The Business

The fastest route to selling a script and getting it made is to have a concept that gets people excited before they ever read the screenplay.

I was back in Los Angeles for the first time in eight months. My first priority was to sit and talk with my agents. This is what we discussed.

Not all directors are created equal. While it's always great to hear kind things about our work, always know exactly how and why someone moves your project further toward production.

It does not matter whether you start with the project or the goal itself. What's important is that they are in agreement.

This week is a different kind of development challenge. What to do with notes from friends, family, other writers, coverage, contests, and any other input you get from the various sources.

Getting representation is a process, like most things, dominated by economics. That is, the allocation of limited resources. Yours and theirs.

THE QUEEN MARY started its WGA credit arbitration this week. Like my last film, WINCHESTER, the arbitration was automatic since an “executive” wrote a draft of the script (usually, a writer has to dispute the proposed credits for arbitration to begin.)

I have learned quite a few things over these years; unfortunately, almost always from making mistakes. One thing that has stuck with me is the importance of having a young agent on your team, especially when you’re just starting out.

As you can tell by the title, this is my story. There is actionable advice here, I promise, but I need to go back a few years because where I failed is just as important as where I succeeded. So let me start back in college…

The second script I ever sold was to a studio with an A-List actor attached through his producing deal on the lot. The lots were full of producer deals back then. My agent actually hated this script and told me to put it on a shelf somewhere and pretend it didn’t exist.

My belief is the WGA is here just for this very purpose. To protect writers when powerful forces try to impose something unethical on us because we are not powerful enough individually to fight back.