There are "Overnight" and "Nobody Wants Your Film," to mention the best and most recent, of films depicting quite clearly why crappy movies get made.
But the article was a bit tongue-in-cheek. The author is cautioning that "breaking all the rules" is as hopeless a ruse as following them (in items 1-4). So the author is satirically suggesting that NOTHING will get your screenplay read, not even breaking all the rules. I think some people will read that humorous article and actually think the author is advising his readers to break the rules. Except that he isn't advising that at all. Except that, in the end, it turns out that he is.
I agree with scripter's item No. 2: too many cooks in the kitchen. The people turning scripts into movies are talented and ambitious, but the alchemy of transposing an idea or a narration into cinema dimensions is difficult without a clear authority. (If you respect Kubrick, you can invoke his famous "one person writes a symphony, one person writes a novel, one person makes a movie.") And the Hollywood system of checks and balances ensures that projects with too much input and not enough singular vision slowly get out of kilter. But I don't think that has much to do with crappy screenplays. I'm amazed at how good a lot of ordinary TV sitcom writing can be. The crappy screenplays proliferate because they are astoundingly easy to produce. Any English major can create a perfectly polished and literate screenplay of three acts in 125 pages in one week. Or should be able to. But in my experience very few screenplay writers will a) write a novel or a major nonfiction work, b) learn a foreign language, or c) watch anywhere near the kind and quantity of movies required to ferret an original idea into an affordable production concept. (Most screenplay writers don't know the difference between Powell and Suzuki; how many of Fassbinder's 40-something movies can the screenplay writer refer to instead of "Pulp Fiction"?) Every blown-up car costs at least $8000 to produce; there are people writing low-budget screenplays with car crashes and explosions, and they have zero idea of the costs they're writing into their scripts.
I've already railed elsewhere about the pointlessness of submitting screenplays, and I won't get into it at length here, but let me tell you how my week has been, since Tuesday:
Hired to make a music video for Bjorklund/Fox and their promotion team out of New York. Impossible situation. Music vids needed for SXSW in Austin next week. I claim I can make three videos in two days and everyone snickers. We film in the Working Stage, of course I meet the owners, let them know I've got a musical, get invited to dinner, make my pitch, bingo, reasonably sure we can get something going this summer in LA. Learn a ton about theatre in Los Angeles: there are 5 to 20 legitimate stages which do not practice "showcases" for actors, wherein some tired old drivel like Glengarry Glenross is dragged before an audience of casting agents and other TV types, and I've found myself one of those theatres. There is not a single original musical playing its opening run in LA right now, or planned in the near future. There are very few original plays playing an opening run in LA, perhaps half a dozen this month, usually one-act monologues. I learn the casting companies, which charge actors cash to be in plays, are often owned by the Scientologists. Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to the Swedish press is weighing RIGHT NOW the possibility of an expose on the pay-for-play in LA and wondering just how strong a legal team the Scientologists will bring to the table. Anyway, my musical the Black Hole Buddha gets a sudden injection of new life: in 24 hours I've got three statements of financial backing from the East Coast; there is a heavyweight lawyer here who represents a platinum-haired superstar who likes the idea that this musical can be the next Rocky Horror Picture Show and can show off four young singers from a single production company, like, say, Sony. He sees the biz. For a cost of around $20,000 to mount the production, I can be reviewed in all the trades from Backstage West to the LA Weekly to the LA Times to Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, and they will honestly report what they see on stage and whether it's as good or as commercial as the producers (me) claim. The music vids go over as a charm; the 30 CDs for Austin are ready by Saturday, with snazzy print job and cool menu art, all made and edited in my studio. More business opps come from this immediately. I am enlisted to help write, produce or film a "small" movie for an aging actress better known for her roles in Bruce Willis movies; this comes out of a single conversation from an introduction made during the course of making the music vids, which I now hear the company in NYC likes: Who can make three music vids in one day? Anybody who wants to, says me. Last night, a week of hints and suggestions to an internet pin-up star coalesces into a single five-minute "pitch" where not only the story is lightly touched upon but the method and timing of contacting the distributors ahead of time is presented and I am offered on the spot more than ten grand to begin producing the first of what is hoped to be many "New Emanuelles." I cannot go the softcore route, and decline. The company is based in Monte Carlo, but I agree to consult and perhaps make another "intelligent" piece for the actress in question, who takes me aside at the end of the dinner and bluntly says even if I will not be hired I must supply the outlines of the story because they do not want to shop for the script. I laugh, maybe. Now that the musical is coming out of the closet, I contact a publisher in Washington, who is meeting tonight with a marketing director for Sundance (they may still be at dinner at Emily's List, Tuesday 7pm PST), and say I need to get a "collector's edition" out by May 1 of a story called "The Yellow Shop," to have something new in my hands when the meetings with lawyers start June 1. This is complicated by an impending series of interviews in Beirut, Amman, and Tel Aviv with a Lebanese-American marine biologist who is the subject of a book of mine called "Scuba Diving in Beirut" which will be published in ARABIC as a sort of primer for young women on how to choose rewarding professions in a world of irresponsible profit-seeking, etc., etc., etc., all bubbling this week with myriad offshoots and possibilities, to say nothing of a movie project about writers to which the Oscar nominee writer of "Monster's Ball" has agreed to participate and which I am to direct and produce and clean up after and for which I limit myself to one phone call per week because I don't want the project suddenly obliterating the creative stuff closer to my heart,
and I write all of this,
provide detail,
because not one single opportunity or spin or weaved dream mentioned in the paragraph above has come as a result of SUBMITTING anything, nor has any of the participants read a single line I've written in the past five years, and nobody cares, because the writer in Hollywood must be able to speak, must be able to inspire and convince, and I grow daily more convinced at the absolute futility of submissions of screenplays, and I hope fifty AW writers can reply and say "What a load of BS, here's the fifty grand I made on this MS I sent in six months ago like a blind rat" or "here's the movie produced from a script I submitted to Hollywood without a lawyer or agent or manager."
I think the most noble thing is to sit in a closet and write. My heroes are Camus and Orwell, and never some tinseltown hack who made a million bucks off Paramount, and I would love to write for myself and not for publication for the rest of my life, and maybe I will, but I will never fool myself into thinking that screenplays are literature or even literary, nor will I convince myself that lounging in the Hollywood swill is an adventure or an opportunity, because it is a waste of time. But to any writer who reads that article I would advise
Break all the rules
because the rules are what break you.
Even though the author of the piece says you'll never get your screenplay read by doing so, break all the rules. Three-act, 125-page screenplays sent in a manila envelope to an address culled from Writer's Digest are works of fantasy if the real intent of the writer is to know Hollywood. This seedy, desperate shithole is the best story going, still never properly captured, and to all who suffer entry Hollywood will repay in beautiful leaps of imagination. Don't mail a screenplay here; come and touch the golden roads, see for yourself what circus you must spin to catch an opportunity in your web.
