A couple of weeks ago, I did an interview with screenwriter William Mager, who created the show, “Reunion.” William detailed his pursuit of becoming a produced writer, which involved working in various forms of production. He was a researcher, wrote short VT inserts, and directed factual TV, amongst other things.
Years later, after he had written Reunion, he ran into actor Joe Sims while picking up his daughter at school. Joe had once done voice over work in a factual show William had worked on. Joe asked him what he was up to and William told him about Reunion. Joe said he should apply for Philip Shelley’s 4Screenwriting scheme.
William took the advice, applied to the prestigious program, and got in! When Joe found out, he asked if he could read the script. He loved it and sent it to his partner, who was high up at Warp Films. From there, the project came together and turned into a TV show.
Now, because William is such a nice guy and the interview was with me, everybody was very cool in how they responded. But I could still sense some writers low-key disqualifying the achievement because William had known somebody in the business. YEAH he got his show made BUT it’s because he knew Joe List.
It got me thinking how screenwriters are obsessed with this idea of the virgin Hollywood birth. They don’t consider anything a real achievement unless it happened to a true unknown with zero connections. You had to be a grocery store bagger who struck up a conversation with a producer and you happened to have a script in your backpack and the producer said, “Actually, I have some time tonight. I’ll read your script.” They read it, loved it, and said, “This is now my number one priority! I’m handing it to Chris Hemsworth tomorrow!”
Nora Garrett, the writer of After the Hunt, has gotten a lot of attention due to the fact that this was her first ever screenplay. And it sold! It not only sold but got Hollywood royalty, Julia Roberts, attached. Not long after that, it snagged one of the buzziest directors in town.
However, if you read deep enough into After The Hunt’s origin story, you got to the point where she says she handed the script to a friend who knew an agent. That was enough to discredit the sale for the Yeah But Crew. She had a friend who knew an agent!!?? That’s a free ticket into Hollywood as far as they were concerned.
More recently, you have the story of “Crush,” the near 7-figure spec sale that I reviewed Tuesday. John Fischer was an executive at Temple Hill but was nervous about showing the script to his peers (I guess admitting that you’re a screenwriter is the most embarrassing thing one can do in a Hollywood office). So he invented a pseudonym and put the script up on the Black List, where amateur scripts compete for reads. The script quickly became the most buzz-worthy on the site, turning it into the ultimate anti “Yeah But” story. A person who had all the contacts in the world shunned them and got his script noticed the old-fashioned way – pitting it against hundreds of other screenplays.
But the “Yeah But” mafia wasn’t impressed. YEAH, he got buzz anonymously. BUT it was the company he worked for that ultimately purchased the script. Just another Hollywood guy using his connections to get his script sold.
Why do I bring these stories up?
Because “Yeah But” is ruining your life, man! It’s one of the worst ways to look at the business.
Let’s go back to William Mager because I find the “Yeah But” label used on him the most ludicrous. William spent TWENTY YEARS trying to be a professional writer before he finally got his break. And the actor who eventually helped him was someone he had only an informal relationship with and who didn’t even help him at first! He did the classic shake-off where you pawn the help off on someone else. “Oh, you should go try this.” It was only after William succeeded at getting into the program that Joe asked to read the script.
Even so, if you’ve been at screenwriting for any significant amount of time, you should have connections. I’m not talking about big connections. But you should know people who are, at the very least, peripherally involved in the business. It could be a gaffer. It could be a friend who knows a manager. It could be some retired guy who worked as an entertainment lawyer (my first contact).
If you don’t have these connections, you haven’t sent your script out to enough people. Cause you gain contacts by making people aware that you are a screenwriter. And you can’t do that if you never show anybody your work. I guarantee that if you’re sending your script out to 10-15 new non-industry people a year (which is a low number), you’re going to gain access to people in the industry.
Because if you believe that the only way to make it in Hollywood is through this mythical virgin birth, you’re setting yourself up for failure. You’re not going to be Andrew Kevin Walker, whose spec, “Seven,” sat collecting dust for months in a producer’s slush pile, before an assistant reluctantly read it one night and fell in love with it.
Those success stories are built on luck. You need to build your success story around a plan. And the best plan is to widen the network of people who know you’re a screenwriter as much as possible, so that when your screenwriting skillset catches up to your screenwriting ambition, you have people you can send your script to who are either in Hollywood or who know people in Hollywood.
Look. I get it. There’s something warm and safe about “Yeah But.” It allows you to dismiss other success stories so that you don’t feel so bad about your lack of success. But I’m telling you, it’s hurting your mindset. Because you’re saying to yourself, “I have no agency over my success. The only people who make it in this business are people with industry contacts and I don’t have those so I don’t have a shot.”
How do you think your brain responds to that when it’s time to write a new screenplay? Are you going to be excited? Are you going to push through when writer’s block hits? Of course not. You’ve already convinced yourself that success is not possible. So why even try?
Going forward, if you encounter a Yeah But scenario, don’t allow it to discount the achievement. Try to see the positive side of it. If someone the writer knew gave it to an agent, say to yourself, “I should be trading my scripts with more writers because one of them might know an agent.” Or simply say, “That was smart by that writer to take that job in documentary research because it allowed him to be around actors doing voice over. Are there things I could be doing to be around more people in the industry?”
And don’t tell me you live in another country so you can’t make connections. Dude, I started this when the internet was barely a thing. You truly had to be in LA to have any shot at becoming a writer. That’s just not true anymore. You literally have access to 1000 times the number of industry people that I would’ve had access to when I learned about screenwriting. Sorry but you don’t get that excuse.
What are some actionable things you can start doing? The first and easiest is to consistently trade scripts or script pages with other writers. Let that be your first network. And you can find those writers right here in the Scriptshadow comments section. Or over on Reddit.
Become an active member of online screenwriting communities, such as this one. There are commenters on this site who are so well-known that if they posted a script right now, 25 writers would want to read it. And I’m guessing a couple of those writers know someone in the industry. If they loved your script and thought it was right up their contact’s alley, of course they would send it to them. This can’t happen if you stay in your little bubble and never share your work or connect with others.
Post your pages on Reddit. Engage with all the showdowns here at Scriptshadow. These are slow but steady ways to keep moving forward. And, unfortunately, it is a slow process. It takes time to build a name. First it’s getting a few fellow writers to enjoy your stuff. And then that network expands as each script you write gets better.
If you really truly want to be the lone wolf screenwriter who breaks into Hollywood with that virgin birth, then only enter contests. I just don’t think that’s smart. Contests give you deadlines that motivate you. And tracking your placement in contests is a good way to measure where you’re at. But you know who entered a contest? Nora Garrett. With After the Hunt. She entered Bluecat a year before she gave it to her friend with the agent. You know where After the Hunt finished in Bluecat that year? It didn’t get out of the first round. In fact, the reader who read it hated it so much that he eviscerated the script in the feedback that all Bluecat writers get for their entries.
So which of these avenues sounds more prosperous to you? Sending your scripts to contests where you’re at the whim of each reader’s individual taste? Or trying to build a network that it going to support and help you get the script into the right hands?
I’ll wrap this up by summarizing something Nora Garrett said about mindsets. She said that, in researching her main character, Alma, she looked into liars. And one of the things she found was that the most successful people in the world are the people who lie to themselves. Who tell themselves that they will be successful, even if the odds say they won’t.
I don’t like the concept of lying to yourself. But I agree with the foundation of that premise. If you believe, you have a shot. If you don’t believe, you don’t. So which one should you choose? Every time you focus on mindsets like “Yeah But” you are feeding the “I don’t believe this is possible” dragon. I want you to permanently slay that dragon. And I want you to start now.
So get to it. :)
