“For Would-Be Screenwriter, Enough False Starts To Fill A Book”

This story ran on NPR yesterday:

There’s a running joke in Los Angeles that everybody — from your dog walker to your dry cleaner — is writing a screenplay. Curt Neill is one of those aspiring screenwriters — a sketch comedian who has tried to write screenplays, but never finished one. “I’ve never even gotten close,” he admits in Caffe Vita, an LA coffee shop where he writes.

But he’s full of ideas for scripts. So many, in fact, that he for all the ideas he can’t deliver on — he calls them “idea seeds.” Finally, in a fit of frustration, Neill wrote a book titled This Movie Will Require Dinosaurs, in which he presents a collection of (intentionally) dreadful beginnings of screenplays — which don’t get very far.

This is actually a pretty depressing story because it puts a spotlight on an unfortunate reality… that many people believe they can write a professional quality screenplay without much in the way of training or education.

Would you look at a brain surgeon at work and go, “Hey, I could do that.” No. But any Tom, Dick or Harry, visions of a glamorous Hollywood lifestyle cavorting through their head, can leaf through a screenplay for the first time and decide, “Piece of cake to write something like that.”

And that’s why 90% or more of the supposed 50,000 scripted projects that float through Hollywood in any given year are rejected outright. It’s because most of those writers have not done nearly enough to learn and practice the craft.

Case in point in the NPR piece, we learn Mr. Neill has never finished even one screenplay. If there’s one unalterable truth about screenwriting, it’s this: You can’t sell a screenplay if you don’t finish it.

If I may offer a suggestion to any of you who have trouble finishing a script: Learn how to break your story in prep. Your chances at getting from FADE IN to FADE OUT go up exponentially if you work from a thorough outline. Not every professional screenwriter approaches the craft this way, but I think it’s safe to say most do.

But maybe with his blog, Mr. Neill has stumbled onto a way to monetize his failed screenwriting efforts: Selling a book of them.

And upon hearing the NPR feature, all across the Internet I can hear a chorus of writers exclaiming, “Hey, I could do that.”

To hear the NPR piece, go here.

To read a transcript, go here.

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