Screenwriting : Anyone know any good places for writers to connect with low budget filmmakers? by Arran McDermott

I think you're going about this backward, Arran. It's not about just posting to a job board, it's about networking. How do you become a known entity? How do people learn to trust you as a writer, or better, get to know that you have the skills? RB always speaks about the importance of winning champions and as someone who has been around this business for quite some time, I can tell you that he is absolutely right. If I put you in a room of 1000 low budget filmmakers today, they still wouldn't know who you are or what you're about. Everything comes from relationships! Start by networking here every day. Set a goal to create 5 new relationships here a day. By the end of the month, you can potentially have 150 people you are building a relationship with who may want to read your work and go promote you as a writer to someone in their network. Build your relationships brick by brick.

^good advice

That's one hell of a post, James. Completely agree on every point.

They are at coffee houses in Los Angeles, hanging out or working behind the counter. Urth caffe, WeHo Aroma cafe, Studio city Priscillas, Burbank

Thanks Jonah and RB!

Inktip and VPF are great sites to market low-budget screenplays to producers who make low-budget films. Pitch sessions here are a great place to pitch screenplays, but it would be really helpful to know the budget ranges that the producers are seeking scripts for before committing to a pitch session. There are also a ton of sites for low-budget filmmakers. Google "websites for low-budget filmmakers" and you'll get a lot of returns. indiewire.com and indietalk.com are two of my favorites. Good luck, Arran!

I've had a lot of luck w VPF. Several read requests which have gone on to email convos and phone meetings. No options yet, but I'm much closer than I've ever been.

truth is, if you want to connect with low budget filmmakers, you should be travelling to film festivals around the country or internationally. That's where the filmmakers get together. Yes, that's not inexpensive. But it's going to be the best way to maximize networking and get your name out there.

Hey Bill, we do list the budget ranges when applicable, but honestly what we hear a lot from executives at studios and higher-end prod co's is that "we can make any story fit any budget". The idea is that if they like the story, they'll develop it further to fit the budget they're aiming for (be it higher or lower). For indie producers, as Danny said film festivals are a great spot. We also host indie producers that come in looking for material anywhere from under $10MM to under $1MM. What I like about us over VPF is our skype pitching. It's one thing to be one of a hundred query letters sent to an executive that reads them over with a brisk "pass" or "request"... but it's another get face-to-face with the executive and have 8 minutes to pitch your material and answer any questions they may have. On the same note, getting two full pages to pitch your project over a one-pager or query letter gives you a lot more room to maneuver. You can go deeper into your story and characters, and you can get into what really sets your story apart as something to be made. What also sets us apart is that we follow up with the executives. If they request your material, we don't let them disappear and essentially ghost the writer. We follow up and see what they thought of the script and if they'd like to meet. So yeah, two different paths towards the same end goal. I like to think of ours as a more intimate, one-on-one affair vs something more "mass marketed".

Erik - nice insights. I've probably been the biggest booster of Stage32 Pitch Sessions over the year and a half that I've been a member. Any entity that offers writers legitimate exposure to managers, agents or people that make or that seek to make films is okay in my book.

Bill, sure, if they're people who can actually do something with a project.

@ Danny. Now you are cutting out 95% of the producers in Hollywood. lol.

Danny - that's why I said "legitimate". I'm sure that over the last ten years or so we've both seen dozens of entities enter and exit this Screenplay Marketing space without any measurable success for writers - even though those entities sold the dream pretty well during their runs. At least for awhile.

What James said, plus: go to film festivals, check out local college film classes, do things that put you in contact with people who make films. There is someone in your area making films now (there's someone everywhere making films), you just need to look for them. When I was a nobody in my home town, I had a big car (ex police car... with a bullet hole from an officer's accidental firearms discharge) and offered to drive to the film festival in the big city miles and miles away... and ended up with a car load of film fanatics, including a freelance entertainment writer who had just interviewed Spielberg! I had no idea this guy lived in my home town. Heck, I was going to the film festival anyway - this way other people chipped in for gas.

"we can make any story fit any budget" - This is completely wrong (whether they say this or not). They're probably just not aware of the problems they're dumping on production... or they have zero idea what makes a film low budget. The two most important elements are number of locations (that's slug line locations) and the number of speaking roles. Every new location is a crew move, and that's time consuming while the entire cast & crew is on the clock. Even a move from the living room of a house to the bed room of that same house means moving lights and equipment which takes time away from production while everyone is being paid. This is why when you watch a low budget movie like THE GIFT or RESERVOIR DOGS or any of those horror flicks, they mostly take place at a single central location. How much screentime in DOGS takes place in the warehouse? How much of THE GIFT takes place in the house? Low budget producers want contained stories rather than travelling stories and you can't turn one into the other without killing it. There's a 70s movie called OLD BOYFRIENDS written by Paul Schrader about a woman who tracks down every man she has ever slept with to try to make sense of her messed up romantic life.... That's a travelling story - not only a bunch of different places where each old boyfriend lives now, but all of the travelling scenes to get from one to the other. Expensive. For some reason, people think road trips movies are low budget - nope! So you want a story where most of it takes place at a single location, with a handful of secondary locations which are reused throughout the story (so 3 or 4 scenes in the same secondary location so that you can "amortize it"). These secondary locations are where you put your "confined cameos" - a role that is confined to a single location written for a "star"... and you want most of that character's scenes to be at the same place within that location so that it can be shot out quickly. So, think of a quiet neighborhood bar as a secondary location and then make the bartender an awesome character who stands at the same place behind the bar and gives advice to the protag. You cast that with a name and shoot it out in a day. The rest of the bar scenes might take a couple more days, but that character's work can be shot in a day. You want it to be a quiet bar because a crowded one costs more money. Those extras. You not only have to pay them for being in the movie, you have to feed them and maybe costume them. You want no big extra scenes and maybe one scene with a handful of extras. If your characters go to a concert, you need to fill a concert arena and pay for music rights. If they go to a quiet bar in the afternoon, that's only a handful of extras. It's good to balance out locations, have a big outdoor location to make up for all of that time indoors at your central location (unless your central location is outdoors - like BLAIR WITCH - and then you might want an interior location). You want a low budget movie to look big. Every speaking role costs money. Every movie these days is SAG signatory, and even though there are some great SAG low budget contracts a producer can take advantage of, you still have to feed and costume and provide drivers and do all kinds of other things that cost money. Every cast member gets a BluRay of the film - so the more speaking roles the more danged BluRays you need to give out. Plus, SAG means H&W funds and residuals and all kinds of other costs. So the fewer speaking roles the better. This helps your script because if you really have to justify the story purpose of every single character, you get rid of the useless ones right away. Now here's the weird thing - it costs the same at Redbox for a big $250m Hollywood blockbuster as it does for a low budget flick... so both must deliver the same level of entertainment. I call this "dog juice" - every movie needs the same amount of entertainment "juice" no matter what the budget. So a low budget script is often packed with more twists and big emotional moments and big genre moments than a bigger budget film. The recent movie that I use as an example of this is THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED - 3 characters, 2 rooms (plus a bathroom) and no shortage of twists and turns and suspense. It's packed with entertainment. You never notice that it's low budget. That's the key - to deliver a script that has the same entertainment value of a big budget movie without the big budget. Here's the weird part: an explosion is done with CGI these days, and doesn't cost as much as an additional location. So it's number of locations and number of speaking roles that really matters.

Thanks for the advice everyone. I guess I'm just impatient to see my stories told on the screen but it sounds like even in low budget filmmaking it's still mainly about networking and building a good reputation. I did direct a short film several years back, so I know I can shoot my own scripts if i need to, but that was before I had kids and the guy I worked with has pretty much given up on filmmaking. So now I'm looking into other way of collaborating without having to travel and be away from my family.

Hey Arran! I've made many friends by organizing S32 Meetups and cross-promoting with local FilmMaking Groups on FB. Try South Carolina FilmMakers, etc.

@ William I think you're confused by what I mean. For instance, you could easily make the story for RESERVOIR DOGS bigger - simply film the bank robbery in full. Bam, higher budget - same story. Similarly, you could have even made SAVING PRIVATE RYAN smaller. Cut out the opening invasion and final battle and bam, smaller budget - same story. EX MACHINA could have been a bigger budget, just move his interactions with the AI into the outside world instead of a chamber and bam, bigger budget - same story. That's what development is all about. They see a story, determine how much they'll need to make it, and then adjust the script to fit. It's not about "killing" the story so much as it's about making it different, and "different" doesn't mean "worse". If you were brought into a meeting at Warners and they said "we love the script, but we want to develop it more to make it bigger" I highly, highly, highly, (highly) suggest you not respond with "no, because you're going to kill the story".

I've had a pile of meetings with producers at Warner Bros, and no one ever said "make it bigger", instead they loved that it was affordable because they could cast bigger stars. My ideas were big, but the screenplays were written so that they could be shot inexpensively. But what kills the movie is going in the other direction: Let's say we decided to do the lower budget version of OLD BOYFRIENDS - she has to visit 7 very different men... but now they all have to live in the same apartment house. What are the odds of that? You've just developed the story into crap, and there's no real way to take a travelling story and make it low budget. Removing the opening scene and battle scenes from SPR are the obvious thing, but basic film production is all about scheduling which means number of locations... what, does SPR take place all in the same field or forest? If you look at war films made on a budget, you'll notice that they are built around a central location: HELL IS FOR HEROES is about a rag-tag platoon defending a specific strategic point against a whole bunch of Nazi soldiers. SAHARA is about a similar rag tag group defending the only oasis in the desert from Rommel's army. I could go on and on, but low budget wear movies are always stories about defending a specific location. STEEL HELMET is another one - but the Korean war. The basic type of story needs to revolve around a central location for it to work on a low budget. I have a great deal of experience in this.