Unsolicited Screenplays and What to Do With Them

Q. Is there a resource that provides lists of agents who accept unsolicited screenplays? Maybe you can provide a little more detail or refer me to a site that explains exactly what you need to do to open a dialogue with an agent if you're totally off the street?

Sure. The WGA has an online list of agents. They used to mark which agencies were willing to read "unsolicited" scripts -- an inaccurate term for "scripts from people they don't know". They don't seem to any more.

But too much is made of the term "unsolicited." The more successful an agency the less likely they'll read a script from someone who hasn't been recommended to them. But almost every agency has a young hungry agent (or an old hungry one) who will read your script if your query letter has an awesome hook. (I talk about all this at length in my first book.) The top agencies won't do it -- your first agency won't be at CAA, ICM, William Morris or Endeavor. But everyone wants to discover someone brilliant. And most agents have the time to read a two line hook. That's why your query letters must be SHORT. They will likely do it while they're on the phone, which is why your hook really has to be sharp and sharply written.

A more useful resource than the WGA list is the Hollywood Representation Directory, published by the same guys who publish the Hollywood Creative Directory. This will give you individual agents' names and eddresses. It's about $45 bucks. You can also access their database online for about twenty five bucks for a trial period; which may be all you need.

The Obvious Question

[Canadiana] This in my mailbox from the WGC:

At the recent CRTC hearings into the future of Canadian television, private, conventional broadcasters like CTV and CanWest Global said the rise of Internet programming and other technologies have eroded their revenues and they are too poor to spend money on Canadian drama.

If broadcasting is such a losing proposition, why would CanWest want to buy Alliance Atlantis’ 13 specialty channels, let alone pay $2.3 billion for it?

"We keep on hearing the same story from the broadcasters – they are losing money due to market fragmentation and have no money for Canadian drama," says Maureen Parker, Executive Director of the Writers Guild of Canada. "Well, this CanWest/Alliance Atlantis deal blows that argument out of the water. It’s obvious that broadcasting continues to be a lucrative business."

Yep. Ditto.

Why I Don't Like Screenwriting Competitions

I recently got an email from someone wanting me to interview the founder of a screenwriting competition.

I don't like screenwriting competitions. The economics are akin to that of a lottery: many entries pay for a few prizes.

Moreover, I'm not at all clear that they select the most viable screenplays. The screenplays are being judged on some abstract "goodness" criterion. The winning script is probably well written, but that's not what gets a movie made. What gets a movie made is a producer's "Do I love this so much I'm willing to spend a couple years of my life trying to get this sucker made?" (Or a director, or a star.)

I feel there's only one real kind of screenplay competition, and that's the one every agent and producer runs. The prize is a produced picture. The application fee is nothing. Why pay $45 to submit to a competition when you can email a query letter for free?

There is a distinction between independent screenplay competitions and fellowship programs run by the studios. The fellowship programs, if you can get into them, are a real way into the movie biz. But then you're not winning a cash prize. You're winning a job, a mentor, and a raft of valuable connections. The goal is different, too. Screenplay competitions, I believe, are in business to make a profit for their owners. Fellowships are created by studios and networks in order to bring in fresh viewpoints -- usually minority ones. They're a way of giving back to the community.

There are also one or two screenpay contests that might be worthwhile if you have a slightly arcane script that's hard to pitch but brilliantly written. The Nicholl, for example. The Sundance Screenwriters Lab. But they're funded and run by major legit institutions. The Nicholl, for example, is run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Not by, say, Joey Nicholl.

I know real writers who've broken in via fellowships, and the winner of the Nicholl tends to get a great agent and a lot of buzz. But I've never met any who made it because of an independent screenplay competition. (I'm not saying that no one who's won a competition has ever made it. The pool of successful writers must overlap at least a little with the pool of successful competition winners, if only because of the sheer numbers involved.)

Save your money. Send query letters to agents. Get a movie made.

Eyes on the prize, baby.

Four Million Eyeballs

According to DMc, Little Mosque on the Prairie had 2 million viewers last night. This proves that with good publicity, and a hook, you can get Canadian viewers to watch a new Canadian show. Now it's up to the show to hold its superb numbers. Ins'Allah.

Are Serials the Wave of the Future?

This Times article tries to answer the question. Executive summary: a lot of the new serials are dying, but so what? Most shows do. "You can't say they're not working," says one exec, "because, really, they are the only thing that is working."

Bridget Carpenter, Part Three

Bridget Carpenter is a writer-producer on FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. Her episode of FNL (#108, "Crossing the Line") was named #19 on The Futon Critic's "50 Best Episodes of TV in 2006."

Crafty TV: How much do you find the characters are evolving from their original formulations? To what extent is that motivated by the evolving story, and to what extent is it inspired by the actors playing the roles, or the chemistry between certain actors?

Bridget Carpenter: We definitely pay attention to actor chemistry, though we're not driven by it. I suppose the most truthful way to talk about how characters evolve is to admit that a writer in the room will say something like "I'm bored with having ___ do that! I've seen that already! Can't he/she do___ for a change?" So we are looking to surprise ourselves, and to watch the characters change, and at the same time stay within the realm of believability. You know, Julie Taylor isn't going to decide instantly day that she loves football. But she might get more interested/tolerant as her relationship with Matt evolves...and she might also be surprisingly good at playing football herself if she gets a little attention from her dad...
(That's a tiny spoiler re: an upcoming episode.)

Crafty TV: It seems to me that you have a show about small town Texas folks who probably vote Republican that's having its greatest success among urban Democrats. (I'm going by the low numbers and the rave reviews.) Does this affect your writing at all?

Bridget Carpenter: No. We have been given an amazing amount of support from both the studio and network. They have said from the beginning, and continue to say, "we love the show. Keep doing what you're doing." It's unprecedented, in my experience.

Crafty TV: Technical note: You're writing a lot of Texas dialect. Obviously you're writing "y'all"s into the scripts. But do you drop the 'g's off words? Or is that understood? (In English scripts, I noticed, Cockney dialect keeps it's 'h's -- the actors drop it off.)

Bridget Carpenter: Most people don't drop the g's, not that I've noticed. There's no real rule, though.

Crafty TV: You mention that you got to TV writing through play writing. There's something I don't quite grasp about modern theatre. Mostly I don't quite grasp plays after the invention of film. The same thing seems to have happened as with painting when photography came in. Since film did "representational" narrative better than theatre -- "can our cockpit hold the vasty fields of France? Or may we cram within this wooden O the casques that did affright the air at Agincourt?" -- theatre became this sort of magic ritual space. But beyond that observation -- which is to say no more than I don't quite get it -- I'm not sure what a play is any more. Certainly I've seen any number of plays that didn't seem to me to "play." They're just a lot of impressive dialog, or we get to watch an actor act a character for a while but nothing actually happens. As a playwright, what would you say you are trying to do in a play that you can't do in a TV episode or a film?

Bridget Carpenter: That's a gigantor question. THE question, really. When I teach playwriting, the best question to ask students who are beginning to write a new play is a version of the Passover question: Why is today different from any other day? Your question is sort of a larger version of that...

As far as plays vs. TV goes, that's easy. Plays end after about 90 minutes. You won't see those characters again. So the story that the play tells has to come to some conclusion, a resting place--you want to feel satisfied, that you've experienced something, be it large or small, with these people. TV, you want your audience to fall in love with everyone you've introduced them to, to be so engaged with the characters that they HAVE to come back and spend more time with them, they NEED to know what will happen next?! So that's a very different architecture. Not to mention that of course on network television you're writing very specifically for act breaks (in our case, FIVE of them) and in a play it's freewheeling. Thank god.

I have written very little for film, so I'm going to ignore the film aspect of your question except to say that when I write screenplays, I write to sell. I don't (yet) write indie films, simply to please myself. But when I write a play, I write entirely for myself, an audience of one. Later, I take the theatre audience into consideration (during previews, you pay attention to how quickly the audience 'gets' things, etc; whether jokes land, all that stuff) but I make changes according to my experience WITH the audience, not whether they "like" it or not.

When I write a play, I write something that would delight me to see onstage, live. So in UP, my last play, I had a character who was a wire walker. He was also a figment of another character's imagination, so you experienced something pretty magical. If I saw wire walking in a movie, I'd be, ok, fairly engaged. But onstage? Your breath is taken away. You're captivated! I like to always attempt to exploit the live-ness of theatre. We're all in the same place, at the same time, watching these people who are also alive, in front of us. So things like singing, dancing, and other spectacular performances are especially effective, because on tv and film we're kind of blase about that, because of the nature of effects, and also those people aren't breathing the same air as us.

I tend to try to combine spectacle and story. My plays are ways of asking questions. I take your point that sometimes contemporary playwriting seems like something else--performance art, or just dialogue, maybe--and I, too, tend to be impatient when there's no story --but I also think that this is a golden time for amazing, radical, resonant plays. I'm thinking of Sarah Ruhl's magical realism wonder THE CLEAN HOUSE and her EURIDICE, Julia Cho's DURANGO and THE ARCHITECTURE OF LOSS; of Nilo Cruz's ANNA IN THE TROPICS, Paula Vogel's THE BALTIMORE WALTZ and THE LONG CHRISTMAS RIDE HOME. Lynn Nottage wrote INTIMATE APPARREL, the most produced play in the US last year, and it uses characters speaking the letters they write to one another to great effect. I love George Walker's plays, and in his play HEAVEN he has people killed, and then they come back onstage from 'above'--awesome, funny, surprising. I think few of those things would have been true on film. August Wilson was a master storyteller, and while no doubt more plays of his will be turned into movies, I bet they will always be best as plays: just people telling each other stories. Going back to the campfire. I'm most moved, thrilled, and excited by contemporary plays. I'm interested by Shakespeare (reading) but I'm often bored in productions and I rarely find myself caring.

Bridget Carpenter, Part Two

Bridget Carpenter is a writer-producer on NBC's FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, the best show on broadcast TV. This is part two of my interview with her.

Crafty TV: How much of the writing staff has spent time in a small football- crazy town?

Bridget Carpenter: We have three writers who played football seriously in high school and/or college, and another writer/producer from Texas. The rest of us range from rabid football fans to "how the hell to you say that in football-ese?"

Crafty TV: If you've lived in a city all your life, how do you write FNL?

Bridget Carpenter: Well, that would be me. And at least half the staff. I guess the most honest answer is we make it up.

Crafty TV: Is there a bible? What sort of issues are addressed in it? What sort of things aren't in the bible that you need to know to write the show? Also, I'm assuming the answer is no, but my readers keep asking: if an agented writer is speccing the show, can the agent ask for a copy of the bible?

Bridget Carpenter: There's no bible.

Crafty TV: How far ahead are you plotting? How many scripts were written before the pilot was picked up? After the show was picked up, how far did you guys plan out the individual episodes before you started writing them?

Bridget Carpenter: We are pretty far ahead. As I write this they're shooting episode 115, and in the room we're breaking the final episode of the season. This is the most speedy and efficient (and, I have to repeat, awesome) group of writers I've ever worked with.

No other scripts were written until the pilot was picked up. Once we were picked up and all staffed up, as a room, we beat out five episodes together, one after another, before anyone went off and started outlining and then writing any of those five. That was pretty great, because it helped us move fast, get a sense of the world, and created a real momentum to events from episode to episode.

Crafty TV: You're nowhere near having this problem, if first season takes you to the championship, which I'd bet money it does, how do you do a second season? Is it enough to just have another season of football?

Bridget Carpenter: We plan to loosely follow the year. So next year's season would take place sometime as the new school year/football season begins. I think as you write the question, no, it would not be enough to have just another season of football. But there will be new players (JV moving up to Varsity), new characters, new alliances--and all that, we hope, would create more depth and new tensions & excitement as we get into another football season. Remeber that in the movie FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, once Boobie Miles was injured, another player emerged to take his place and that opened up a whole new dynamic, which was painful and exciting to watch.

Crafty TV: Do the writing staff ever discuss second season, even idly? Or is that jinxing it?

Bridget Carpenter: Oh my god, of course we do. And if it's jinxing it, we're f****d. Because we definitely talk about it. A lot.

ACTRA Strike

ACTRA, the Canadian actor's union, is going out on strike. The producers are offering a pay raise of 4% over three years. Since the inflation rate is about 3.5% per year, that works out to a 6.5% pay cut over three years in constant dollars.

The ACTRA strike will hurt actors and producers both, since productions that might have gone to Canada will now go elsewhere. (Some of them already have.) But it's a basic principle of negotiation that if you're not willing to walk away, you're in a lousy negotiating position. The ACTRA strike won't help my business and won't help me in the short run. But I'm glad the actors had the guts to reject a lousy deal.

Producers probably don't realize this, but the talent unions benefit them. Why? Because producers will individually pay as little as they possibly can. A dollar in your pocket is a dollar they don't get to keep. That's just the nature of the business.

But if actors, writers and directors got paid as little as possible, very few people would be able to make a living acting, writing or directing. The minimum payments specified in the contracts are what make it possible to make a living in the business. That means that an industry develops that has a pool of people who are not only talented but skilled. Those are the very same people that producers need to be able to draw on to work on their projects. Without unions there would be a few extremely successful creative people -- who would charge much more to make up for all the money they didn't get earlier in their career -- and a lot of amateurs working day jobs and writing or acting or directing on the side. That wouldn't actually be good for producers as a group.

When I was in Cape Town, I got to see the results of an un-organized, un-unionized writing pool. In South Africa a writer gets paid a couple thousand bucks to write a TV drama. You actually get paid more to write books. So, as you'd expect, there are very few skilled, experienced screenwriters; and they're typing as fast as they can to get by.

Show business is a scary business. Unions make it possible to have a life in it. Strikes are what give unions clout.

You go, ACTRA.