Realities of The Screenplay Trade

THE PLAYWRITING SEMINARS > FILM > PLAYS vs. FILM > REALITIES >

'. . . I'd been working and working [on the screenplay], and I was looking forward to it actually being fun. It's not fun unless it gets made. And unless it gets made, you're never going to feel legitimized. An unproduced script is not publishable, and you can't get a bunch of your actor friends to put it on as an Off-Broadway show. A film script is good for only one thing. Otherwise, it's dead. And in many cases you don't even own it.'

-- Ted Tally

On the other hand, screenwriting is a fine way to pay the mortgage. And respect for your craft as a writer is possible if you've had a play successfully produced in New York or by a major regional theatre.

It's a world of its own, though it borrows a lot from the theatre where it began life a hundred years ago.

But a caution about those visions of wealth you're seeing -- If paying that mortgage is your only motivation, you'll probably never make this work. It's a demanding discipline and you've got to be fascinated by the idea of Visual Storytelling to do this without setting yourself up for double doses of Prozac.

The competition in the U.S. screenplay industry is ferocious. The Writers Guild of America registers some 30,000 new screenplays, treatments, and related material each year. Hollywood studios produce about 100 feature films a year [the optimistic estimate is about 300].

And when all else fails, there's always . . .