Practicing What I Preach...

Today, I sat on a panel at the Rhode Island International Film Festival's sidebar "Scriptbiz." Scriptbiz is a workshop that helps aspiring writers learn to perfect their craft as well as to navigate the minefield that is marketing completed screenplays to the industry.

The final question put to the panel was "what is the biggest mistake new screenwriters make when marketing their material?" What I told the audience was something I had not been doing as vigorously lately, and I wanted them to learn from my (The Script Sages) complacency.

The Sages have chronicled our on-going work with a management company about an epic, period screenplay concerning Irish revolutionary Thomas Meagher. The managers felt that, even with a solid screenplay, there was not much they could do with it. Joe and I had spent a year working the script, honing it, and counting on the management team to go wild with it when complete. We got a little lax in contacting other agents, managers, and producers. We counted too heavily on the management team taking out the script that we forgot to continue to market ourselves to other folks and outlets.

It's not the fault of the managers. They have to eat too, and if it's too hard a sell then what can they do. But what could The Sages have done better? The answer is the teachable moment: don't ever relax in the script game. What seems promising one week, can fall apart the next. It is so very difficult to get a script optioned, bought, and/or made that one should never think something is a done deal until the check is in the bank or the end credits roll.

So even if you have a manager, agent, or producer interested in your material or reading something of yours, don't sit back and wait on him or her to take your script to the next level. Always be cultivating new contacts. Always have a new project going. If you have to, juggle three, four, or five projects at a time. Odds are one or all of them will fall through, and if you have no back up plan then your a** is in the breeze.

As the advice flowed forth from me, I realized I had not been practicing what I was preaching (at least to a certain extent) and that it's easy to go soft when you think someone is going to swoop in and do the work for you. I hope it was a lesson taken to heart by the audience at Scriptbiz because it was lesson for me and The Sages on getting too comfortable in the script game.

-Randy