Screenwriting : Screenwriting industry inclusiveness by Jeffrey Knepper

It's low risk to read a screenplay by a noobie. If it's bad, no big deal. If it's great, lots of potential upside.

The industry isn’t open at the upper business levels. We think we are part of the business, but we supply material that is used by the business.

In some segments we are more involved. TV requires more writer involvement. But the business is still buffered from us by showrunners and producers. Yep, some people can be writers and have those roles as well.

If you can write well, it’s actually a plus if you come from another field and bring that knowledge with you. It can add verisimilitude to your scripts. That’s interesting to some producers. The world of medicine, real estate, restaurants for example. You still need to be a strong writer.

You need new talent to engage with new audiences.

I'm not so sure it is actually that open across the board. I mean, 99% of it is located in Hollywood for a start. In my own country, if you're not in London, and from certain schools, you're pretty much dead in the water. There's a lot of performative words leveraging issues for PR purposes with little to no action to back it up.

Diverse creatives have typically cut their own path and fought their way in, often by creating new niche markets in the process.

At a script reading level however, I agree with the above. It's low commitment and people are often looking for stories from people outside of their own circles.

Maybe you need to define "open"... cause everyone has their own meaning. For me it is about money/income- getting paid your worth or more than the average whoever doing the same as you.

For example on corporate movies, is there a secret algorithm number employers use to pay talent- how did the co-screenwriter (female) of Crazy Rich Asian movie make 10x LESS than male co-writer? Or why do Show Biz newspapers & critics specifically target & blame the female director of Captain Marvel 2 for low box office numbers?

Anyways, ppl mentioned, this occupation (like many jobs) is still the old boys club of networking & personal recommendations

Hey M LaVoie, I could not disagree with you more. Your entire diatribe is one big machete, chop, chop, chopping away. Nobody will give a Recommend...? Really...? Everybody lives in fear that their opinion may come back to hurt them & their career...? Uh, are you for real...? So they only top out at Consider, what...? C'mon. First off, let me just say that I don't trust many people who don't put a picture to their profile, and you've got a black circle for your photo. A smidge of a bio wouldn't hurt matters either. I've heard you before, LaVoie, "Less is more" until you have things in motion or some... stuff like that. Please. Put a damn pic and bio up, especially if you're gonna talk this stuff.

You also have a great entertainment lawyer, yes, yes, and you had to prove yourself to him. I remember from the other thread. Mr. Esq. made you submit material before taking you on. Uh, I'm here in LA. No entertainment lawyer I know of -- and I know more than a few -- would ever make a writer "prove" him or herself to the lawyer. Why's that...? Because you're already going to be vetted by the manager or agent who calls them for you and says, "Hey, Karl Austen, I just signed a great new writer, he needs a great killer lawyer. Are you down?" Entertainment lawyers in LA are not taking calls or doing meetings with unknown writers who want to hire them. Or reading them. They read the contract that the studio or the other buyer sends over. That's their reading list.

But I digress. What makes you such an expert, M LaVoie? Please, do tell. Personally, I've had numerous people in this business make referrals on my behalf -- and I didn't know them all that well, either. Maybe I wasn't a complete stranger, but it wasn't far off from it. And one of those individuals was an A-list screenwriter with a first name of Zak. Yeah, it's a tough, tough business, LaVoie, but contrary to your view, there are plenty of people who, when they find a great piece of material, or when they find a new talent they might feel strongly about... they're not afraid to recommend. Or to even assist with a referral if the situation is right. And I speak from personal, in the trenches, experience. So to the brand new writers, and even the not so brand new writers out here, it's not all locked up and walled off as M LaVoie would have you believe. Hollywood is a meritocracy. And Stage 32 is a prime, shining example of this. All the executives and managers and agents who have become part of Stage 32, are not walled off and afraid to say something is great when it is.. They'd love nothing more than to find that great material. That's why they're friggin' here. So write something great in 2024, people. The buyers are here. Literally.

To add... 6 months ago, I read a logline to a feature script that had won second place in a contest. I thought it was hilarious. I reached out to the writer on Coverfly and asked him if I could read the script. He said sure and sent it to me. The script was one of the funniest, most clever comedies I've read in forever. He was a WGA writer who had moved out of LA, and was mostly producing now. He didn't have a rep. I liked his script so much, I emailed four or five managers and got him 3 reads with Zero Gravity, Circle of Confusion and one other, I forget who. Now, I wasn't concerned one bit that I was "putting my neck on the line" for a writer I didn't even know. And I knew all those managers pretty well, too. They're either going to like the script enough to consider or rep the writer, or not. Turns out, nobody bit or signed him. Hey, that's how it goes. A couple managers really thought it was a very funny script, but that's not always going to get you signed.

But here's the beautiful thing that happened out of me offering to tell a few people that I thought his script was pretty damn great... he asked what I was working on. And when I told him about a biopic I was finishing up, he asked me if he could read it. That turned into this WGA writer/producer becoming my mentor and personal studio executive for the better part of the next month to 6 weeks, where he asked all the right questions, made me really think and work hard, and helped me refine and hone that already pretty good script, into something that went a whole lot deeper and became a whole lot better than it was. And IF I manage to get this movie made, a lot of that success will be traced back to me being willing to help someone else... which led to that person helping me. So, Bill Kellman, if you're poking around these parts,. thanks again. Grateful...

M LaVoie, that's not how I've found it on the industry side. People recommend scripts all the time and other industry members know that taste is subjective. I've had scripts recommended to me that I've not liked but I know the person who recommended it only meant the best for me and the writer. I'd happily read anything else they put my way.

At a coverage level, I see it like following a critic. You heed the advice of those you know your taste aligns with and turn a blind eye to those that don't. Again, it's all down to subjectivity.

At the level of running Script Revolution, on which certain coverage services are considered reputable, and I add all the accolades myself, there are writers out there getting recommends, and there's a quantifiable difference between a reader choosing that over a consider. As above, it's up to the person browsing the scripts to decide how much weight they give the endorsement.

screenwriting to me is like awesome food , people will line up for hours in a old run down shack until its sold out...people will consider your terms and conditions to have access for awesome scripts

CJ Walley would you say half of success is driven by subjectivity and finding your tribe before pitching

Jeffrey Knepper I've been saying for a long time that everything comes back to alignment; alignment with industry members, alignment with financiers, alignment with distributors, alignment with an audience.

So many people spend their time fretting that they won't be accepted universally while they bastardise their material in the hope it's objectively good. Worse still, so many others actively encourage that mentality with their rulesets.

You can't standout and play it safe at the same time. You have to put yourself out there and aim for alignment with people on your wavelength. Dulling yourself down increases the chances those people are going to blow by you.

It's just like dating, You need to be the most authentic version of yourself you can and lean into situations where you're most likely to run into the kind of person where mutual appreciation is going to happen. A lot of aspiring writers are instead choosing to try and get the perfect haircut, wear the perfect clothes, and rehearse their perfect pickup lines before going speed dating in the hope of finding true love with every person they meet.

The crazy thing is, in any conversation about this, all the people making films will be saying the same as me, yet there will be twice as many amateurs and gurus advising the complete opposite. It's painful.

I like brightly optimistic Jeffrey Knepper. That said, very, very few get lucky quickly, or even lucky at all. A manager at Circle of Confusion, who I think may be one of the nicest people I've ever known, put things across with the perfect dose of reality check when he said the following to me not long ago, "It's a game of attrition, DT. You've gotta stay in. It's the only way, man." So... refuse to be part of the attrition, be optimistic, and keep going forward.

CJ Walley agreed...cant be everything to everyone bc ultimately it comes down to the one

Yes CJ Walley. I just had this back and forth with someone on S32, a female, whom I instantly liked because she was unapologetically herself. Unique. She has a POV. If she channels who she is into her work, and writes from a place that reflects what makes her her, chances are she's on the right path to doing something cool that may get noticed and appreciated. Don't chase the coverage. ALL coverage will have something in it you can benefit from. Use it to help you and the writing. But realize all the various opinions are just that. As RB often mentions, we are all our own CEO. Be you and be in charge. A South African writer/producer did an Ask Me Anything the other day, "Subz." I'm paraphrasing, but Subz said something like, "Put your unique fingerprint on it. There's only one you." He's 100% right. And he wrote a damn good action movie for Netflix on his first time out. Fingerprint + lucky = It happened.

And Jeffrey Knepper, target specifically. If you have an urban comedy and you want to pitch it to an exec, you can find exactly that type of exec who has that wheelhouse on Stage 32.

And speaking of urban comedy, let me share this with everybody. There's a new OWA for a golf-centric comedy that Cedric The Entertainer could star in. Well, I'm crap out of luck, because I don't have one, but it just so happens that my next door neighbors -- The Williams Bros. -- are Cedric's cousins, and they grew up with him in St. Louis. So I ran into one of the brothers as I wheeled the trash cans out last night, "Hey, Keith, so I hear Cedric wants to do a golf comedy. I sure wish I had one, I'd be walking it straight over to you!" After a little more chit chat, I can assure you that Cedric would like nothing more than to be on a golf course for a couple months... and making a movie, to boot. So if you've got a good, funny Golf comedy and you're part of the Writer's Room, go for it and good luck!