Why do you want to be a screenwriter?

WHY DO YOU WANT TO BE A SCREENWRITER?

By 

Rob Tobin

This is the first in a series of articles I’ve been asked to write by Talentville founder and CEO Ben Cahan. There’s a nearly endless number of screenwriting topics I can discuss in these articles, but I think it might work best to begin at the beginning and work our way gradually forward. Let’s start with the hardest but most important question of all, one that will probably make you groan and want to turn away, but one that will draw you back once you stop to consider the question and your possible answer. 

Why do you want to be a screenwriter?

If you already write, it may be as simple as the reason that I always give when asked that question: it gives my life meaning and joy. If that’s the case, you can skip the rest of this article, because it’s not as if you have any choice in the matter anyway. You either write or you lead a meaningless life. For you (and me) there IS no choice.

On the other hand, if you’re writing or want to write because of all those financial benefits that come from being a screenwriter, well then you’re a bit like Rick when he says he came to Casablanca for the waters and he’s reminded that Casablanca is a desert. “I was misinformed,” he says dryly (pun intended).

Let me briefly discuss the realities of the film industry and why you may have been misinformed, even though I know the vast majority of you do not want to hear about that. 

There are approximately 400 players in the National Basketball Association, the premiere basketball league in the world. Millions of people around the world dream of being in the NBA. More than ten thousand college players, the best amateur players in America, vie for maybe 40 open NBA positions each year, and God knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands of foreign college and pro players vie for those same 40 positions. 

Now consider this: there are fewer feature film screenwriters making a good living in America than there are players in the NBA. 

I’ll let that one sink in for a while: it’s harder to make a living as a screenwriter than to be drafted into the NBA.

There are tens of thousands of feature film screenplays registered by the Writers Guild of America every year, and thousands of scripts from previous years continue to be submitted. That means that at any one time there may be 100,000 screenplays being actively submitted to American production companies. 

Last year the major Hollywood studios made just over 100 films. 

Maybe 400 films (studio and independent, foreign and domestic) got theatrical distribution in the United States last year. 

Damn it, Tobin, don’t be such a f*cking downer! 

Okay, I’ll stop, but only because I think the point has been made: Like Casablanca, Hollywood is a desert. There ARE no waters.

The chances of getting one script produced and distributed are small; depressingly small. The chances of making a consistently good living from screenwriting are even smaller. There are a lot of reasons for that, and I’m not sure it’ll do you any good to know those reasons now. 

The point, however, again, is this: it’s easier to get drafted by an NBA team than to make a good living as a screenwriter.

“So what?” I can hear you scream it at me in frustration. Bear with me for just a bit if you don’t mind.

Apart from the statistics and the immense odds against succeeding in Hollywood, there is something else: even if you ignore those odds, the difficulty of making a living as a screenwriter affects the way you write. So, settle down, stop shouting at me, and consider that last sentence. Here, have a beer while you’re doing that. Don’t worry, just put it on Ben’s bar tab.

Okay. Now how does the difficulty of making a living as a screenwriter affect your writing? Well, again, if writing is your absolute passion and you can only write what you’re passionate about, then this may have no bearing on you. You’ll write what you want to write and that’s that.

If, however, you’re aware of the difficulty of making a living, and really accept the reality of that; and if you actually have some say as to the type, genre, budget, and style of writing you do, you’re probably going to be asking yourself an important question: what can I write that is most likely to sell?

You’re really going to hate me when I say that William Goldman, my screenwriting hero, was mostly right when he said no one in Hollywood knows anything, including what will or won’t sell. 

I remember working for TriStar and telling an exec there that I could tell him whether a script was well written but not whether it would sell or do well at the box office. The exec laughed and agreed that the quality of a script and its commercial viability were only occasionally related.

Yes, I know that’s frustrating. How the hell do you know what to write if you have no idea what will sell? You can look around at what’s doing good box office now, but of course there’s a year to three year lag between when those films were shot and when they were released, and an even bigger lag between when the script was bought and when it went into production, so who knows what fads have died or were born in the meantime?

Also, who knows when even a huge fad like vampires or superheroes will finally saturate the market and cause people to move on to the next big thing?

Or how about the Colorado shootings and how that might affect action and superhero films? I know I have not yet seen “The Dark Knight Rises” simply because violence in film suddenly seems even more wrong than it did before. 

Or what if the female lead in the world’s most successful vampire franchise cheats on her male lead with her director and he and the audience find out? Again, there is no way to accurately predict what will sell at any particular moment.

So what do you do? Well, for years I did the same thing: I wrote what I wanted to watch. It got me by, won me a few awards, got me a few writing assignments, allowed me to slowly rise through the ranks of screenwriters, yadda yadda yadda. But, to be honest? For the most part, it got me pretty much nowhere. 

Then last year I decided to write a micro budget script.

Wow.

First, the script was purchased by a Bay area producing team and put into preproduction. They ran out of money. Then two separate Canadian producers tried to produce it but they both ran into problems with their government funding sources. Then several other producers latched onto the project, wanting to option and produce it. 

The upshot is that I just received a verbal offer of, well, let’s say a significant amount of money even by Hollywood standards, for the script. A written offer and contract are being written up now.

Why the hell didn’t I write a micro budget script years ago? Don’t know. I don’t even know if there would have been a market for a micro budget say… ten years ago. Again, the industry changes constantly, and so do the tastes of the public and of the studios and distributors. But it may be important to note that when I moved from writing essentially for myself, to writing for the market, it created a hugely good result (“hugely good?”).

Why did I make this transition, from writing for myself to writing for the market? Because I’m a slow learner. A really, really slow learner. I had spent twenty years banging my head against the Hollywood wall, defining myself as a screenwriter and only a screenwriter, concentrating all my efforts on the quality of my work, the structure, characterization, theme, blah, blah, blah, sitting in Starbucks and other coffee shops with my Mac Air, in my own little creative cocoon. And it got me nowhere at Warp Speed.

Then, one day I just decided that maybe what I needed to do was to write a script that people could actually afford to produce. That may seem ridiculously simple, but I’d love to know how many writers like me just never got their heads out of their own literary butts long enough to look around and realize that screenplays are only the beginning of the filmmaking process, and that once that “brilliant” script is “finished,” an army of people have to figure out how to produce it and it all begins with getting the money to produce it.

So, with my usual delayed brilliance, I said to myself: “Duh, self… what if it was really, really cheap to produce my script?”

The script, “Storefront,” was written to be produced for under $100,000. Ironically, the producers have decided to produce it for $6 million, in order to have enough money to attract A-list talent and more experienced and accomplished director as well as P&A of course. I’d written $5-6 million scripts for twenty years with nothing to show for it. Then I write a $100,000 script, get paid a multiple of that and then find out the producer wants to produce it for $6 million anyway, the same budget as all my other scripts. 

Who the hell knows?

But here’s the real secret, guys and gals: I wrote this $100,000 script because I finally got really clear and really honest about why I wanted to be a screenwriter: to make a living at it. I finally admitted that I had been ground down by twenty years of waking up at 5am every weekday in order to get some writing time in before commuting on California freeways to my day gig. I was tired of balancing day gig with domestic responsibilities and pitching the scripts I already had, and taking meetings with people I hoped could help me, and trying to find agents and managers, and… I was just tired, okay?

I wish I’d gotten tired before, but it finally did sink in: as much as I loved to write, I couldn’t continue doing so unless I could make enough money to make screenwriting my full-time job.

I don’t know what you need to know or find out or realize in your writing life, but I suspect that it starts with knowing the reason why you want to write, and then maybe expanding that reason. If you want to write just for yourself or your artistic integrity or to bestow your endless wisdom and talent on humanity, then maybe you need to expand that to include, as I did, being commercial enough to be able to actually make a living at it so that you have more time to devote to your artistic pursuits.

If you want to write solely for the money, you may want to take a look at the odds against that happening, not so that you can quit or become depressed, but rather so that you can get the day gig you’ll need while you try to make it, and so that you can be the best and most commercially viable writer you can be in order to give yourself the best possible chance of making a decent living as a screenwriter.

And remember, it’s not just about budget. Even after that army of filmmakers get the money to produce your script, they have to create the sets, find the locations, get the actors and crew and director, and do a million things to make each scene of your script come alive. Don’t just make your script inexpensive to shoot, make it easy to shoot.

But, in addition, knowing why you want to write also affects what stories you tell and how you tell them. It affects who your competition is, and who your markets are. 

If you’re primarily a commercial writer, driven by box office and residuals (and I’m not at all being judgmental about that, I’m partly in that camp myself), then writing “Secrets and Lies” or “Donnie Darko” may not be the way to go, dude. 

On the other hand, if you’re driven by theme and character and style, and rackfocus shots down long, dark, claustrophobic hallways, and always wanted to write the next “Adaptation” or “Memento,” you might want to stay away from submitting to Michael Bay or James Cameron.

But beyond just the genres or markets for your screenplays, there’s the feel of the story. Knowing why you want to write will help you with that too. If you’re writing in order to say something significant about character, about humanity, about evil or goodness, you can do so in a blockbuster like “The Matrix” or “Star Wars,” or in a tiny little indie piece about a guy who paints with his left foot. But if you are only interested in making things blow up, then you will probably want to write “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or “The Avengers” as opposed to, say, “The Help.”

So, just as Shakespeare suggested that you get to know yourself, I suggest you get to know why you want to be a screenwriter. And yes; I just inserted myself a sentence alongside Shakespeare. How’s THAT for a day’s work?  

Great writing to all of you. Please continue to support Ben and Talentville – he’s a good guy and it’s a great site. Support each other too. Write passionately, whether it’s for a blow-em-up space fantasy or a sensitive British period piece. Give it your all. That way, even if you never “make” it as a screenwriter, you’ll know you tried your best. 

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About Rob Tobin

Rob Tobin is a produced screenwriter, published novelist ("Jo-Bri and the Two Worlds" and "God Wars: Living with Angels", available on Amazon.com and iBookshelf), author of two screenwriting books ("The Screenwriting Formula" and "How to Write High Structure, High Concept Movies" available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Google, bookstores, etc.), a former motion picture development executive and book editor, graduate of USC's prestigious Master of Professional Writing program, husband, father, Canadian, and he lives an extraordinarily happy life in Southern California. He is available for writing assignments at scripts@earthlink.net. Visit his website at robtobinwriting.com or surfcityfilms.net.