THR: “Market for Original Screenplays Heating Up”
We have already dug into the subject here, but it’s interesting to see it picked up in the trades. Here are some key excerpts from today’s article in THR:
It’s a sign of just how far the spec market has fallen that even a glimmer of activity has sparked hope among screenwriters of a resurgence, as nearly all the major studios are suddenly spending money on original material.
“It’s all on a case-by-case basis, and it depends on the material and on the size,” says Gersh lit agent Greg Pedicin, who repped the recent sale of Chris Bullett’s The Nameless to Valhalla Motion Pictures. “But I haven’t seen this in more than four years, since before the writers strike.”
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At best, recent sales have created a sense of optimism that there is more willingness on the part of studios to invest in emerging writers.
“For this new generation of voices, spec sales are the start of their careers,” says Anonymous Content manager Bard Dorros, whose client Max Werner’s first screenplay sale, the Halloween comedy Fun Size, is being made by Paramount. “When specs weren’t selling, it was tougher to launch talented writers.”
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“I don’t know that we’re out of the woods — or if the woods have just transformed into weeds — but the good news is that people are not acting day to day out of fear as much as they did maybe six months ago,” says producer Mark Gordon, whose Source Code, a spec written by Ben Ripley, had its world premiere at South by Southwest. “The studio heads were so frozen because they didn’t quite know what to do. The DVD market was going to hell; they were figuring out what was going to replace it; the costs were going up. They were able to rely on their older development and the things that they had in their trunks, but now it’s caught up with them, and they need to start buying things.”
I’ve covered all of the spec deals mentioned in the article — you can do a search of the site for “spec script sale” to see them. Also the article mentions John Swetnam, a first-timer who kindly did a GITS Q&A which you can read here.
Is the spec market rebounding? Signs look good.
Takeaway: Finish that spec script!
For more of the THR article, go here.