A Career Writing Scripts Could Be For You

We have all paid good money to see a terrible movie at the local multiplex (in amazing 3D) and have walked out complaining that even we could have written a better script than that. Terrible movies get made every year (duh) and Hollywood spends millions of dollars hoping that the next Avatar is just around the corner. The studio executives know that it is a numbers game. Eventually (they hope) the studio will find the right script from the thousands that they get every month and after years of development and pre-production, it will finally get made into the next blockbuster hit or indie breakthrough (think Slumdog Millionaire).

If you want to have a long, lucrative career writing scripts in Hollywood you need to start with the basics. You need to learn your craft and that may mean years and years of honing your skills before ever getting any positive coverage by a studio reader. Or you could hit it big with your first script but that is highly unlikely. We all want to believe we are the next Diablo Cody (Juno) or Jud Apatow (Superbad) but even those folks struggled in obscurity for years, we just dont hear about all the hard work and lonely hours sitting in front of the computer, only the success story.

Being a screenwriter means sitting in on endless hours of note meetings with directors, producers, and studio executives while they whittle away at your precious story. It can be a very frustrating experience and you need to develop a certain third party perspective and a resilient outer shell. You need to be able to take constructive (and not so constructive) critique with a smile on your face and then come back with some great revisions within a few days if not hours. Once you are on the set, if you ever get that far, the pressure is really cranked up. Revisions have to be done sometimes in minutes and everyone sits around waiting for you. This is a very expensive business and waiting for the screenwriter can cost tons of money.

Writing scripts can be a very rewarding enterprise and if you are persistent enough, and have some great ideas and some talent, you can make it far. A lot of writing scripts is who you know. This is bad in a way but like anything else it is just a fact of life and you need to face the reality that you are not going to be able to live your life in a cocoon, typing away in the middle of the night, never seeing anyone, and expect to make it big in Hollywood. This is probably the most social town in the world and screenwriters are expected, like everyone else, to go out at night and schmooze it up. You need to be a shameless self promoter in the business and always be talking shop, no matter how many times you are told not to.

Start off by writing scripts, as many as you can pump out in a year or two. Read any and all books about writing scripts. Enter as many contests and get as much coverage as you can. Go to openings, parties, screenings, film festivals, film markets, clubs, and anywhere else that movie people congregate. If you are one of the lucky ones, sooner or later someone will notice your wonderful screenplay and bet it all on you. Good luck.