Thursday, August 22, 2013

Q. I would be interested in your thoughts on submitting to the WGA's Black List.

First of all, it's not the WGA's Blacklist. As the site says,

It began as a survey. In 2005, Franklin Leonard surveyed almost 100 film industry development executives about their favorite scripts from that year that had not been made as feature films. That first list - many of which have been made since - can be viewed here. Since then the voter pool has grown to about 500 film executives, 60% of whom typically respond.

Over 200 Black List screenplays have been made as feature films. Those films have earned over $16BN in worldwide box office, have been nominated for 148 Academy Awards, and have won 25, including Best Pictures SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE and THE KING'S SPEECH and five of the last ten screenwriting Oscars. A complete list of Black List films is below.

Now they seem to have added a moneymaking side to it, where you can submit scripts for money. 

In October 2012, we extended our mission further by allowing screenwriters from the world to, for a small fee, upload their scripts to our database, have them evaluated by professional script readers, and subject to that evaluation and our recommendation algorithm, sent to our - at present - over 1000 film industry professionals. You can begin the process of being discovered here.

This is not the same as the Blacklist. This seems to be a script reading and evaluating service, using the Blacklist brand. There's nothing wrong with using a script reading service, especially if you don't have friends in the biz who can give you honest feedback. But it probably won't get you on the Blacklist. You get on the Blacklist by having your agent send your superb script around, and having development execs love it and send it around to their development exec friends. You can't buy that service.

I would be careful of any script reading and evaluating service that says it can help you break in. I would use a service to get good feedback so you can make your script better. I think the way to break in is still to query agents. 

2:33 PM

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Back to Complications Ensue main blog page.