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HOW TO SELL YOUR SCREENPLAY?

By Rob Tobin

This is the third in a series of articles I’ve been asked to write by Talentville founder and CEO Ben Cahan. There’s a nearly endless number of screenwriting topics I can discuss in these articles, but I think it might work best to begin at the beginning and work our way gradually forward. Let’s start with the hardest but most important question of all, one that will probably make you groan and want to turn away, but one that will draw you back once you stop to consider the question and your possible answer. 

How do you sell your screenplay?

Okay, so you know why you want to be a screenwriter, and you know who your audience is. Or do you?

The final audience for your screenwriting is the one that sits in the big megaplex theaters voting for or against your script and your career with their butts and credit cards. And when you write your screenplays, you do indeed have to be aware of who that final audience and what they want to see. But in Hollywood it takes an average of five years to go from buying a screenplay to showing the finished film in theaters. A lot of people see your script along the way, and each has a say in whether to pass it on to whoever has the power to actually greenlight the project. 

The people in that chain of deciders are your more immediate audience. Just as you have to write for your eventual theater audience, you also have to write for the deciders, the people who decide the fate of your script and to some extent the fate of your entire career. If you don’t please these first audiences, you don’t get a chance to try to please the people in the theater.

What makes things more complex is that while the final audience will respond to the quality of your screenplay and of the film made from your screenplay, the deciders will respond to the commerciality of the script as much or more than to the quality. More importantly, they will respond to how well you pitch the script; what “elements” you attach to the script (I’ll explain that later); which similar projects are in the theaters or slated to be in theaters; what the political, and what the social and technological realities are at the time they read your script. 

All sorts of things can help your script get sold and produced. A lot more things can stop your script from getting sold and produced, and most of those things have nothing to do with your writing ability.

Frustrating? Of course it is. It’s as if you walk on to a major league baseball training camp tryout, hit fifteen consecutive home runs and then have to wait for a hundred people to decide your fate based on everything except your baseball skills. “Gee, we already have a guy who looks like him,” or “I’m not sure people are ready for someone who talks like he does,” or “I’m not looking for homeruns right now, I’m looking for singles.”

As ridiculous as that sounds, that’s basically the kind of thing a writer goes through with every script he writes. It leads to bad scripts being made, and good scripts being rejected. Once in a while, thankfully, it leads to good scripts getting made and even more rarely, to good scripts being made well.

But that’s the reality of things. Even worse, let’s say you submit your script to a producer. The standard procedure is that some unpaid intern working for school credit at USC, UCLA or Chapman College, will be the one who judges the quality of that script. Nothing against those interns, I used to be one a million years ago, but they do not have the experience to be doing the most important job in motion picture development. And yet, that’s the truth of it: some Loyola Marymount of NYU intern will decide the fate of your script and to some extent your career. And that’s only if you can get your script even that far. Today the vast majority of producers and agents will not read unsolicited scripts.

Okay, okay but how do you get your script to that rookie intern to read? Well, based on my own experience, here’s what not to do: become an unpaid intern or paid development assistant, thinking that somehow you’ll get your producer so excited about you that he or she will agree to read your script and make you rich and famous. That may have worked once or twice in the history of mankind, but it’s such a long shot and takes you so far away from your primary goal of being a screenwriter, that it is far more likely to waste your time than it is to help your career.

On the other hand, it may not hurt to intern at a production company to get a feel for how producers work, how they handle scripts, and so on. But that’s about it. I read more than 5,000 scripts while in development and it did help me with my writing, but I could have read those scripts without slaving away 80 hours a week for some jerk-off producer who kept wanting me to pick up his laundry and hand his business card out to good looking women with the promise that my producer would cast them in his next movie as long as they went on a “date” with him. You would be horrified to know how often that empty promised worked in getting stunningly beautiful women into bed with my short, stubby little producer.

So how do you get your script to that intern? There are a lot of ways to do it, but let me give you my recommendation, for whatever it’s worth. First of all, do not submit your first five scripts to the film industry. I know you don’t want to believe it, but except for an extremely small number of geniuses the first five scripts you write will be varying degrees of crappy.

Of course you don’t start off wanting to write crappy. And maybe you’ve read all sorts of screenwriting books, maybe even mine, and taken all sorts of screenwriting courses, and read tons of screenplays, all of which you should do, by the way; but even if you’ve done all this, writing is still something you learn from practice. Taking courses and reading brilliant screenwriting books like mine is a necessity and will cut years off your learning curve. But that curve will still remain. The actual act of writing is the main thing that will improve your writing. 

No-one would think that reading about running a marathon would by itself make you a better marathoner, but for some reason people think that reading about screenwriting can make you a great screenwriter. Theoretical knowledge of screenwriting is crucial, but the key to writing is… writing. And it takes a lot of writing to get good at it – at least it does for most of us.

If you submit a substandard script, say your first or third script, to the industry, you will be branded as a substandard writer. Your name and disparaging remarks will be entered in production databases, and when you go back to submit a much better screenplay, you will have more difficulty getting it read, because the first thing a development reader will do is access the database to see if you’ve submitted to them before. It’s a small industry. “Bad writer” travels a lot farther and faster than “he’s a good writer.”

On average, a produced screenwriter in Hollywood writes ten or twelve screenplays before he sells a script. I wrote nearly 20 screenplays before getting a writer’s credit on a produced film.

So what do you do with those first five or ten screenplays? You submit them to screenplay competitions. I’m not saying that screenplay competitions are some kind of magic bullet. Agents and producers are on the lookout for the winners of only a handful of contests. The Nichols Fellowship is probably the only contest influential enough to have its semi or maybe even quarterfinalists get noticed by the industry. 

So why enter contests? Because they work well if you work them well.

First, you need to enter contests that give good feedback. The bad news is that contests will cost about $50 bucks for every script you enter. The good news is that for fifty bucks you get an objective third party opinion on your screenplay and hopefully a few comments on what specifically needs to be improved in your script and in your writing in general.  It’s the cheapest way I know of getting valuable feedback on a script.

Your placement in contest is also a great barometer of where you are in your writing career. If you enter ten contests and do not make the quarter finals of even one of them, that’s not a bad thing. Rather, it’s an objective commentary on your writing at this stage in your writing career, and an indication of how far you still have to go before being a sellable screenwriter. Use that as incentive to improve, not as a reason to quit, at least not yet.

Just as importantly, making the quarterfinals of contests, maybe the occasional semi-final and maybe even the finals or winning a contest or two, well that looks good on your resume. And that is more important than it sounds. See, at the beginning of your career, your resume (the one you submit to producers at their request) is going to consist perhaps of writing courses you’ve taken, or maybe a writing degree. Then, as you start making the quarter or semi- finals of contests, you create an “Awards” section on that resume and that looks just grand, not just to your ego, but to people to whom you submit your resume. And the first contest you win, no matter what contest it is, gives you an incredible right: the right to call yourself “an award-winning screenwriter.” And THAT looks very good in your resume and in the first sentence of your query letter: “Hi, I’m an award-winning screenwriter and I…”

Odds are you’re not going to win many screenwriting contests. There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people submitting scripts to each significant screenplay competition. The math tells you that only a very small percentage of them will win, place or even make the quarter finals of very many contests. But making the quarterfinals of at least one or two contests should be your goal.

Look at it this way: the screenwriting competition circuit is like the minor leagues in baseball, or the development league in NBA basketball. It’s a proving ground, a training ground, a place where you can get experience, learn how to deal with rejection, get feedback on your techniques and talents, and get yourself ready for a try at the big leagues. It gives you a bit of credibility as well. Even though playing in the development league or college league is a far cry from playing in the NBA, it still gives the NBA scouts and management something to go on.

“Hey I made the quarterfinals of the Nichols” is not earthshaking, I’ve done it myself, but it all adds up. “I’ve made three quarterfinals, two semis and won a major contest this year” is a great way to start a submission letter. Much better than “I just wrote my first script and my Auntie Irene says it’s the best thing she’s ever read.”

Let’s put things into perspective. I recently won a few awards at a fairly large screenwriting competition/film festival. One of the judges claims he’s won over 100 screenwriting competitions, but when I sat across from him at the awards ceremony, he admitted that not a single one of those contest wins had led to a sale or a writing assignment. That’s the bad news. The good news is that my contest wins have led to several screenwriting assignments. And each screenwriting gig has made it a bit easier to get the next screenwriting gig. The point is that screenwriting competitions aren’t the be-all and end-all, but they’re a tool that, if used right, can help your career, especially at the beginning of that career.

So take your time. Write your screenplay, then rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it again, until you can go through the entire script without changing a single thing, without a single part of the script slowing down or boring you. Then start submitting it to competitions.

Which competitions? Go to moviebytes.com. There you’ll find a free listing of damn near every worthwhile screenwriting competition around. They will be rated according to a number of criteria including relevance, professionalism and, most importantly, feedback, and you can list the contests by any of those criteria. Pick say, five contests to start with, the ones that have the best combination of relevance and feedback, and submit your script.

As soon as you submit your scripts to those contests, start writing your next script. Don’t just sit around waiting for contest results. Start writing the next script you’re going to submit to those or other contests. 

“Damn, that’ll take years.” Yeah, and…? Did someone tell you that story of the guy who submitted his first ever screenplay and it got bought by Spielberg or produced by James Cameron? Yeah… I’ve heard those stories too. It does happen, but so rarely that if you think that’s the norm and expect the same thing to happen to you, you’re playing the fool. It does take years.

Now the next temptation, other than submitting your first screenplay, will be to submit your first draft. Listen, make it easier on everyone, and save yourself some time: just shoot yourself in the foot now. My favorite author, Earnest Hemingway, wrote: “The first draft of anything is shit.” That’s an actual quote, go Google it. And the great writing God is absolutely right. He might have added that the person who submits the first draft of anything is a sh*thead. Or at least an idiot.

The secret to writing is rewriting. That’s not my quote. But this quote is mine: “the difference between a waiter and a writer is a single letter and a million words.” Write, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite… get the picture? If you don’t do at least ten drafts of every script you write, you’re probably not going to get produced. Now I know someone out there is going to say they sold the first draft of their first script. Good for you, but what about the other ten million screenwriters who don’t have either your skill or your luck? Right, the rest of us need to write, rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite ad nauseum.

The point of all this is this: do not submit anything but your best work. Ever. To anybody. And do not submit your best work if it is your 1^st or 5^th screenplay, because chances are that even your best work at that early point in your career isn’t that great. Do not ruin your reputation as a writer before you get to the point where you’re good enough to have your work considered. 

Oh, by the way, although you seek out the contests on Moviebytes, go to Withoutabox.com to actually submit to those contests, because it’s actually cheaper to do so. Some contests don’t use Withoutabox, but most good contests do.

Okay, so let’s say that you’ve written at least five screenplays. You’ve entered all of them into several contests, gotten feedback, rewritten the scripts based on the feedback that seems common from all the contests, resubmitted the scripts and written new ones, and you’re starting to regularly make the quarterfinals of significant contests (contests rated in the top 100 on Moviebytes). Now what? Now you’re probably ready to submit your scripts to the industry. Though it may still be too early for you to get actual script sales, your scripts should be at least good enough to represent you well.

Who do you submit to? Production companies that produce the kind of scripts you write – the same genre, or perhaps budget or feel of your scripts (e.g. micro-budget scripts like “Napoleon Dynamite,” or rom coms like “When Harry Met Sally” or “Sleepless in Seattle,” or big budget tent pole movies like “Avengers” or “Deep Impact”). How do you find those companies? Well, let me give you a technique that has worked for me.

Using IMDB to find the right Production Companies to send queries

This technique revolves around IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, not a perfect tool but still the single most complete and influential listing of movies, television content, production companies and agencies. You’ll find a treasure trove of information in this database but you have to know how to use it, and you need to make sure you get the IMDB Pro version, because it contains the real contact information you’ll need to make this work. Yes, it costs money to get the pro version, and it costs money to enter contest, and it costs money to get Final Draft of Movie Magic script formatting software, and to buy books like mine, or take courses. And? What’s your point? That your career and writing aspirations aren’t worth that kind of expenditure? Or that you’re so friggin’ good that you shouldn’t have to spend money to have producers go into full-blown orgasm over your screenplays?

I have obtained everything from $90,000 writing assignments to a quarter million dollar offer to purchase my latest screenplay by using IMDB Pro in the way I’m going to now describe to you.

First, go to the following web address: http://pro.imdb.com/. If you’re already subscribed to the service, you’ll be taken to the IMDB Pro home page. If you’re not yet subscribed, you’ll get a “Log in to continue” box. At the bottom of that box it states in a hyperlinked sentence: “not a subscriber? Start your free trial now.” Click on that hyperlink and follow the instructions to get a free trial, but then be sure to follow that up by actually subscribing to the service, because it is one of only two really invaluable subscriptions I would never be without, the other being LinkedIn. Forget Facebook, it’s kid’s play and not meant for business.

Once you’ve subscribed to IMDB Pro, you’ll be taken to the home page. This is where the process begins. That process is that of compiling a shortlist of production companies best suited to pitch your script to.

So the first step is to determine the genre of your script. There are countless genres with varying names, but IMDB breaks it down into the following: Action, Adult, Adventure, Animation, Biography, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Film Noir,

Game Show, History, horror, music, mystery, news, reality TV, romance, Sci Fi, Short, Sport, Talk Show, Thriller, War, and Western. So the first thing is to figure out which of these genres your script fits it. If it’s a period piece, you’re out of luck, though you might try history. But it might fit into drama, comedy, suspense, and so on. If you’re not sure, look up a film that you think is like yours and see what genres IMDB assigns to it.

Don’t forget, your script may fall in two or more genres: drama, comedy and western, for example. Or drama, comedy and romance. There are names for these, but they are not necessarily included in the IMDB list. For example, a mixed drama and comedy is called a Dramedy. A romantic comedy is often called a Rom Com. Just choose the genre that best fits your script.

So, you’ve chosen your genre. Let’s say it’s horror. On the IMDB Pro home page, you’ll see a search field at the top of the page. In that field, type the name of a movie in the same genre as yours. So, if it’s “horror,” let’s type in “The Exorcist.”

You’ll see a drop down menu listing a number of choices, because there were several sequels to the original Exorcist film. Click on any of the versions.

You’ll be taken to the main page for that film. And at the top of the page you’ll see categories such as “Budget,” “Opening Weekend,” and “Genre.” Because it is “The Exorcist,” you’ll see “horror” and “thriller” listed. Click on “horror.”

You’ll be taken to a search results page for horror movies. You’re now where you want to be, but you have to further narrow the search, because you’ll notice that there are more than 40 thousand films listed under “horror.” You’ll never be able to use these results because there are just too many of them.

So, on the bottom right corner of the page, you’ll see the link “Refine your query.” Click on that. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. This page allows you to filter your search in so many ways it’s mind boggling (I still don’t actually know what boggling actually is, though it does sound painful). 

At this point, you want to narrow your search down as much as you can, so that you don’t have to send out as many queries, and so that the queries you do send out will be to companies that have definitely already produced scripts very similar to yours in terms of genres. In other words these are appropriate production companies to pitch your script to. 

That’s a huge step, because every producer will tell you about horror scripts arriving on the desk of romantic comedy producers, and vice versa. It’s a huge no-no and will harm your reputation. Using this IMDB procedure will help avoid that problem.

Under “Release Date,” choose a date range for the horror scripts that have been produced. I suggest no more than five years back – if a production company hasn’t produced a script like yours in more than 5 years, it probably isn’t the right company to be pitching to.

Under “Production Status,” choose “post production,” “released,” “completed,” and “filming.” 

Under “Type of title,” choose whatever categories your script falls under: television, movies, short, etc. 

Under “Genre,” leave it as “horror” (or whatever genre your script is under).

Under “Language,” choose “English.”

Under “Box Office,” choose the budget you think your script falls under. Now this may not be as easy as it sounds, because you may not have the experience to really know how much it would cost to shoot your script. My suggestion is to do a new search on IMDB for the scripts that most closely resemble yours, check their budgets and use them for your script as well. 

Don’t use too big a budget range, because it’ll give you too many movies and therefore too many production companies to choose from, and thus increase both your workload and the chances of sending your pitch to an inappropriate company. For example, the company that produced “Blair Witch Project” may not be the right company to send a pitch for a $250 million tent pole action horror script to.

If you want to narrow your search in terms of quality, you can pick both the star meter ratings (an IMDB rating system based on how many people have searched for a person or film) or user ratings (how users have rated a particular person or film).

Under “Display Options,” choose production company as what you want to sort by.

Okay, click the “Run Query” button and you will get a list of the companies most likely to be receptive to your type of script. Now whether they’re receptive to your specific script depends on the quality of that script, and we’ll get to that later under “writing techniques.”

Once you choose a shortlist of producers who produce the genre and budget your script falls under, then it’s time to write the query letter, which I’ll address in my next article.

Before I go, though, let me re-address something that at least a few of you are thinking as you read this article – and perhaps while reading the previous articles in this series: “I’m a writer, not a salesman.”

Newsflash: yes, you can avoid being a salesman. Or… you can sell your script. It’s your choice. Because the truth is that unless you’re Paul Haggis or Terri Rossio, with a huge agency doing your selling for you, you’re going to have to sell your own friggin’ screenplays. And even these amazingly successful writers have to pitch themselves to someone – their agent, a producer, a studio… someone.

How important is marketing versus writing well? I may be wrong, but it’s been my experience, borne out by the generally poor quality of Hollywood movies, that marketing is far more important than writing well, as long as you don’t give a crap about the quality of the films being made. In other words, if you’re more interested in making the deal than the movie. But although the emphasis on marketing at the expense of writing quality has had a terrible effect on the quality of Hollywood films, the facts are the facts: you can try to change them, but until you do, you’re operating under their rules. So if marketing is that important, you’d best learn how to do it.

“But the script is what counts. A good script will always find a market. Producers are always out actively looking for good scripts.”

Yeah. Right. You can actually write a brilliant script that never sells and never gets produced, because the writer didn’t want to or didn’t know how to market it. So, you can go back to your Starbucks and write another script that won’t sell, or you can keep reading these articles and follow the advice contained in them, or maybe read other good articles or books on the subject of script marketing. 

It’s up to you: produced writer/salesman… or unproduced writer.

In the next article I’ll be discussing the query letter among other random things.

Great writing to all of you. Please continue to support Ben and Talentville – he’s a good guy and it’s a great site. Support each other too. Write passionately, whether it’s for a blow-em-up space fantasy or a sensitive British period piece. Give it your all. That way, even if you never “make” it as a screenwriter, you’ll know you tried your best.  

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Rob Tobin is a produced screenwriter, published novelist ("Jo-Bri and the Two Worlds" and "God Wars: Living with Angels", available on Amazon.com and iBookshelf), author of two screenwriting books ("The Screenwriting Formula" and "How to Write High Structure, High Concept Movies" available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Google, bookstores, etc.), a former motion picture development executive and book editor, graduate of USC's prestigious Master of Professional Writing program, husband, father, Canadian, and he lives an extraordinarily happy life in Southern California. He is available for writing assignments at scripts@earthlink.net. Visit his website at robtobinwriting.com or surfcityfilms.net.