Production companies

"Ready for production" - What exactly does that mean? It's already cast, actors hired? Locations secured, crew scheduled?

Or are you looking for someone to purchase your script? In other words, you are shopping it around, hoping to find a producer who will like it?

You're left with a screenplay that is vanishingly unlikely to ever see the light of day. You're in good company, though. There are 999,999 other screenplays just like it orbiting Hollywood right now.

Read all this stuff:

http://www.kullervo.com

gambit924 said:

I do have some actors who are interested in it, friends mostly. Right now I just need somebody to produce, who will take what I have to offer with a screenplay? The concept is good, people seem to like it, but I need to find a producer because they are easier to pitch to, agents sometimes, but most of the time they don't trust in untried writers, that is not part of their job, their job is to work with people who will earn them money, and right now that is unsure at best. I can appreciate what Kullervo is saying, but I'm am not in the least bit ready to give up on this, I shouldn't have to. I want to fight for it until there is absolutely no option left to me and it's best to let it die. But not now. I'm gonna keep trying.

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Okay, first you need to understand some professional terms, because the word "produce" can have different meanings depending upon where you are in the process.

If you already have the financing in place and you're looking for someone to "produce" your movie, you're looking for someone to "line produce" -- that is, to do the nuts & bolts job of actually putting together the thousand and one pieces of the puzzle that make a movie happen.

On the other hand, if you've just written a script and you haven't sold it yet, you're not so much looking for someone to "produce" it, per se - as looking for someone to "buy" it. Ultimately, of course, the goal is to have it produced, and if you're script is better and more commercial than around 50,000 other specs written by other unproduced writers and better than several thousand produced and sold writers, that may possibly happen -- but it's not generally phrased in that way -- that you're "looking for a producer."

Basically, the goal of a "screenwriter" is to make a sale -- to either have a script optioned, or sold outright. Almost always, you would sell your work to a development company. If you're lucky, to a company that already has some source of financing in place -- but most don't.

That is, they have enough money to pay their staff and to option material (pay a fraction of the purchase price to hold onto it for a certain length of time) -- which they, in turn will go out and try to package (that is, attach a director or a star to) and go out and sell to somebody who actually has the money to make a movie.

And rest assured, no one that you will be selling your script to (presuming that you can find someone willing to do it) will be interested in casting your friends, unless you happen to be friends with Bruce Willis or Anne Hathaway.

You'll be lucky if they're even interested in having you remain attached to the project to do the rewrites which they will inevitably be asking for.

The only real alternative to the above is for *you* to take on the role of producer, which means that you have to actually raise the money to make the movie yourself. How? Beats me. I've never done it, but people do.

And the overwhelming majority of those people, who raise money and use it to make their own movies, lose that money, because the movies that they make, for the most part, prove to be unreleaseable.

That's not terribly surprising. When you consider that they're generally based on screenplays that the writers in question couldn't sell, no one should really be shocked that when those same writers raise the money, make those screenplays into movies, and go back in the hopes of getting a distributor that they can't find one -- since they're basically going back to the same people who weren't interested in their scripts.

The same reason that those people had for saying no to the screenplay will generally apply to any movie made from those screenplays. Only now, instead of having a screenplay rejected, for which the writer has only lost the time and effort of writing a screenplay, now he's lost all of the time, effort and *other people's money* -- and often his own, that he's invested in making a movie that will never be released or show any profit.

And given the proliferation of low-budget cameras and digital editing, there are now literally thousands of such unreleased and unreleasable movies produced ever year -- movies that will never be seen outside of youtube and never make anybody a dime.

So both routes pose major challenges. Personally, if you can't get someone interested in buying your script, I think that it makes very little sense to attempt to produce it on your own.

If you're going to attempt to sell it, there are various ways to go about doing it, and a search of prior posts asking that very question on this board will probably give you a sense of how to go about it.

But you should understand that, at best, it is a highly competitive market, and a very steep climb for anybody to get a project sold and produced.

If you can make a film then that is an easier sell (ie a finished film) than a script, all things being equal.

Writing a script is simply wear and tear on the fingertips and a few sleepless nights whereas making a film is like a military op with a budget to match.

Respect if you do either or both, especially the latter.

A glass of red wine beckons.

Anyone is welcome to join me.

Hillgate said:

If you can make a film then that is an easier sell (ie a finished film) than a script, all things being equal.

Writing a script is simply wear and tear on the fingertips and a few sleepless nights whereas making a film is like a military op with a budget to match.

Respect if you do either or both, especially the latter.

A glass of red wine beckons.

Anyone is welcome to join me.

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In a sense it may be true that it's easier to sell a finished film that a screenplay, but one has to think about it this way.

Think about it in the sense that you've got two lotteries (and yes, I understand that writing a script or making a movie isn't exactly the same as a lotttery, but even so --)

In one lottery, the ticket costs a dollar and the chances are a million to one.

In the other, the ticket costs ten thousand dollars and the chances are fifty thousand to one.

Indeed, you may have a much better chance of winning in the latter lottery -- but the chances are still really bad, and the investment is enormously greater.

And casting metaphors aside, anybody who's going to go to the trouble of making an independent feature should realize that major players in the indie market -- people with substantial credits to their name, who've made movies with real, recognizable stars have gone to Cannes and Sundance and other major markets and festivals and walked away empty-handed -- couldn't find a buyer. Not for a theatrical release, not direct to video.

Nothing.

These are, within the indie world, major movies, and they're ending up sitting on the shelf because in the same way that companies don't have the money to make movies, they also don't have the money to buy them and they're being extremely selective.

And there's no indication that the tight credit situation is likely to change any time in the near future and that basically is the only thing that is really going to make any kind of a significant change in the market for scripts or movies.

Until then, things are going to continue to be really tight -- tight for people who are in the business and even tighter for people who are looking to break in.

The same message that people are delivering to kids just getting out of college about the challenging job market -- ditto for the movie business. It's a really tough job market.

And it's not like it was ever easy.

That's not a signal for anybody to give up, but it should be a signal for people to be aware of what the situation actually is and that one ought not to go into this business with unrealistic expectations.

NMS

The grim truth

Couldn't agree more, NMS - things were looking up at AFM 2010 (ie more independent distribution deals, often for 'extreme' genre stuff - much better than Cannes 2010) but in general it seems to be taking 2 years to sell a handful of territories for a good quality indie: and a lot of distribs will pay the same for a film whether the budget's USD10k or USD8m: they'll work out how many they'll sell, on what formats etc and what their profit will be so unless there's a major sell/marketing plus eg bankable star (bankable in the sense that a distributor can rely on their B.O. draw to replace marketing dollars) then the price paid can often be a dollar. Especially with US distribs. Maybe that means we need to make films like 'Monsters' for less than USD200k that punch well above their weight, and that's not easy to do well.

And that film didn't even have a formal script, which sort of cuts the writer out of the equation.

nmstevens said:

And casting metaphors aside, anybody who's going to go to the trouble of making an independent feature should realize that major players in the indie market -- people with substantial credits to their name, who've made movies with real, recognizable stars have gone to Cannes and Sundance and other major markets and festivals and walked away empty-handed -- couldn't find a buyer. Not for a theatrical release, not direct to video.

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There's also another category - making a distribution deal that is so bad you are basically giving away the film for free.

Here's an excerpt from an interview I did with a guy who made a half million dollar indy film:

The movie was selected as one of the “8 Films to Die For” series. Everyone was excited for a day until we got the contract. No money to filmmakers until the P&A was recouped and the number I was given was 15 million. I called filmmakers from the previous series, and they told me they never saw any money… and never expected to.

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Full interview at: http://bit.ly/MakingA500kGenreFilm

Mac

Mac H. said:

There's also another category - making a distribution deal that is so bad you are basically giving away the film for free.

Here's an excerpt from an interview I did with a guy who made a half million dollar indy film:


Full interview at: http://bit.ly/MakingA500kGenreFilm

Mac

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Interesting. This is getting interesting. The '8 Films to Die For' 'franchise' is operated by After Dark films, run by Courtney Solomon. Until Jan 2010 the films were bought-in by them for them to distribute in an output deal with AFD doing theatrical, Lionsgate doing the DVD and Scyfy doing the TV. On the face of it a great deal for low-budget indie producers.

For 2011 suddenly all the films appear to be 'home-grown' and financed with money that had to come from somewhere. Possibly from your friend. some of 2010's producers have been paid, some not, some paid half or two-thirds, some not.

I can confirm AFD do pay some of their filmmakers: as far as overages go, it's a game of wait and see, as it is with most distribs.

Lionsgate will buy certain films direct for USD1. IFC will also buy films for USD1. They are both respectable companies so one would hope that overages would be paid, but, as in the earlier poster's example, fictitiously-high P&A recoupment, or double-dipping distrib fees will reduce overage to zero or, more likely, negative. If the film is passable you'll get the USD1 deal. If it's really good you'll have more than one company after it and then, and only then, do you have leverage to negotiate your way out of their standard terms.

I've done the USD1 deal and the big MG/bidding-war scenario and all I can say is that ANY distrib deal is this market is a success even if it's a USD1 deal but with proper exposure.

Film-making used to be for the very rich and/or those with too much time on their hands. For a lot of indies this is the future I suspect.

Is it too early for a glass of red?

Hillgate said:

Is it too early for a glass of red?

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Never too early, mate. It's always happy hour somewhere in the world.

You can self-publish a comic a lot easier than you can make and release a movie. The costs are much lower.

gambit924 said:

Then tell me one thing. Is it easier to get a film produced, or just turn the script into a comic book? I can do that easily enough. Plus I think it would be cheaper and easier to manage.

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I got fed up trying to sell my script in Hollywood (all that bad news at Kullervo's website is true) and turned it into a graphic novel. The difference between film-literary and print-literary is breathtaking. I snagged the attention of a top New York literary agent virtually the month I started querying, and we'll be submitting to editors and publishers in January. I think we stand a good chance of selling film rights as well. So go for it!