Bring Your A Game When You Enter Screenplay Contests

Youve just spent the last two months working on your screenplay and now youve finally finished Act III and are ready to make your movie. Whoa, not so fast there. Unless you have five to ten million dollars burning a hole in your pocket, then you still need to get the most important part and that is feedback from a disinterested third party. Thats right, a disinterested third party and that means someone that you dont know, not just someone that is generally disinterested in things like your cousin Fredo. That is where screenplay contests come into the picture. Screenplay contests are a great place to get some constructive feedback and who knows, you could end up winning the darn thing and getting lots of money and prizes.

A couple of good screenplay contests are the ones at Scriptapalooza and also on scripped.com. You can also find other screenwriting resources listed on the Writers Guild of America site at www.wga.org. For a list of screenplay contests go to www.angelfire.com/movies/coolscreenwriter/contest.html. The Nicholls Fellowship is another great contest as is the Disney Fellowship. Francis Ford Coppolas production company American Zoetrope, located in San Francisco, California, hosts an annual contest and a great web site at http://www.zoetrope.com/contests/. Go to http://creativescreenwriting.com/aaa/index.html for another of these great screenplay contests from AAA Creative Screenwriting. For another list go to http://www.donedealpro.com/members/listing.aspx?content_type=10.

As you can see, there is no shortage of screenplay contests out there. Before you submit your jewel you need to get some feedback. Check out some of the resource sites available and on display at the WGA site. Spend some money on getting script coverage from a real reader with no agenda. The feedback from this type of third party coverage is invaluable, even if you dont necessarily agree with it. Compare notes after getting several different readers to give you coverage and if the same things keep popping up, and they will, then you know you have some work to do.

Remember, screenwriting is a collaborative art and you will be taking notes and rewriting on a daily basis if you are one of the lucky ones to get past screenplay contests and actually into production. Whether a studio picks up your script or an indie producer, you have to be ready to work hard for very little money for a long time before you become world famous. And to be brutally honest, you will probably never become famous because writers, especially in Hollywood, are not big celebrities usually unless they are also directors or actors.

You need to have thick skin and not get too personally attached to any one thing in your script. Things will change. Whole scenes, scenes that you loved, will be cut out in order to make the movie flow better. Characters will be eliminated or changed until they are unrecognizable to the author. The most common edits are scenes that cost too much or settings that just cant be managed, like anything having to do with water. Just ask James Cameron.