ABSTRACT
The writer is indispensable, yet not always valued — at least in the entertainment world. Sam Goldwyn, in one of his classic aphorisms, is reported to have called scriptwriters “ schmucks with Underwoods. ” An Underwood, for those who have no cultural memory about this, was a make of manual typewriter. So you’re a schmuck with a laptop. Robert Altman’s brilliant fi lm The Player (1992) gives you an idea of what life as a writer in Hollywood might be like, even though it is edged with satire and more injokes about the industry than most of the audience would understand. In the movie, a studio executive makes an interesting statement that goes something like, “ My studio accepts a thousand submissions a year and puts twelve of them into production. ” There are probably no formal statistics to support this, but it sounds reasonably accurate. Multiply that by several studios, and you can estimate the number of screenplay submissions in any given year. Let’s say 10,000 as a round number. That’s a lot of
competition. Of those, many are bought or optioned, but few are ever actually produced. So income from writing, as I know from personal experience, does not necessarily lead to screen credits. There is no way of knowing how effective or systematic the selection process is. Most studios and independent producers have readers who read all submissions and write a report that often determines the fate of the particular script. This hidden process causes much heartache and frustration and maybe prevents quite a few brilliant but idiosyncratic scripts from being produced. Every time you see a bad movie, you wonder how it got into production. Although people make mistakes in judgment, we like to assume that overall, the best scripts eventually rise to the top. No one intends to make a bad fi lm although many producers make low-budget product for the video market that never gets a theatrical release.
