Ideas are worthless. Plenty of people approach writers with that same. "I have an idea! I'll tell you and you write it!" enthusiasm, but it's not the way it works.
And the idea that someone refuses to "collaborate" because they're "greedy and don't want to share the credit" is not only insulting, but immature and amateur on your part. If you want to take a shot at screenwriting, learn the craft and do it, don't seek out someone to do the work for you and call it "collaboration". It's difficult enough to get something sold to a prod. co. on your own, add another writer to the mix and you've just given a prospective buyer an extra headache it's not worth it for them to take on. They want to deal with one person, not a group.
When you put a name on a screenplay, that doesn't necessarily mean that's how the "written by" is going to look on the final movie. The writer's guild determines that and the more names they have to weigh, the more difficult the process is. Each person who works on the screenplay (because even if you sell it, others are going to rewrite it) has to be weighed for their contribution.
That's why you get things like:
Written by:
Bob & Dave (both Bob and Dave worked as a tem)
and
Written by:
Bob and Dave (the arbitration committee determined that they contributed equally, and independently to the shooting draft.)
if it's changed a whole lot, you might even be reduced to:
Story by:
Bob
This is one major reason it's not profitable to "collaborate" with other unknown writers.
Okay, just to make this point clearly, because there may be some potential for misunderstanding in what you wrote above:
When professionals write as a writing team, they are considered, for the purposes of the project for which they are hired, or for a spec script that they sell -- an indivisable unit, both by the producers who hire them or buy the script and by the guild for purposes of arbitration.
That is, the "John Smith & Tony Jones" credit (with the ampersand) will always read exactly that way. It's a writing team and is considered a single credit.
If credit isn't awarded, neither will get credit. If additional credit is given, it will read, Screenplay by "John Smith & Tony Jones and Barry Bottom."
Guild rules limit credit to three writers, but again, the writers in a writing team are considered to be a single writer, so you could have a credit reading, "Screenplay by John Smith & Tony Jones and Janet Bean & Leslie Hithere and Beyonce Toodles & Mark Itabsent."
That is, three separate writing teams.
And regarding not knowing how to collaborate -- there are lots of people who write in a collaborative setting. Most TV is written around writer's tables. It's quite collaborative.
And inevitably, you have to collaborate in features because you always get notes and have to take meetings and have all sorts of people tell you how they want to change your script around.
But when it comes to the actual writing, I can't imagine doing it any other way than simply being alone in my office, by myself, doing the writing.
I know that there are people who do this, somehow or other, with two people in the room. But how they go about doing it, I haven't a clue.
And I don't particularly want to find out. I've been writing the way I write -- on my own -- since I was around ten. I'm fifty-three now.
I haven't needed anybody else in the room so far to enrich my writing experience and I've been making a decent living at it for around twenty years now.
I suppose if [Name redacted--JDM] called and asked to collaborate on something, I might consider it, but you see, there's a big difference between collaborating *up* and collaborating *down.*
This very much falls into the same area of advice that I give about "attachments" to projects. Collaborators are sort of the same.
They come in to kinds. Balloons and ballast. Balloons lift a project up toward being sold or produced. Those are the kind you want. Ballast weighs a project down. You have to drag ballast around with you. It holds your project down. Ballast, at best, goes along for the ride and gets carried along when (or if) your project gets sold or produced.
We all love those balloons.
Nobody loves that ballast.
As with attachments, so with collaborators.
We'd love to collaborate with somebody more experienced and more successful who'll carry us upward.
Nobody particularly wants to collaborate with somebody less experienced and less successful that *we're* going have to carry.
And as far as ideas -- shocking though it may seem, professional writers already have many more ideas of our own than we'll ever have a chance to write.
I'm afraid it's yet another dose of harsh reality.
NMS
