over a couple of years. A dark funny anti-romantic comedy, “The Right Girl” where the two people don’t get together at the end. A Monster Movie, “The Ogre”, with a great original premise, that’s sly, violent, very funny, and gruesome. And a big grand Action/Adventure Spy Movie, “Family Bonds”, with a killer premise. Two of them are still available, by the way. The anti-romantic comedy is going into production July 30. Only… it’s no longer an anti-romantic comedy. The two people do get together and love wins. How did that happen? Not by accident.

A production company optioned The Right Girl about a year and a half ago. In that time Jeff and I have done six (6) paid full rewrites of the script for them, taking it from the snarky anti-romantic comedy it was to the still kind of snarky in places fun true romantic comedy it has become. More than a few different people from the company and the network have given us notes over the last 18 months at different times. Our main Protagonist, a woman who travels from narcissist to empowered woman (with or without a man) has basically stayed put. (She was the reason they bought it to begin with and I’m glad they kept her journey reasonably the same). She’s a lot less profane and all of the overly sharp edges have been ground down, but her personal journey to redemption still isn’t powered by her growing love for a man. The real love happens between them because she’s changed on her own.

But beyond that… if you read our original optioned draft and the production draft I sent in yesterday, you’d barely recognize it as the same script. Our major original premise point is gone, replaced by a different one they wanted instead. Our antagonist doesn’t even exist anymore. Characters and their arcs we loved are gone. Gone. Replaced by other new and different characters that fit the new paradigm. Characters retained have different agendas and needs. Some have changed sex. Some have changed age.

Don’t get me wrong. Jeff and I were given fairly free reign to make these new characters and their story arcs our own, as long as we stayed inside the lines. We skirted the edge and got away a lot of it, but we always stuck to the spirit of their notes, which is what you do when you want to keep doing this.

And we did a good enough job that they didn’t bring in any other writers to rewrite us. We wrote every version from the original to the production script. The Production Exec told us that’s never happened with them before. They always bring on other writers. So we’re feeling pretty damn good about that.

But if we had been so married to our original that we couldn’t or wouldn’t have made the huge wholesale changes that have been made to it to get it where they’re actually spending millions to makes it, we would have been replaced faster than you can imagine. And the new writer or writers may have gotten writing credit for the film with us.

Your original script, no matter how much you love it, cherish it, and do not want to see it changed, is only a suggested starting point if you want to see it get made. Unless YOU put the money up yourself, it is going to get changed and probably changed as much as ours was. As a screenwriter you have to learn to live with that or have a very very short career.

Do we like the new version? The one THAT’S GOING TO GET MADE and play on Cable for years and years to come? Yes. We do. It’s not the film we originally wrote, but it’s a damn good script. The notes we got work for what the Network and Production Company need. Did we get notes we thought were wonky at times? You bet. But we fought for what we wanted, still understanding our limitations, and most of the time prevailed. It’s going to be a cute funny film and better than a whole lot in the same category, I think. The Production Company thinks so, too. They’ve told us as much.

They are building the sets on soundstages right now. Offers are out to stars. Casting is in full swing. A director I like a lot and have worked with before has been hired. And we’re been invited to set anytime we want to go. We’ll be taking them up on it.

 

One of the most frustrating things about screenwriting is the time it takes for anything to happen. Anything. It takes time to figure out what to write. It takes time to research it. It takes time to write it, always longer than you think. Then come your rewrites. Time. More time.

Now you want someone to read it. It takes time to build a network of writers and trusted people in the industry to vet your work before you try to get it out to be optioned or sold. And then it takes time for them to read it and get back to you because they’re busy, too. This is if you want to do it right.

This doesn’t take in the time you need to write a bunch of scripts to get good enough to be able to maybe sell one. That’s a long time, too.

Now… You can write a script in two days and be done, have no one but your friends and family read it and then try to send it out. The chances it will not be complete crap are infinitesimally low, but you still have to sell it. And that’s where time really slows down.

And here we get to the most frustrating thing about dealing with new writers. Most expect instant gratification. They have no idea about the reality of film and TV production or they think their script is so good, that even knowing how long might take, they will be the exception to the rule. Nope. Not going to happen. Not. Going. To. Happen. Either way, their thought is: I will write this script. It will sell. I will be on the red carpet at the premiere in six months. Ok, three months.

Sounds like an exaggeration, right? Yeah. Ok. It’s a pretty harsh assessment. But it's what I hear. All the time. It's the expectation. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard writers complain they haven’t heard anything from a reader and it’s been a WHOLE WEEK. Or the manager who requested it hasn't gotten back to them in a month. Or why can’t they get anyone to read their script right now? Why do I have to wait? Why is it so unfair that you can’t send an unsolicited script to anyone you want and have them read it the next day? Ok… I’m exaggerating again… but not by much.

The system is set up the way it is so that producers, production companies, agents, and managers are not so overwhelmed with product that they can’t read anything. There are hundreds of thousands of scripts out there looking for a home. And every writer of each of these believes they have the next hit film. That includes me. You should believe in your work. It’s essential to success. But the industry doesn’t believe you. Thus all the checks and balances and brick walls put up by the people in the film and TV business. It’s self protection from the avalanche of scripts that would engulf them.

And… getting through those checks and balances and brick walls takes time. A lot of time.

Want to know how long? It’s not weeks or months. It’s years. Mostly years and years. Yeah. That much time.

As a new writer who’s trying to get read by a manager or agent, if you're lucky enough to get a request based on your query, you need to know it could take weeks or months to get to the top of their pile. If you get read sooner, it’s a bonus. Once you have a manager or agent and they send your work out, it can still take weeks or months to get read. And longer after all the passes, because you have to do it all over again. I heard hundreds of no’s. Still do. You have to be patient. It hurts, but you have to.

Yes, there are fabulous sites like the Blacklist that may speed up the process, but nothing is guaranteed and it's a tough process to get through them, too. Still, I wish they'd been around when I started, but hey… c’est la vie.

But now, you hear yes. And you’ve optioned a script. Congrats.

Once you option something, even if it’s shortcutting time on the Blacklist?  Time? TIme slows to a crawl. You have no idea.

Someone has finally said, “YES”. Well, it’s not a real yes. It’s a qualified yes. They have notes and you need to rewrite your script to satisfy those. Whoops. Nice try. We need a second rewrite. More notes. Now another year has passed, good thing you gave them a renewal for another year. We might get Denzel, you need to rewrite it for him. More notes. Another three months. We didn’t get Denzel. But we have more notes. Another six months.

We have a director. He has notes and is going to do the rewrite himself. You sit and hear nothing for another six months. You email and call and they tell you to be patient. If you email and call too much, they’ll shut you out completely so you have to be careful. Then they hire another writer to rewrite it. And then they renew for the last yearly option. You’re in your third year. They tell you that they’re close to having financing. And another year passes and they say, “Sorry, we tried”. You get the rights back. To your original script. They still own all the changes you made based on their notes. You can sell the original again. And process starts once more.

This is the norm. A small percentage of scripts optioned actually get made. I optioned multiple scripts multiple times to Studios and BIG and small production companies for eighteen years and never got one film made. Made some good money, but never had an original script of mine made.

That changes this year, but that’s another blog. And yes, I have a bunch of credited films to my name. By the end of this year, I’ll have eight. Most of them are films where I rewrote the original writers so drastically that I got credited as a writer with them.

Getting a green light on a film is an amazing experience. You don’t believe it when it happens, even if it’s a script you rewrote. Seeing your storyline and characters and dialogue on screen is surreal. Why is it surreal? Lots of reasons, not the least of which is all the time it took.

There is NO instant gratification. There are no overnight successes. Everyone spent time becoming an overnight success. More time than you think.

Notes.

For the people who aren’t writers and read this, NOTES are the sometimes mandatory changes to a script you get from producers, directors, development execs, the guy who waters the plants at the production office, other writers, your friends, your ex-friends, actors, and anyone else you can think of that might have some fleeting interest in the film and TV business. Notes you can get at every stage of production. Notes you can get up to and including the day they get shot.

They can be as small as a change of a word in a sentence to changing the entire story. And all you can think of in between.

Yep. THOSE notes.

I’ve been on both sides of them. Getting them on my scripts and giving them on scripts I didn’t write, but would like to rewrite and get paid for. The giving part usually happens when a production company contacts me and wants me to read a script they’ve bought or optioned and then wants me to give them my opinion on it. This also happens, most of the time, after the original writer has been given a chance to do it but can’t or won’t change it the way they want.

For some writers this is a hard thing to do. Change their baby. Take something they slaved over to create and then have to throw out or change huge portions of it to fit what the people PAYING for it want. These writers think that their work is sacrosanct. And when I was first starting out I felt the same way. It’s perfect the way it is and shouldn’t be TOUCHED. I learned fast you can't think like that.

The only way it will stay the way you wrote it is if you put up the money to produce it yourself or lock it in a drawer and never have it see the light of day. Every script gets changed. Every one of them. And they all get changed in significant ways.

Which brings me back to notes.

When I get a script to rewrite, I get notes from the development execs and the producers to start. They’re usually very general and sweeping, otherwise they wouldn’t be hiring me. I do, mostly, what are called “page one rewrites” where I usually take the original author’s script and change it so much it's unrecognizable to them.

I don’t do this lightly and I always feel badly for the original author, but… they again, most of the time, have had their chance to do this and wouldn’t or couldn’t. Plus they’re still going to get a screen credit and paid. Often more than me.

So how do I do this?

I take their general notes, combined with the notes I gave on the script which the producers liked, and I write a draft. Then I write another one based on more notes after they read the first draft. Then another draft with more notes. And then if they don’t give it to another writer to rewrite again, I do a polish. Or rewrite it again.

Then the director might do his own draft or give me more notes to change it again to fit his vision. Then maybe another polish. Then a production draft… then… you get the drift. Any remote resemblance to the original script is a miracle.

This happens with almost every single script. Even most writer/director ones. Don’t worry about the exceptions because you know already if you’re one of them and you aren’t reading my blog.

I’ve been on the other side, too. I’ve had to rewrite my original scripts. Some more than others. A couple of times making them unrecognizable to me and I did the rewrite. Did these notes make my scripts better? In most cases I have to be honest and say they did. The notes made a few of them MUCH better. In one case, they made the script so much better I’m grateful to have worked with this director to get it to this point. And we’re on something like draft 31, I think.

And then there are the notes that make you wonder why the hell they even bought your script in the first place.

Yep. You can get notes that may turn your script into an award winner. And notes that may make you throw up in your mouth.

Again, a fact. If you option or sell a script YOU WILL GET NOTES. How you respond to them will have a great deal of influence on your career and maybe if you’ll even have one at all.

So you need to mentally set yourself before you get notes. KNOW they are not going to be what you want to hear. You have to be open minded and not instantly reactive. Give yourself time to think about them. I know when I do that, after some serious thought, I can often see how to use them to make the script better. Even when I hated them on first take.

And then if you truly hate some of them, fight for them not to be used. But don’t do it emotionally. If you do that, you lose.

One way to do this is to know your script and story and characters so well that you can intelligently and CALMLY explain why some notes will not work if they want to keep the story you wrote. How one change they want can have a ripple effect on the whole script, changing things they may not want changed. Or that the characters just wouldn’t do that and how it would affect the story. But you really do have to know your script inside and out so you can rationally explain why. This does work because I do it all the time and, more often than not, win those arguments.

BUT… if they want the changes, it’s up to you to implement them to the best of your ability, even if it hurts. And it does sometimes. You, as the writer, are one cog in a huge machine that is film and TV. You cooperate to your best ability and do the best job you can making the script the way they’ve asked for it to be and they will expand the way they use you. They will learn to trust you and might ask you for your opinion on things that may not even have to do with the script. It’s happened to me. It’s happening to me now on the script I have shooting in May.

As a screenwriter, the sooner you realize that script notes are an integral part of your job, whether pointed at you or coming from you, and realize it’s up to YOU to be cooperative and innovative in seeing those notes through, the sooner you are going to be recognized as a pro.

Most people this time of year make New Year’s Resolutions. Me? I do my best not to because I know myself and I know I’ll never keep any of them. I never have.

I do have some goals for 2014 though. One of them is to make it as good as 2013, professionally.

Personally, 2013 mostly sucked gas, especially for my fabulous wife, lots of loss and health concerns. I won’t bore you with the details, but I am hopeful 2014 is better for us that way and especially for her.

For my writing career, it was nothing short of miraculous.  One sold script (with a writing partner), four production rewrite jobs, one cable TV series episode job, two produced films. I got to visit the set of one of those films for a day and see them film something I wrote. I never got to visit the sets of my first two produced films in 2012, even though I was invited. This year I got to. The producer was mega gracious and immediately asked a PA to get me a director’s chair and set it up next to his so I could see the monitors. The director pulled me onto the set and explained how he was setting the shots up. The crew was friendly and engaging. The actors thanked me for writing such a good script. (Whether they meant it or not is inconsequential) It was like hundreds of daydreams coming true. I pinched myself a lot that day.

My dark comic thriller sped its way to a 2014 start date with some amazing attachments. I got a nice acting job in a very funny film and enjoyed it a lot. It’s been three years since I did a film only as an actor and it was FUN.  I directed my first short film. It was a ton of work and a ton of fun and the jury's still out, in editing now.  I think it'll be funny. And this month, to put a big bow on the year and thanks to the Black List, I optioned a big commercial comedy to a very successful production company. And everybody paid me on time. A good year.

Uh oh. Did I dream it? I just looked at what I wrote and it seems too good to be true.

Well, I also got yelled at by my manager a few times. I didn’t write one original script the whole year. He also told me to either update my website (which I hadn’t done in three years) or dump it. I updated it and added the blog. I also lost out on some writing gigs and got some disappointing passes along the way, too. And I got rousted by US Marshalls at gun point while traveling on an AmTrak train, something I’d rather not have happen again. Hmmm, the list of not so good things is filling my head now, so I’ll stop ruminating about 2013.

GOALS FOR 2014:

Lose 40 pounds. Big one. Have to. For my health. For my family. For me. Not a resolution. A goal. This one is gonna be the hardest. Why I bought a treadmill and put it next to my desk in my office. It will NOT collect dust.

Write three new originals, at least one with my sometime writing partner Jeff Willis. (I’ll do a whole blog one day on how ultra cool this guy is and how much he deserves all the accolades he’s been getting lately.)

Have at least two films shot. (The aforementioned Dark Comic Thriller and a romantic comedy I wrote with Jeff that we sold last year)

Option a couple more scripts.

Get a couple of good rewrite jobs. Maybe get to adapt a book.

Maybe write a book. Maybe.

Get an agent. Yeah. I know. I still don’t have one. I have a wonderful manager though.

Couple of acting jobs would be nice.

Realize I’m asking for too much.

And the one that will happen for sure, keep trying to give back.

When I first started to try and do this writing thing a whole bunch of people in this business helped me out beyond what I could have ever expected. They encouraged me to keep at it. They championed my work. They got me through doors I could have never dreamed of getting to, let alone through. The help I received was staggering.

I promised myself I would do the same thing if I was ever in a position to do so. I’m not completely in that position yet. I’m still on the fringes of this business, but I do love to encourage writers and believe that there is room for anyone to succeed.

So… to my family, all my friends, colleagues, business partners, writers I know, writers I don’t know, I wish you all a beautiful 2014 filled with your dreams coming true and big pots of gold at the end of every rainbow. But mostly I wish you personal satisfaction, because that… is what pays the most.