Spec Script Sale: Untitled Amy Welsh

Focus Features acquires untitled Amy Walsh spec script. From Deadline:

Amy Welsh, who most recently was supervising producer on the ABC Family series Bunheads, and who has written on sitcoms from Roseanne to It’s Like You Know and Men Behaving Badly. They [Focus] are keeping the logline under wraps.

Welsh is repped by ICM Partners and Benderspink.

By my count, this is the 26th spec script sale of 2014.

There were 48 spec script sales year-to-date in 2013.

In the 6+ years I have been running this site, this is the single longest period of time in which there wasn’t a reported spec script sale: April 17-June 4, 2014. Literally the entire month of May: 0 sales. Hence the precipitous drop from last year to this.

What does this mean?

First, there may have been other spec deals in that time period which were not made known publicly or may be revealed later. This happens. Tracking spec script deals is an inexact science.

But let’s assume there is a considerable drop in spec script sales this year. It is not without precedent. Here is a list of spec script sales aggregated in The Definitive Spec Script Sales List (1991–2013):

1991: 28
1992: 40
1993: 89
1994: 101
1995: 173
1996: 155
1997: 141
1998: 110
1999: 83
2000: 92
2001: 101
2002: 114
2003: 90
2004: 75
2005: 58
2006: 60
2007: 64
2008: 87
2009: 67
2010: 55
2011: 110
2012: 99
2013: 100

After hitting a low point of 55 deals in 2010, the last three years (2011–2013) has been a strong period for sales, averaging 103 per year.

Perhaps buyers have full development slates right now. Maybe the type of material bubbling up through script development circles isn’t hitting buyers’ needs. Or maybe the stories just aren’t all that good. Could this lull in spec script sale activity somehow be tied to the current obsession with TV? Maybe the planet Jupiter is in retrograde.

It’s hard to make any definitive assessment short term. For writers, it means this: As always, we have to strive to write the very best stories we can. There will be competition. The buying market will go up and down. But a truly great script will always find its way. 

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