This is yet another in a series of essays here about how professional or aspiring professional writers can and must cope with two various kinds of rejection — rejection of your work by the buyers and rejection by various folks in the audience. Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 can be read here, Part 3 can be read here and Part 4 can be read here. Please do not reject any of them.
Now then. If you are a writer or aspiring writer, you probably know or at least have access to other writers more successful than you. I can't speak for all those other writers but I bet I speak for 95%+ of them when I say they would rather not read your script. I sure wouldn't.
I don't want to read your script because…well, first of all, I don't enjoy reading scripts. I always have a couple of mine bouncing around in my head and that doesn't leave a lot of room for someone else's. I'll make the time/effort to read one that resulted in a great movie or which was written by someone I know to be a great writer because I might learn something there. The late Larry Gelbart gave me copies of a couple of his unproduced screenplays and I sure as hell read them.
Also, Larry wasn't expecting me to critique those scripts for him or help get them to someone who would produce them. That's a big difference.
When people say to me, "Would you read my script?" what I usually hear — buried deep or sometimes not so deep in the subtext — is: "Will you read my script and tell me how great it is?" That can put me in a very awkward place if, as is more than a little possible, said script doesn't strike me as great.
The first time a friend did that to me and I was dumb enough to agree, it did not go well. I realized too late that the friend did not want to hear, "Well, the opening is way too slow and I didn't understand that whole thing with the switched keys and the scene in the diner is totally redundant." He wanted to hear, "It's brilliant, it's perfect, start writing your Emmy speech!" When I didn't say that, it had a very real, damaging impact on our friendship.
The second time I agreed to read someone's script, it was because the someone had assured me that she really, really, really wanted criticism. "Tear it to shreds if you think it deserves it," she said…and I, fool that I can be, believed her. I didn't shred it but I did point out a number of things I thought were wrong with it, including the whole ending which didn't make sense to me.
It turned out she really didn't want that. What she wanted was for me to say something like, "You need to cut about five pages — and don't ask me which five because they're all so good — and fix the typo on page 14 and it'll be perfect!" Again, it was not a pleasant conversation.
The third time — I can be a slow learner — I thought the script was really bad. It was the pilot for a proposed cartoon show and though I had about twenty criticisms of it, we never got past the first one. The friend — who before the conversation concluded would no longer be one — began arguing with me. He'd said, "I really and truly respect your opinions" but once he heard a negative one, there went the respect. It was really an upsetting discussion for both of us, all the more so for me because I'd thought I was doing this guy a favor.
So that's one reason I don't want to read others' scripts. Another is that some day if I write something vaguely similar, I don't want them accusing me of stealing their idea. (At least twice in my life, folks who have asked me to read their work have expected me to first sign a paper acknowledging that I'd read it and that they could sue me if I ripped them off. There's a fine way to not get someone to donate their time and expertise to help you out.)
But the biggest reason is that I think it's a waste of both my time and theirs. They shouldn't care what I think of their script. I'm not in a position to purchase or produce it. And I'm not really in a position to get it to someone who could purchase or produce it.
My opinion doesn't matter. It could well be 100% wrong.
Did you ever see a truly awful movie? Of course you have. I'll bet you can name dozens. Well, someone approved the making of those movies. Someone who had the power to do so authorized the spending of a considerable sum of money to make each of those movies. It might have been a small company spending a few hundred thousand or a big company spending tens of millions but someone (probably several someones) made a bad investment.
In some of those cases, it may have been a matter of a good script being mauled and changed and not probably well-served by the production. But in some cases, it was surely a matter of a bad script that was misjudged.
If someone entrusted with greenlighting scripts for production can think a bad one is good, they can sure as hell think a good one is bad. The latter mistake is probably a hundred times as prevalent since the former misdiagnosis pisses away a lot of money and the latter doesn't. "No, let's not make this" is almost always a much safer decision so when they err, they err in that direction.
Nevertheless, you need to get your script to the person who can make that kind of decision, wrong though it may be. You don't have to get it to me. Me liking it doesn't help you. There have been a lot of movies that were very successful in a financial and/or critical sense that left me cold. If you'd written the screenplay that could result in one of them, that script would probably have left me cold, too. Which means I'd be wrong…and you'd be wrong to take that as meaningful.
There are two reasons why writers try to get readings of their scripts from someone like me. One is that they want the ego-boost if/when we say, "This is terrific." They want that thrill and they want some reassurance that they aren't wasting their time to hustle it along further.
The problem with that: Some people placed in my position will say, "It's great" just to make you happy and to avoid discomfort. And even if we don't say we love it, that shouldn't lessen your determination to get it to someone who can make it happen. Because we can be utterly, totally off-the-mark in our evaluations.
Then there's the second reason writers try to get readings from someone like me. They're usually hoping that we'll say something like, "This pilot for a new cartoon series is so wonderful that I want to send it to an agent I know. He's best friends with a guy at Disney and he told me his friend is looking for an animated series just like this!" That's probably not going to happen because I probably don't know of any such easy openings. At this moment, I don't think I even know of any not-easy openings.
Most of my jobs these days come from buyers approaching me…which is great because the part of my job I like the least is the "selling" part. I love the writing part. The selling part is sometimes a necessity so I can get to do the writing part or get what I've already written purchased and then produced or published.
I don't like getting involved in the selling part of my own work so I have no desire to get involved in the selling part of yours. Nor am I any good at it. I don't stay in touch with what's happening at every studio and who's in charge of buying this week and what the hell are they looking for at the moment? If I did like that kind of thing, I'd have become an agent.
Agents specialize in all that…and if you have a spec screenplay or a pilot for a TV series or a bible for a new animated show, that's the person you need to get it to. Not me. Not someone else you happen to know who's in the business of selling his or her own work. Except when we need one for ourselves, most of us don't keep up on who the agents are who are open for new clients. (I haven't had an agent in over 20 years.) And we certainly don't know every place in our field to sell a script or get a writing job. We just have the few connections we have that will pay us for what we write.
And finally, what we especially don't have are magic wands to wave and sell your script. If we did, we'd wave them over our own.
