Selling a Screenplay: The Screenwriter's Guide to Hollywood - Softcover

Field, Syd

 
9780440502449: Selling a Screenplay: The Screenwriter's Guide to Hollywood
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0440502446 ISBN 13: 9780440502449
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 1989

Inhaltsangabe

- Breaks Down the Business of Screenwriting
- Explains What the Buyer Looks For
- Shows You What to Do to Get in the Door
- Tackles the Pitching Process
- Provides Personal Insights from Famous Screenwriters

Everybody has a story to tell. Everybody wants to write the great American screenplay. But what do you do after it’s written? How do you sell it? Studio honchos. Development Executives. Independent Producers. What do they want? Do you need an agent or manager to get it into production? Selling a screenplay can mean earning $250,000 or more, so competition is fierce.

Syd Field gives you an insider’s look at the movie and TV industry, packed with essential tips from the pros. Selling a Screenplay is a must-have guide for every screenwriter, filled with frank real-life advice from Hollywood’s most powerful deal makers and most celebrated screenwriters.

They all started somewhere.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Syd Field (1935–2013), the internationally renowned “guru of screenwriting,” was the author of eight bestselling books on the subject, including Screenplay, published in twenty-three languages and used in hundreds of colleges and universities nationwide and around the world. He was inducted into the Final Draft Hall of Fame in 2006 and was the first inductee into the Screenwriting Hall of Fame of the American Screenwriting Association. He was also a special consultant to the Film Preservation Project for the Getty Center.

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THE MARKET

The market potential for the screenwriter is enormous. But what is the market? How do you describe it, define it, articulate it?

That was a question I kept asking myself over and over again. In my screenwriting experience, I had never explored the market, had never taken the time to find out what the parameters were and how they effected the writer.

I had some notions about the market, yes, but nothing else. The only thing I had, really, was the question, What is the market for the screenwriter today?

The market is a vague and nebulous term. You can talk to ten different people and get ten different answers. A producer views a script differently than an agent; an agent views it differently than a studio executive; a studio executive views it differently than a reader; the reader views it differently than an independent producer; an independent producer views it differently than a marketing executive; a marketing executive views it differently than a person in development. And so on.

So I went to a friend of mine, Stan Corwin, an independent producer and publisher, who with his partner found a novel titled ". . . And Ladies of the Club" and through sheer marketing strategy catapulted it onto the New York Times best-seller list as the number-one best seller for over a year. If anyone knows what the market is, I thought to myself, it would be Stan, now president of Tudor Communications, a national paperback and film development company.

So, we sat down and talked, and during the course of the conversation I slipped in The Question: What is the market?

"For what?" he replied.

I looked at him, taken aback. "An original screenplay," I replied.

He looked at me for a moment. Then, "What kind of screenplay?" he asked guardedly.

I took a deep breath and shifted into my most confident, optimistic attitude. I didn't know what to say. What kind of screenplay would I like to write, I wondered, and immediately thought of The Last Emperor. "A period action-adventure," I said.

"That's a tough one."

"Why?"

He explained that in today's movie market a big-budget, period screenplay is a very difficult sale. What about a contemporary script, a comedy, or action-adventure? I asked. The first thing you have to do, he said, is see if there are any buyers interested in the material.

"Who are the buyers?"

He then gave me a thumbnail sketch of the marketplace for film and television. Most feature films, he told me, are produced or distributed by the eight major studios: Twentieth Century Fox, Disney, Paramount, Universal, MGM, UA, and Columbia (which has since merged with Tri-Star). Then there are the many independent production companies that supply the studio with product: Amblin, David Geffen, Weintraub Entertainment, Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Productions, Carolco, Cannon, Hemdale, Kings Road, Lorimar, Guber-Peters, and many, many more. These are some of the buyers and the producers of films.

In television, the buyers are the three networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, now joined by Fox Broadcasting, and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). At the present time the market is proliferating, and cable TV is emerging as a major market; video companies like Vestron, HBO, Showtime, Lorimar, and Prism are becoming the suppliers of product, and they are starting to initiate their own projects rather than buying or renting them from the studios.

Today, to intelligently discuss the marketplace, you've got to understand that there are many different combinations that can get a movie made. You can create your own, just like creating your own omelet in a restaurant. For example, a producer could buy or option a screenplay, and then generate a combination of financing from Paramount, a studio, Hemdale, an independent production company, and Vestron, a cable TV company; then he could presell the project in Europe so that by the first day of principal photography the production costs of the film are covered. That's the way they did Platoon.

In other words the market is a living, breathing entity that reflects the time and economic conditions of the industry and, of course, the country. It changes constantly. The market is not just one thing, it's many things, and if you're looking to expand your awareness of what the market is, you can't be limited by what you don't know.

At the present time the marketplace is more sophisticated than it ever was. You can walk into an agent's office, whether it be the William Morris Agency, ICM, CAA, or Triad, and the tables and shelves are lined from floor to ceiling with screenplays, galleys, and books from New York publishers.

That's what you're competing against if you're trying to sell the screenplay you hold in your hand. Last year, remember, more than 40,000 screenplays were registered at the Writers Guild of America and less than 120 movies were made.

How do you deal with that? How do you go about trying to get your screenplay read, either by an agent for representation, or by a stuio or a producer, to get it made? Everybody in Hollywood, I began to see, was a buyer and a seller.

I thought about that for a while. Then I remembered something I'd read in a Kurt Vonnegut novel: when you're trying to find the answer to a question, the answer is in the question.

Is that true? If the answer is found in the question, how does it relate to the market and the selling of the screenplay? And then one day, while riding my bike, it dawned on me that when you write a script you create the marketplace. Who you present your material to, and how you present it, is almost as important as the screenplay itself.

That would certainly explain why so many terrible movies get made.

When you have a script you want to put into the marketplace you've got to have some kind of a plan, a strategy; your primary goal is to get somebody to respond to your material. Don't just write a letter and start sending your script all over town and hope that somebody's going to be interested. It doesn't work that way.

To get somebody to read your script with any degree of interest or enthusiasm, you've got to find out who might be interested in what you've written. Here's an exercise that may possibly define a market for your screenplay. Take a sheet of paper and make four columns. The first column is for agents you want to represent your work. That's assuming, of course, that you don't have an agent. The second column is for casting the major roles. Who's the best actor or actress for the part? Write it down. Who else? Write it down. Do as many as you can. The third column is a list of possible directors or filmmakers you think would do this kind of material. The fourth column is a list of people you know in the industry.

Everybody knows somebody. When you start thinking about who you know in the industry start jotting down names, and before you know it, you'll find somebody--a friend, relative, lover--who knows somebody who knows somebody. You'll end up with twenty or thirty names of people who might be interested in your screenplay.

If you want to get an agent to represent your work, make a list of the agents. You can get a complete list from the Writers Guild of America West, Inc., 8955 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048, (213) 501-2000. They'll send you a list of authorized agents, some of whom, as indicated, are willing to read unsolicited screenplays. Make a list of ten agents, then call or write, telling them you've written a screenplay and asking if they would be interested in reading it. If you write, you might include a one- or two-sentence story line, but no more. I would recommend calling and talking to the secretary. A secretary can be your best friend. If the...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
1989
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0440502446
ISBN 13 
9780440502449
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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