Script P.I.M.P

Submit a month before the deadline and make it a paper copy mailed (not uploaded) to increase your chances of getting read right.

yeah - the worst thing you can do is submit your entry now, only to rewrite it and improve it greatly in the next few months...unable to resubmit you much better script. work it!

Trust me. I know everyone at Scriptpimp and how they (and many other comps) run a competition.

Submitting too early means when the decision for finalists has to be made, your submission will have been forgotten. If you submit too late, they rush through and may knock it out for not giving it enough attention.

Of the 1000+ entries ScriptPIMP gets, they do not read all of them. Any script with obvious formatting or style problems (no white space, over page count, etc...) gets thrown out immediately without being read. That accounts for almost a third of the submissions for any major comp.

It sounds unfair, but when it comes down to it-- if you have two scripts that are equally good but one has formatting problems, it can't win, therefor they weed it out before it has a chance to take up valuable space and reading time.

Also, almost 90 percent of all scripts submitted to any competition are within the last two weeks.

This is why I say a month before the deadline. Just enough time for them to still remember it, but not within the major onslaught of submissions.

This is why I say a month before the deadline. Just enough time for them to still remember it, but not within the major onslaught of submissions.

Click to expand...

Great post. Sage advice.

First, scripts are flipped through by the staff or secretary who pens the mail and the junk gets thrown out. Ie. the ones that are 200 pages or 50, have no white space, bad formatting, monologues that runs a page or more. etc...

Most comps use unpaid (or a buck to a fin a script) college interns for first round (and/or staff for the overflow). Readers go by a grading sheet for each submission and ones that make the grade go onto the next round.

The top 10 percent usually go on to semifinals. These usual go to paid readers or staff, who also use a grading sheet.

The top 20 (or top 1%) or so become finalists and then industry judges (people in the biz) are used (paid sometimes too).

Even though everyone uses a grading sheet at different stages of the comp, it's one thing to look at a grading sheet, it is another to remember the submission and use the grading sheet.

When I used to read for a comp, I used the grade sheet, but when asked which (of the over a hundred script I read) I think should go to the next round, obviously the ones that have the highest scores move up, but many will have the same score, so those that I remember will take precedence.

I've have consistently placed in the top 10% with 99% of all comps I have entered. This is because I know when to enter ( 3 to 4 weeks before deadline) only in a mailed paper entry (reading on the screen is too hard for most readers) and to make sure that the script is flawless and runs a structure that all comps expect. If you want to win, pay someone off, but if you want to do the best you can and controlo some of the variables, you need to:

- Write a great script.
- First 4 pages need to show the genre.
- No VO in the first act.
- No camera direction.
- No ing verbs (as few as humanly possible)
- By page 12, need to basically know what the story is about.
- Nice flow and balance of white space.
- Proper formatting.
- No dialog over 4 lines.
- No scenes over 5 pages.
- No descriptive action (opening just under the slug) over 4 lines, and under 2 otherwise throuh the scene.
- No runs of dialog between characters without action in between. I try to shoot for no more than four instances of dialog before adding an action.
- Script under 115 pages.

You may think this is some kind of joke, but these rules work for me. It keeps me focused to write the best possible script with the fewest words (thus using the strongest most visual words). What I end up with is a tight, fast read, that looks like a script and smells like a script and as long as you have a great story with great characters, the reader will enjoy the experience and that is worth remembering, whether it be a reader for a comp who has to decide which ten scripts moves up to the next round (of the 25 that all got the same exact score grade) , or a producer who only has 60 minutes to devote to your script before reading the rest of the stack on his desk for the weekend read.

I think PIMP is around $1000 for each of the four winners, plus each winning script goes to over 200 production companies and agencies. Then of course there are the bragging rights, the press releases, etc...

Most legitimate comps offer a little cash but a lot of exposure. When I told someone that Nichols, the biggest comp around, gives 30K, they came back with a snide "That's all?"

Competitions are not about the money, they are about getting you to sell that puppy.