Year 1: Black List & Go Into The Story — The Definitive Spec Script Sales List [1991–2012]

As part of our week long celebration of the 1-year partnership between the Black List and Go Into The Story, I thought it would be interesting to review some of the more notable initiatives, series and posts that emerged during the last 12 months.

This next project emerged from over 20 years of me bookmarking, copying, and even clipping actual newsprint reports of spec script sales. I amassed all this stuff for a few reasons. (1) I sold a spec script so I’m naturally interested in the subject. (2) I have a habit of checking for spec script sales to keep up with that segment of the acquisition market. (3) Part of my psyche is an anal retentive Air Force brat who likes numbers.

In my mind, I always hoped to do something with that data, but had no resources other than myself and as always pressed for time, so it seemed like a “shitty pipe dream” to quote Red in The Shawshank Redemption.

Then this year, I swapped a few emails with Franklin: Do you think there might be some value in creating a list of spec script sales for the last two decades? Franklin responded with an enthusiastic yes. Thus with the incredible help of Black List interns Mikal McLendon and Evelyn Yves, and with the permission of the excellent online resource DoneDealPro to reference their data as confirmation of our information for the years 1999–2010, we put together The Definitive Spec Script Sales List [1991–2012].

Since the time of posting that list, year by year, I have received several additions from screenwriters, adding sales unreported by the trades or other public sources.

In addition, many GITS readers did some heavy lifting in tabulating things like sales by genre, sales by studio, and so on which you can review in each of the posts per year.

We are working on putting together some sort of graphic interface meets database thing, so look for that down the road.

In the meantime, you can access every year of the list, representing over 1,000 spec script sales in the last 2 decades here.

Selling a spec script is a big deal. Writers who achieve that deserve to have their initiative and creativity duly noted. But these numbers also tell a story: What Hollywood was interested in year to year, from story types to genre, who was buying and who was not.

And frankly if you’re a smart screenwriter who buys into the idea of ‘similar but different,’ those 1,000+ loglines could be an excellent resource to jump-start your story concept process.

The Definitive Spec Script Sales List [1991–2012] is a happy result of the partnership between the Black List and Go Into The Story. Tomorrow: Another one.

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