Reader Question: How valuable are script consultants?
Open Forum question from Lucy Riches:
What is your view on script consultants? Should young scriptwriters invest there money in them if they are serious about the business?
I’ll often get an email from someone asking for a recommendation on a script consultant. I also get approached by script consultants, asking me to promote their services on GITS.
In all honesty, unless I know a consultant personally and/or professionally, get to know their understanding of story, and the quality of their work, I don’t feel comfortable making a recommendation.
Here are three people I do have 100% confidence in:
Chrys Balis: A working screenwriter and WGA member, I’ve gotten to know Chrys as a fellow instructor through the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension, where she was selected as Outstanding Instructor of the Year in 2007. You can go here to visit Chrys’ website for more information.
Keith Giglio: Another working screenwriter and WGA member, I’ve also gotten to know Keith as a fellow instructor through the UCLA Ext Writers’ Program, where he was selected as Outstanding Instructor of the Year in 2009. If you’re interested in Keith for a possible script consult, please email me and I can get you his contact information.
Diana (D.C.) Mar: She is an excellent writer, has taken several screenwriting classes with me, so I know first-hand the quality of her script analysis, and she has been a professional script reader for over a decade. Some of you remember her from this 6-part Q&A series “A Script Reader Speaks”. If you’re interested, send me an email and I will get her contact information to you.
One thing you can do is consider participating in a peer review group like our own The GITS Club. Moderated by Jeff Messerman and Mike Scherer, the site has taken off since it debuted in January, currently with 205 members. This is a no-cost way to go to get feedback on your script.
Speaking of which, if you are a member of The GITS Club, here is something I posted on TGC, but it’s good advice for those of you involved in any script peer review site:
This is a peer review site — which means that you can post your pages here for feedback from other writers. But like ‘dialogue’ has ‘subtext,’ there’s a subtext to the idea of peer review as well:
If you post your own pages for feedback, you should be willing to read and provide comments on other people’s pages.
Why?
(1) Fairness: If you receive the benefit of someone else’s feedback, they should get the benefit of your feedback.
(2) Karma. Enough said.
(3) And perhaps the most important issue is experience. A professional screenwriter makes most of their income off OWA’s (Open Writing Assignments). What that means is your agent and/or manager puts you up for an assignment or a producer or studio exec has liked your work and inquired about your availability. In either case, the primary source material of the project ends up on your lap and you are expected to read it, then come up with a take of how you’d handle writing it. If it’s a rewrite, that means you must read the script with a critical eye, looking for its strengths and weaknesses. How do you develop a critical eye? By critiquing scripts. Where can you do that? At The GITS Club.
In other words, you’re not just providing feedback to a fellow writer, which is both fair and good karma, you’re also — with each critique — developing your own analytical capabilities.
I can not emphasize the importance of you developing your story analysis muscles: If you have any serious desire to become a working Hollywood screenwriter, you have to be able to read a script, tell what’s wrong with it, and suggest how to make it work.
That is precisely what you will do when you read and analyze other people’s pages.
So to sum up…
Fairness.
Karma.
Analytical skills.
Now go to one of the forums, review some pages, provide some feedback, feel good about yourself, and improve your chops as a screenwriter.
GITS readers, what are your opinions of the value (or not) of script consults?
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