off course, how can someone survive without an agent. And for those comment, who says to work in Indian film Industry, i think you will be shocked knowing the fact that here a script gets peanuts, literally, and that too when they don't steal it. About WGA kind of security, they have bigger brain and they can make such proxy that not even God can punish them for stealing a script. Every year hundreds of cases are there, so mainly, here the script writers are the people who want to direct movies some day, so they bear these unfair deals, and keep bearing. Do you think i should give my dedication to such industry who is unfair with the mother of a movie - Story.
Well, is place concerns even if i have a brilliant script??? What they say in Hollywood...which attracts stars, needs less budget. I am an author, and till now whatever i have written has seen the light.
Please guide.
The market for scripts today, given the economy, is tighter than its been for years. That's as true for smaller indie movies as it is for bigger, "Hollywood" movies. Fewer movies are being made at every level. Fewer scripts are being bought -- especially "spec" scripts as opposed to scripts based on pre-existing properties.
Every spec script that goes into the market is in competition with every other -- and that includes specs written by established writers with track records of produced movies that have earned a lot of money and potentially won major awards.
If they buy yours, it means that they're passing on a spec written by one of those guys. It doesn't have anything to do with whether your script is cheaper or more expensive to acquire, because at this stage -- at the stage of acquiring and developing scripts, they're not spending very much money.
What it means is that they have to believe that they expect that your script will likely earn more money than those other scripts. That it will be more likely to attract a major star, that it will be more likely to attract a bigger audience.
That is -- a bigger U.S. audience. A bigger international audience. A bigger audience for DVD sales.
That means, in almost every case, that they're looking for a movie that takes place in the U.S. with a predominantly U.S. cast. Maybe you can get away with England.
Not India. Not movies with Indian leads. Maybe a handful of movies taking place in India or with Indian leads have been made, essentially as Indie films, have been made and released over the last dozen years in the U.S. market. We all know about Slumdog Millionaire and Bend it Like Beckham, but these are exceptions. Some have done well, some have not, but the market for these films is, on the whole -- very, very small.
So you have to ask yourself a very serious question. Could you really write a movie taking place in the U.S., with American characters that would pass muster -- that native Americans would read and believe?
I think that the answer, just based on reading what you've written above, is no. Your mastery of English, though far better than my mastery of any other language, goodness knows, simply isn't strong enough for you to be able to write in English well enough to do that.
And being familiar enough with a foreign culture to be able to write about it well enough to convince those who live there -- and I mean more than simply knowing their movies -- that's also a real challenge. Even writing from England to the U.S. or vice versa often presents real challenges. Countless little details of language and every day life that you just get wrong.
And if you write a movie taking place in India -- in a world that you know and a language that you know -- I think it's obvious where you're going to be most likely to sell it.
And however bad the pay and however crooked the business may be -- a sale on bad terms (and the possibility of better sales down the road), I'm afraid, is going to be much better than no sale at all, which is far more likely to be the outcome of any attempt to enter the fray here in the U.S.
NMS
