Wednesday, April 06, 2005

To,
Alex Epstein,

Sir,

how are you? been long time. I want to tell you I have now written 10 screenplays. I sent four for coverage reports. I scored excellent in premise in all of them. they told me if I can get my dialogue to American accent then I have a market for my work in hollywood. I have found an editor willing to do that for me but am doing the rewrite to remove a few plotholes etc, etc.

here is what I want to know, DO YOU REALLY SEE ANY MONEY if you sell spec screenplays? (after all the cuts of agents, lawyers). a lot of poeple claim otherwise. I intend to sell screenplays so that I can raise money so that I can go and direct a low-budget of mine. I will keep the premise to excellent in my directorial venture also. the another question is, will I be able to sell my directed movie by luring distributors on the basis of premise and also have a few elements (sex, violence tec).

best regards...

Um, yeah. Agents get 10%. Lawyers get 5% if they go on a percentage basis. You get to keep the rest. That could be quite a big chunk of dough, though "half a million against a million" deals are still rare enough to make the news. However writing spec scripts is not a good way to raise money. You could go your whole life and never sell a spec. You could sell your first spec, though what Hollywood calls a "first" spec is rarely anything like a first spec.

Many people have no sense at all of how their writing comes across to other people. I have felt equally good about my latest scripts for the past twenty years. Fortunately, how other people have felt about them has gotten much more positive. It's like, the way your voice sounds to yourself, inside your own head, is much more rich and resonant than the way your voice sounds to other people. And your own children are far more charming than other people's children.

You don't write for the money. You write because you have to write. The money comes or it doesn't.

As for selling your movie, well, once it's a movie no one's buying it for the premise, they're buying it for the movie. But sex and violence always sells if done well. See Bill Cunningham's excellent post on how to make a great direct to DVD movie.

8:00 AM

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