Reader Question: Why are so few script contest winners made into movies?

From Brandon:

I have two totally unrelated questions that I would love to get some insight on:

Question 2 has to do with screenwriting contests:

2. My understanding of screenplay contests are that they discover great scripts and stories from undiscovered writers, which makes it a wonderful way of curating original content for Hollywood that is yearning for fresh, new stories that are well crafted. But why are so few of those scripts made into movies? If you look through all the major contests, most of the winner’s scripts never get made? Why isn’t Hollywood falling over themselves to execute these scripts judged the greatest by some the most prestigious members of Hollywood? Even the Nicholls, the best of them all, had only a handful of its winning scripts produced? Why aren’t those great scripts being made into great movies?

First this fact: A majority of projects Hollywood studios buy do not get produced. I don’t have any hard numbers on this, but over the years I have heard the percentage of acquisition-to-production figure range from 10–25%. [If someone has any specific info in this regard, please share in comments.]

I seem to recall John August and Craig Mazin in their Scriptnotes podcasts recently referred to the studio script development process as equivalent to a company’s R&D division [Research and Development], and that sounds right. Studios buy a lot of content and develop them all, seeing which of them gains enough momentum to carry it forward into production. Most do not.

The thing is, stories are not widgets, there is a certain amount of ‘magic’ involved in the process of developing them. Plus movies are inherently a messy proposition, literally thousands of things that can go wrong and crush a project. So this type of attrition rate should not be surprising.

Nor should it be surprising to see screenplay contest winners, even prestigious events like the Nicholl, languish in Development Hell.

One of the research projects I have on the docket is to go through all the spec script sales from 1991–2012, and see what percentage of them got produced. That will give us some hard numbers.

Also I have the entire development slate of several studios from 2008 which I kept around just so I could check in with them years later to see what got made and what didn’t. Perhaps now is a good time to check that out.

Bottom line as Max Millimeter would say, “It’s fucking hard to make a movie.”

For Brandon’s first question, go here.

I’ll be getting back to the most recent set of Reader Questions starting next week.

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