Reader Question: Is the spec script market dead?
From Billy via email:
A question for your open forum. Is it dead? I had my first spec go out last spring, during the low point of the economic meltdown. It received good coverage but in the end didn’t sell because it was ‘too big’ and studios development had come to a grinding halt. No one was buying anything. Is that spec dead or have you heard tell of zombie specs that have risen from the grave and marched across this town leaving bloody entrails in their wake? (… too colorful?)
Evidently my post Reflections About Movies and Death put some folks in a morbid mood.
Billy, listen to me: Stop with the sleeping pills, put down the razor blade, back away from the ledge. All is not lost. That feeling you have is what is known as “being a writer whose script didn’t sell and they wonder if Hwood will ever get its proverbial head out of its proverbial arse long enough to know a good story when they read one.”
In other words, the normal experience of being a screenwriter. Certainly not enough to contemplate ‘killing off’ your writing career.
Did you check out this post from earlier today about how the script Whales just got a greenlight from Universal Pictures:
On that original post about a year ago, one of the writers Jack Ameil was kind enough to provide some background on the project in comments:
I was surfing to see what people were saying about the script, and stumbled across this site. For the record, Michael and I wrote the script (at the time titled “Whales on Ice”) almost ten years ago, and it has been sitting on a shelf for a pretty long time. It’s based on a wonderful book by Tom Rose about the event. We wrote the screenplay as a satirical indie comedy, which is why it probably didn’t sell originally. Two months ago, we took out all the cursing and two sex scenes and overnight it magically became a family movie… not kidding. Warner Bros. scooped it up with no idea of what it once was, only what they thought it could be.
“Almost ten years ago.” Script sat collecting dust for a decade. Then the writers excised F-words and boobs, and voila — a family script that gets bought and is now a go picture.
There you go! Proof scripts can come back from the ‘dead.’
Re the spec script market. Yes, it sucks right now. We’re on track for perhaps 50–60 sales this year, maybe even less. That’s a low number. You can choose to obsess over that. Or you can heed the words of veteran screenwriter and TV Jack Sowards.
Back in the late 80s, there were several online message boards for Hollywood writers. Jack was on several of them and that was how I got to know him. Writers being writers — passionate people who know how to use words — there were the inevitable flame wars. Jack was always a voice of reason, a Mentor figure due to his disposition and the fact that he had the accumulation of professional wisdom from working in the business since the early 60s.
Whenever anybody would lament how bad business was, how slow the spec market was, how hard it was to land a gig, Jack would inevitably post something like this:
“That’s Hollywood. It runs in cycles. There are ups. There are downs. That is the only constant about the entertainment business. A writer understands and accepts that fact, then does the only thing they can do in response: Write.”
I must have read a variation of that post by Jack dozens of times, always addressed at younger, more anxious writers — myself included — to give them some perspective.
Sadly Jack died in 2007, but let’s take a moment to have a run at his [paraphrased] words again to let his wisdom ‘live’ a bit here in 2010:
“That’s Hollywood. It runs in cycles. There are ups. There are downs. That is the only constant about the entertainment business. A writer understands and accepts that fact, then does the only thing they can do to combat it: Write.”
It’s always better to create content, always better to have a new spec script than not.
* The spec script can sell.
* The spec script may not sell, but can get you an OWA gig.
* The spec script may not sell, but can get you representation.
* The spec script may not sell, but 10 years later you can take out F-words and boobs, and end up with a greenlit family movie starring Drew Barrymore.
All of those can happen — but only if you write the damn script.
Chances are a few years from now, people will be all aflutter about how busy the spec script market is. But whether business goes up or down, writers will always have the power to do what we do — write.
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