Spec script as asset

We tend to focus on the spec scripts as sales and of course that is the dream, isn’t it? Write a spec. Sell it for a million bucks. Move to Hollywood. Start dating Ryan Gosling or Emma Stone.

But there are multiple ways a spec script can benefit a writer:

* It can get you representation.

* You can use it as a writing sample to meet producers in Hollywood.

* You can use it as a writing sample to go up for writing assignments.

* It can get optioned.

* Even if it doesn’t sell, it exists as a title in your back list, an asset that someday can pay off. Like this:

Graham King’s GK Films, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way and “Paranormal Activity” exec producer Steven Schneider are teaming to produce the psychological thriller “Home.”

Dennis Iliadis directs from a script by Adam Alleca.

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“Home” follows an unstable young man staying at his dead father’s house. As odd phenomena begin to occur, he struggles to determine whether he’s having a nervous breakdown or his father is haunting him.

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Project was originally optioned in 2005 by Wes Craven through his and Marianne Maddalena’s Craven/Maddalena Films banner.

Alleca wrote the first draft of “Home” when he was an intern at Eli Roth’s Raw Nerve shingle.

It’s 2005. Alleca is an intern. He writes the spec “Home.” It gets optioned. The option lapses. But the script is good enough to make the very first Black List (2005). By virtue of that, its reputation, and presumably good representatives who never gave up promoting the project, here it is, 6 years later, and the script is set up to get produced.

Again the point: Even if a script doesn’t sell the first time around, it is still an asset, a title in your back list that can become a go project. Yet another rationale to write spec scripts.