Exclusive Q&A Interview: Jason Scoggins (Part 4)
Last week, we had two posts so GITS readers could submit questions to Jason Scoggins:
Jason Scoggins is a manager and partner at Protocol, a Beverly Hills-adjacent literary management and production company. He represents writers, directors and producers of film and TV alongside Protocol’s founding partners Brian Inerfeld and John Ufland. After getting his start in the entertainment business as an assistant at ICM, Scoggins became a TV Literary Agent at The Gersh Agency, followed by a stint at Writers & Artists Agency and then several years in the wilderness. He returned to the business in 2007, just in time to be impacted by the run-up to the WGA strike.
Jason also has a great website called Life On The Bubble, which tracks movie box office and the spec script market.
GITS readers asked some good questions and Jason has responded with some valuable insight into screenwriting, the spec script market, and working in Hollywood. In Part 1 on Monday, Jason provided his take on the current state of the movie business. In Part 2 on Tuesday, he gave his opinion on the status of the spec script market. In Part 3 yesterday, Jason answered a common question: Does a person need to live in Los Angeles in order to break in as a screewriter? Today Jason takes on three questions related to spec scripts:
I was always wondering if writers can concentrate solely on specs. Obviously Shane Black used to be the “King of specs” back in the days, he didn’t really want to do assignment work, but I’ve read several interviews (for example on DoneDealpro) these days where writers said that you’ll eventually have to do it in order to stay in the business. After all, spec sales have gone down a lot. So do you know writers who can rely on spec work only? Do you believe people like that can still stay afloat in LA these days? — Mike
I’m not sure why one would want to ignore OWAs in the first place (Do you have something against getting paid to write?), and I don’t know that there were ever more than a handful of people in the above-referenced Shane Black category, but it’s a moot point these days in any case. Take a look at the numbers I’ve compiled in my Spec Market reports (they’re updated regularly on my blog, www.lifeonthebubble.com). As I write this, only about 53 spec scripts have sold in 2009 so far. You can do the math as well as I can: You cannot rely on spec sales to stay afloat as a writer in the entertainment business. And again, why would you want to?
I know spec sales are sexy. And you’ll also see articles about A-List writers getting decent deals in the trades. But I see many pro writers, even A-List, mentioning projects that haven’t been publicly announced. So it seems like the sales in the trades are the tip of the iceberg, and there’s plenty of other ‘stealth’ work going on. Is this true? If so, how much paid work is going on off the radar and underneath the water? How much is going to less-established writers. — Grant
As far as I’m concerned, the sexiest part of the screenwriting business is the Open Writing Assignment (OWA) side. What’s not to like about getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a couple of months’ work? It’s a great gig if you can get it.
Yes, there’s a significant amount of development work that doesn’t get reported in the trades. I’d argue that it’s neither “stealth” nor even “off the radar” (it’s certainly on the radar for anyone who can get their hands on an OWA grid on an on-going basis), but OWAs get filled every day that don’t hit the trades for months, if ever. With obvious, A-list exceptions, run-of-the-mill development deals only appear in the trades when someone wants them to be there pretty badly.
Plenty of work goes to less-established writers, but very little goes to previously unknown writers. This is the biggest downside of the dead spec market, in my opinion: Specs are an important tool to break a new writer in the first place, and when their scripts don’t sell it’s that much harder to convince producers and executives to take a chance on a writer by giving them an assignment.
If you have a new (unknown) client with three spec scripts, what is your process for sending out those scripts into the marketplace? Would you send out only the one you thought had the best chance of selling, or maybe send each one to different buyers who would be the best fit? Thanks for your thoughts. — Sam
I want to make sure I’m sending consistent messages to the marketplace, and I don’t even like trying to sell multiple scripts from different writers simultaneously, let alone several scripts from one writer. I’d also decide which to send out first by balancing the commercial prospects against the quality of the writing. I don’t generally send scripts out that I don’t think will sell, but it’s important to put your best foot forward first. If one of the three was clearly the better script yet wasn’t as commercial as one of the other two, I’d consider introducing the writer to the town piece by piece with that sample, and then going out with the one most likely to sell once the pump was primed.
Come back tomorrow for the final part of Jason’s Q&A, where he talks about what he looks for in a spec script.
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