Screenwriting:

“People Actually Get Paid To Do This?”

By Andrew Knox

Senior Project (Period 5)

May 26, 2008
Mr. Franklin-Bihary
Screenwriting: “People Actually Get Paid To Do This?”

CHAPTER TITLE PAGE NUMBER

Introduction Page 3
History Page 4
Formatting Page 7
The Life of a Screenwriter Page 11
Film as an Art Page 16
My Experience Page 18
Conclusion Page 19
Works Cited Page 21

Final Draft
Word Count: 5,378

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Despite the popular conception that writing a screenplay is a simple process (“I could

write a better movie than that in my sleep!”), it is actually an extremely complex and multi-

layered process where one line can make or break the script; where one executive can make or

break a career. As long as there has been theater, there has been an audience. As long as there

have been audiences, there have been critics. As long as civilization continues to exist, we will

continue to have films.

This report will focus chiefly on the professional film industry in the greater Los Angeles

area. When referring to Hollywood, I am referring specifically to the professional film industry

in the greater Los Angeles area. This report excludes other cities in the United States with

significant film industries. It also avoids countries such as India and South Korea where a greater

quantity of films are produced annually, as well as countries like Japan and various member

states of the European Union where original concepts for later American remakes originate.

Hollywood has been, is and will continue to be the spiritual mecca of cinema.

With all of the above considered: When writing a screenplay there are numerous hurdles

to overcome on the road to the box office, including criticism from various sources, creative

liberty, the legacy of literature, the formatting rules, the “dog-eat-dog” business of Hollywood

and the writer’s lack of motivation and procrastination. This paper will contain articles

regarding the history of drama, film’s artistic credentials, a summary on formatting, how a

screenplay goes from idea to marketable commodity and a brief description of my personal

experience. For an in depth look at dramatic writing around the world, we must go back to the

beginning… we must go past popular culture, past the invention of the camera, past the

proliferation of mass media, past literacy as an expectation, back to the age of Shakespeare.

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History of Drama

At the beginning of Western Civilization, the Greeks defined all dramatic works as part of

one of three categories: comedy, tragedy and satyr (pronounced say-ter). Two of these survived

the passage of time and criticism to become the polar extremes of a fictional work’s possible

emotion, while one reappeared with a different name. These three categories became known as

the original tradition. Comedy was originally defined as an everyman stumbling upon good

fortune, and the rest of the story detailed his entire life changing for the better. On the other

hand, tragedy was defined as the inverse, a godlike character devolving to a state of poverty.

Satyr can be considered the precursor to 20th century burlesque and vaudeville acts, however

many plays simply devolved into orgies with audience participation. These developments took

place from 450 to 400 B.C., during the Greek Enlightenment. Although this is not how we

would define them today, certain memorable memes (anything communicable, in this case,

mythology) share plots with the original definitions (Hooker).

The next evolution of the original tradition was called the ‘rhetorical tradition’. The new

distinction between comedy and tragedy became respectively that one was believable and one

was not. This distinction opened the door for more varied plots and main characters that did not

necessarily fit into either of the old categories. The Romans, who idolized the Greeks to the

point of doppelganger-ism, took this second tradition and developed the three-act structure

(Hooker 1). Three-act structure is a basic formula that most dramatic works fall into; it consists

of Setup, Confrontation, and Resolution (Pruter).

In the two thousand years that followed, little but the language pieces were written in

changed. Then, an English poet named William Shakespeare revolutionized our civilization’s

conceptions of drama and popular culture. Shakespeare’s plays became famous and spread

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throughout the countryside and continent. Neighbors discussed plays with each other; the stories

were summarized and passed down from grandfather to grandson like they were mythological

memes. Shakespeare’s success was in no small part due to his affluent upbringing and the

patronage of Shakespeare’s company by Lord Chamberlain and, later, King James. Although his

style and source of inspiration was nowhere near unconventional compared to his

contemporaries, Shakespeare’s success marked the era as a time of interest and helped preserve

printed works so easily lost to the ages for future generations. As Ben Jonson once said, "He was

not of an age, but for all time" (Bartlett).

A couple hundred years later, at the close of the nineteenth century, another important

development, the one this paper is fixated on, came about… Louis Lumière invented a device

which distilled the motion picture camera (the device that captures the light that will become the

image), the film processing unit (the device that transfers that light to film) and the projector (the

device that projects that light and thus enlarges it to a size comfortably viewable by humans) into

one sleek unit which he labeled with the brand name of Cinematographe. Although the

Cinematographe is credited with having kicked off the motion picture era, Lumière was cynical

about the potential applications of his device: "The cinema is an invention without a future."

Lumière was not the first to make a projector, nor the first to make a camera to take moving

pictures to project, but like Shakespeare before him, he took something relatively new and

intriguing, and popularized it (Bellis). Perhaps the first film screening, of Lumière’s film, La

Sortie des usines Lumière, also known in English as: Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory,

took place in Paris on December 28th, 1895 (CyberSound).

In the beginning, these projection films were all silent. While that fact conflicts with our

perception of what a movie is today, it makes perfect sense if you think about how a camera

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works. Cameras just record light onto film and the finished product resembles something our

eye sympathizes with. When sound was first run simultaneously with moving image, it blew

people’s minds; the age of the sound film, or “talkie”, was born.

The first movie studios started cropping up in California around the end of World War I.

California was thought of as an ideal shooting location because of the temperate, enjoyable

climate of Los Angeles coupled with convenient access to desert, forest, mountain and ocean

scenes. Genres emerged as the rule and not the exception; many films were categorized by their

similar plots, characters and locales. By 1927, the “Big Five,” the five most powerful film

studios, ruled Hollywood. The “Big Five” included Warner Brothers, Famous Players, RKO

Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and 20th Century Fox, three of which are still major players

today. The “Little Three”, three less significant but still important studios, consisted of Universal

Studios, United Artists and Columbia Pictures (Dirks).

The period roughly from 1927 to 1948 was known as the “golden age”. The “Big Five”

monopolized the U.S. film industry with a strict moral code and collusion between studios to

keep opponents out of a job. The practice of block booking, selling a package of movies to a

theater as a single unit, was cited as an example of unfair monopolizing. In 1948, the golden age

came to an end when the “Big Five” were brought to the Supreme Court to fight against a federal

antitrust suit. Comparable to other stories of rise and fall, they lost the case, and the aftermath

saw the rise of independent and foreign cinema in the United States as well as the disintegration

of the Hayes code (which will be defined in greater detail in a later chapter), which listed what

and how much must be censored (Colbert Track 9).

To quickly summarize the evolution of film over the next sixty years, new directors,

producers and actors came on to the scene and old ones left, boundaries in acceptable language

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and behavior were pushed to new limits. As time passed, film evolved with the entirety of

American culture. This trend will most likely continue into the distant future. As long as there

are people who can be offended, the standards of decency will expand. As long as there are

writers, directors and cameramen, there will be movies.

Formatting

Movies are essentially a combination of two elements, dialog and action, mixed together in

hopes of making a piece of art or a few pieces of gold. A screenplay is basically a transcript of

the dialog and action that appears on screen in a movie.

The screenplay format has been formulated to be extremely rigid on purpose. The

rigidity has helped it become a standard that screenwriters must follow and all the major studios

expect. If the format is not followed from page one, the professional reader holding it

automatically deems the rest of the script garbage. It is the blueprint of modern cinema, and in a

hundred short pages, characters’ lives begin and end. With any luck, the following diagram will

help to unravel the aforementioned enigma:

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As you can see in the diagram, the Courier font is specifically designed to mimic a

typewriter ostensibly for the greatest amount of readability. Starting from the top of the diagram,

you see the scene heading, which sets the location and time of the following content, in this case,

a forest at night. Scenes are either INT (interior scene, house, car) or EXT (exterior scene,

outdoors, city streets) Following the scene heading is the scene description, which is an

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undefined amount of prose drawing the scene with specific details and introduces the characters

in a scene unless it is an obvious and direct carry-over from another scene. After this there is

something to disrupt or alter the peace that previous existed, either action or dialog (Frensham

23).

Action is what people or things do. Action is not indented. It is written in present tense,

should be flowery or descriptive in language and the way it is written should be free of glaring

errors in grammar or stylistic impersonations. Action is where you plan out subtext, which will

be explained later. An audio action cue is just a sentence of action that requests to the director

that a certain sound or piece of music begin at that point on the page. Action is simply formatted

compared to dialog. (Ink to Pixel 5)

Dialog is what people or things say. Dialog must be cued by character cues before being

stuck into small columns that frequently leave orphaned words on short lines. Unlike action, the

content of dialog can be of whatever caliber is becoming of the character saying it. Dialog

should be as colloquial and provincial as the speaker, in other words: “grammar and spelling be

a'ight to misinterpretate because human being don't never ever speak perfect” (Geller 125-129).

Transitions are directions on what the transfer between scenes should look like. The most

common transition is called CUT TO. It is so common that it is considered the default transition

and is rarely typed out. It implies a quick and abrupt transfer to the next scene that adds drama

to the last lines of the previous scene as well as action to the beginning of this new scene. The

most common written out transition is FADE IN/FADE OUT, which means that the shot fades to

black momentarily and then slowly comes back into a new scene. The unconventional one in the

example above is called WHITE IN/WHITE TO, which is similar to FADE IN/FADE OUT, but

the scene fades to and from white instead of black. The screenwriter can invent transitions as

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needed to carry their vision of the story, but it is recommended to avoid them when possible

since the actual image is the domain of the director, and you don't want to anger him without

good reason. Other commonly used transitions are DISSOLVE TO (where one scene “dissolves”

to the next), QUICK CUT (which is similar to CUT TO), SMASH CUT (which is similar to CUT

TO) and FADE TO (where one scene “fades” to the next) (Ink to Pixel).

Parenthetical directions are the things below the character cues that tell the actor in what

emotion the following dialog should be read. Like transitions, it is recommended to avoid them

unless the parenthetical carries meaning perpendicular to, or at least significantly different from,

the dialog that follows. Parenthetical directions are also actions that take place while the actor is

speaking (Schellhardt 201).

Too many books are dedicated to the exact numbers for spacing and indenting. So instead

of recounting them again, I shall instead suggest formatting programs such as Celtx (which is

free) and Final Draft (which is an arm and a leg) that are miles above Microsoft Word in terms

of all of the specialized formatting and that take the thought out of formatting, which lets you

focus on the actual writing. (Celtx)

The rough estimation for how long a movie will be is based on the number of pages; the

basic formula is one page = one minute (Ink to Pixel 3). Therefore ninety-seven pages of script

will be approximately ninety-seven minutes long. The average running time of a movie is

around 90 minutes with a standard deviation of 15 minutes in either direction. Comedies and

family films tend to run shorter, like The Emperor's New Groove which clocked in at seventy-

eight minutes. Epic blockbusters, science fiction and fantasy films tend to run much longer, with

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring lasting two hundred minutes in its theatrical

edition. The world's longest “movie” is The Cure For Insomnia which lasts eighty-seven hours.

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It consists of clips of porn, metal music videos and a boring spoken word piece. You are bound

to fall asleep at least halfway through.

The Life of a Screenwriter

Hollywood radiates the perception that it is “an oasis of wealth and opulence. That there

are gold fountains that leak liquid mercury carefully down their sides to entertain the spouses of

movie stars who wait for one of their housekeeping staff to deliver a fresher guava daiquiri. That

the sidewalks are paved with Teflon and pedestrians wear slippers of steel wool to stay upright.

There are walls of stone that keep the rich and poor from having to see each other. That it is a

world that one can only leave; one can never enter.”

However exaggerated that may be, in a sense, it is accurate. Those whose dreams, by

coincidence or luck, are not shattered into a hundred thousand shards can strike it... affluent. A

successful screenwriter with a good amount of luck and tenure can make a great living off of

selling their art to the highest bidder. The previously mentioned perception of wealth and

opulence is reinforced by claims that Joe Eszterhas sold Basic Instinct for $3.0 million and M.

Night Shyamalan sold The Sixth Sense for $2.5 million (Eszterhas).

The biggest paychecks in Hollywood come to writers of speculative scripts, better known

as spec scripts, which are scripts written without a guarantee of payment and without a mandated

plot, and submitted to agents, producers and studio executives. Speculative scripts represent a

merciless example of the free market. The agents, producers and studio executives, also known

as “Power players” represent gullible townsfolk. The writer can end up being a literal snake oil

salesman.

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For those writers who desperately want to break into the industry, speculation is the path to

take; but the only real career path for a screenwriter (unless you win an Oscar for your piece) is

to become a script doctor. A script doctor is someone who sits at a desk and rips apart spec

scripts that have already been bought by studios in order to make them the best film they can be.

These jobs pay better and more reliably than speculation, with the main downside being a hit to

the ego, you likely will not be credited for your revisions (Schellhardt 260).

The Writer's Guild of America West, the union that looks after the economic best interests

of people who write for a living, has forced Hollywood to give speculative writers a minimum

wage. This wage is not strictly defined, but for the current calendar year, an original screenplay,

including a treatment will bring in between $58,477 and $109,783 (WGAsm 6). In addition to

this, the WGAW fights for royalty rights, billing and respect. DVD residuals were a primary

cause of the 2007-2008 Writer's Strike that starved Hollywood of funds and America of fresh

entertainment. They offer a reasonably good medical insurance plan as well.

All that being said: for the vast majority of people who attempt to write screenplays

professionally, there lies ahead a life of ramen and Kool-Aid. For every beginning screenwriter

whose work is purchased and turned into a blockbuster, there are a hundred who just had a dream

similar to his reality the night before. Those hundred have done everything to the best of their

ability, no blatant mistakes, but they'll need to keep their day job. These wannabes have few

things in common.

The biggest thing that they all have in common is that they copyrighted and protected

their works. Just in case you actually have some quality material, or at least believe that you do,

you should shell out your allowance money to get it legally registered as yours, and only yours.

If someone stole your screenplay and stole or used it as their own, and you had it registered, then

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you could use that time-dated and signed copy of your script as evidence in civil court.

There are three main methods of protecting written materials in these United States. The

most popular one, as well as being the mid-priced plan, is the Writer's Guild of America, West

(WGAW) Registry, which will hold on to what you submit for only $20.00, and an even cheaper

rate for guild members. The filed item is held in an archive at the WGAW's Los Angeles

headquarters and can only be removed by the author (or the author's heirs, in case of the author's

death). The Guild claims that it will not remove an item except in cases of “official guild action,

court order, or other legal process...” A filed item will be held for a period of 5 years and can be

renewed for another 5 years at the then-current registration rate. The WGAW claims that it

archives more than 55,000 works per year (WGAreg).

The most well advised common method, as well as the most legally binding, secure and

expensive, is registering it with the U.S. Copyright Office. With this method, in addition to what

the WGAW does, you also get the Federal Government as a character witness, all for the low

price of $45.00. The time period that it stays protected for is also much more generous, lasting

the life time of the author plus seventy years (USCO).

The easiest, least safe, cheapest as well as being the last method mentioned here, is the

“Poor-man's Copyright.” For less than five dollars, you can get a bucket full of shifty pseudo-

protection, consisting of your script, a manila envelope, some tape and postage. The main idea is

that you write in your own name and address on the envelope, send it to yourself, and avoid the

temptation to rip open mysterious parcels for the next week or so. The theory is that if the script

was sealed at the postmarked date, it won't be altered anymore after that, so if your copy predates

the plagiarist's copy, good for you. This method is easily the most entertaining, especially if you

savor the small, insignificant things in life above all else (Schellhardt 272).

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Agents are talent representatives who try their damnedest to sell the work of their clients.

Why wouldn't they? It's their livelihood. For new writers, agents will often work pro bono until

the first check comes in, where they will typically take around 10% of their client's earnings

before taxes. Agents aren't exactly as desperate as their prospective clients, but they want to get

rich too, therefore it is necessary to sell your product to them before they'll sell it to the industry.

There are directories filled with agent's names and contact information such as The Writer's

Guide to Hollywood Producers, Directors and Screenwriter's Agents and Hollywood Creative

Directory. The WGAW also sells a list of agencies in addition to all the things they already do

(Schellhardt 281-283).

When acquiring an agent, you will have to assess your entire writing career, put it in the

best light possible, then distill it down to a page. This is called a query letter and it is the writer's

equivalent of a resume. The first paragraph consists of a list of accolades, people that you and

the agent mutually know, other writing experience and ingratiating commentary. The second

paragraph is the hook, line sans sinker of what you are trying to sell, write a summary to a point

where a drop-off is a cliff-hanger. Suspense may be intangible, but try and quantify it in your

head.

Once your agent has gotten your foot in the door and gotten a producer or executive

interested in your work, you have the right and the necessity to take a vacation. Screenplays take

an unbelievable amount of time and thought to complete. So... congratulations, you are a winner

in my eyes (Schellhardt 283-287).

For writers headstrong and foolish enough to jog through the Valley of Lost Souls

without an agent as a Sherpa, an unrealistic amount of pain lies ahead. Unsolicited manuscripts

are rarely ever considered, you almost always need a connection on the inside to get a meeting,

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and, possibly worst of all, you have to be prepared to be the ultimate factotum regarding your

piece, remembering every detail, quoting dialog on command. It is an extremely despised and

not advised path to take, only for the strong of heart and weak of sense (Frensham 262).

But if it is a path you feel you are destined to take, you must write a treatment. A

treatment is a selling tool between eight and fifteen single spaced pages long that summarizes all

of the action and dialog contained in a script into paragraph form. “Power Players” love

treatments because it expands on a concept that they already like—without being too wordy and

hefty. Like all other business documents, make sure your treatments and query letters are clean,

typed, shiny and free of glaring spelling and grammatical errors. Treatments help increase

competition between prospective screenwriters, even though they never meet each other; they

put an enormous amount of effort into making the perfect treatment so as to show up the “other

guy” (Frensham 237).

Speaking of massive, anonymous competition, there are countless screenwriting contests

in this country. One notable contest is the “BlueCat Screenplay Competition” which claims to

have “discovered more successful writers and provided more support through our analysis and

feedback to more writers than any screenplay competition in the world” (BlueCat).

Contests, in addition to conferring recognition and significance to its finalists, often give

professional-style reviews called “coverage sheets”. Coverage sheets often take the form of a

blank form with categories and check boxes that help Power Players generalize the quality and

saleability of a film. Coverage sheets serve as an example of why Hollywood is like high school;

you get graded on the quality of the paper you wrote (Schellhardt 278).

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Film as an Art

Art and Literature Principles in Cinema:

Subtext is literally below the text. Subtext can be dialog where what is said is in direct

contradiction with its meaning. It can also be inconsequential action that has importance later in

the scene or movie. Normally, subtext does not affect the characters in a film, but more often the

audience of the film. It is often used to give the audience a different view of the plot or a certain

character, a different view than that of the protagonist. It is all about subtlety (Frensham 173).

Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino is a prime example of a film that deserves to be in a

museum. Coincidentally, it ended up being a sleeper hit, a surprise blockbuster that comes out of

“nowhere” and grips audiences and critics alike. Pulp Fiction won the Best Original Screenplay

Oscar and was nominated for Best Film on the strength of its fascinating characters, memorable

dialog and solid direction. College students across the nation entertained their friends with

explicit dialog and ultra-violent reenactments

Sling Blade was another film that ought to be on display. This film introduced us to the

genius potential of Billy Bob Thornton, who wrote, directed and starred. Karl Childers was a

simple man with simple desires. His lines of dialog and the way his actions were written

demonstrate and prototype this quite well. He has a love of “French-fried potaters” and is

written with a distinct blend of southern drawl and mental retardation. Although this film is of a

caliber much higher than any of Thornton's more recent works, it shows a few similar themes.

Critical Opinion of Cinema:

Many critics say that cinema as a whole is not a fine art on par with paintings, sculpture

and literature. Others disagree, countering with the assertion that only films that attempt to have

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popular appeal purposefully dispose of their artistic credentials in order to make a buck. There

are plenty of films out there that deserve display in museums as well as ticker-tape parades down

Main Street.

The film industry is sustained by the consumption of fresh meat. Although it sometimes

shows a preference for the same hackneyed plot or overdone situation with a slightly modified

location, time period or main character, original ideas can make big waves in the creative pool.

Films like Star Wars opened the imagination of the country as well as the pocketbooks of the

industry to new concepts and modes of conduct. It was the first notable cultural phenomenon

associated with film; the exotic aliens and strobing red and green lasers attracted young and old.

On the flip side, several studio executives criticized the trend that followed, making films into

“feature-length ads for toys” (Rickey), vehicles to sell truckloads of action figures.

There are some that believe sound has ultimately been a detriment to the art of cinema,

Paul Rotha once said, "A film in which the speech and sound effects are perfectly synchronized

and coincide with their visual image on the screen is absolutely contrary to the aims of cinema. It

is a degenerate and misguided attempt to destroy the real use of the film and cannot be accepted

as coming within the true boundaries of the cinema” (Agate).

There are organizations that resist the proliferation of popular culture through cinema, such

as the Film Industry Reform Movement, or FIRM. The main concept behind FIRM is that "the

motion picture is a significant medium for the communication of ideas, and therefore, has great

potential for influencing human thinking and behavior." A main goal of FIRM, and one with the

most importance regarding legitimizing cinema as an art form is to "SEEK EQUITY.” Seeking

equity is to “work toward creating a more equitable economic and creative environment within

which film industry professionals may pursue their craft and livelihood, so that moviegoers and

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society in general may benefit from less homogeneous, more diversified motion pictures"

(FIRM, Mission Statement).

Many people attempt to write screenplays professionally, and many fail.

My Experience

My experience with Screenwriting has been brief by my definition, but may seem

expansive by the definition of another. I have written two screenplays and one stage play, and I

have begun (but not finished) multiple other projects in the same realm. The first screenplay I

wrote, In Bloom, is what occupies most of my time and attention; I have, for all intents and

purposes, abandoned the other one. The writing process is intense, but short when you are

inspired. I took the rough draft of the book I had been writing for the previous six months and

wrote up a rough draft of the screenplay in a little over a month.

In Bloom, as a book, was born in the first week of the New Year, 2006. There was

optimism abounding in a world coated in a thick layer of fear. There were groups of children

that ran around in playgrounds without reason. There were doctors, lawyers and construction

workers returning from holiday. And all of the high school students had shiny new cell phones

and iPods. I had a new computer and new ideas, but no plan to implement them. In a choice

unbecoming of a sane person, I had recently decided that I was a writer, after I wrote up a cheesy

6-page horror story for Ms. Ciardullo’s Language Arts 10A class in a dozen midnight-oil burning

hours.

In Bloom started as a new take on 1984, focused on the Grunge generation. It then

devolved into a series of rants against fascism and dystopia, a psychotic hallucinatory journey to

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the center of the universe inside a VW Bus and ended with little semblance of a plot except a

beginning and an end. My favorite chapter was about a genetically-modified monkey on a U.S.

Navy frigate that gains super-intelligence, telekinesis and weather control. It then kills its

masters and causes worldwide flooding and monsoons that drive humans underground. The

book needed serious revising.

That summer, I enrolled at the University of Washington in a two-week beginning

Screenwriting workshop. The first week I found boring and uninspiring, it just didn't catch my

attention until that Friday. In the weekend that followed, I had a creative rush, converting

chapters from my book into the screenplay format at a breakneck pace. The following Monday, I

was more than eager to show the workshop teacher my half-done work. He liked it. The end of

the class was not the end of my interest in the format. I kept on translating.

Revisions are the true time wasters. I christened the rough, formatted version of my

screenplay ‘Version 2.0’. Through some amazing instance of foresight that I'm sure only amazes

me, I kept a log of all of my revisions. Three years and ten “versions” later, I am on “Version

7.2” and it vaguely resembles a professional piece of work. It constitutes the entirety of my

Physical Project. One day, I wish to submit it to Hollywood, and perhaps make screenwriting

my living.

Conclusion

“And now, the end is near;

And so I face the final curtain.

My friend, I'll say it clear,

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I'll state my case, of which I'm certain.

Regrets, I’ve had a few;

But then again, too few to mention.

I did what I had to do

And saw it through without exemption.”

~“My Way”

Frank Sinatra, artist. Paul Anka, lyricist.

When writing a screenplay there are numerous hurdles to overcome on the road to the

box office, including criticism from various sources, creative liberty, the legacy of literature, the

formatting rules, the “dog-eat-dog” business of Hollywood and the writer’s lack of motivation

and procrastination.

Screenwriting is a difficult profession based on a strict, monolithic format and an overly

competitive market. In this simple statement it represents several fundamental truths about

American society. At home, school, work and on vacation, we meet and conform with a set of

rules, while pouring over those rules to find an advantage. This also largely represents human

society in general. Screenwriting is a microcosm of human nature.

The world that the film industry fits into looks rather cramped, but I intend to squeeze in.

The job opportunities may be slim, the rejection may be brutal, the success may be non-existent,

but I am determined to try, at least try. I've devoted several years, several hundred hours and

several bones to this ideal, to get rich or... give up eventually—BUT NOT YET. I guess a lot of

people have a goal of getting rich—or die trying—because we all die in the end.

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“Screenwriting and other forms of sadomasochism can be fun.

But don't say I didn't warn you” ~Stephen Geller (page 212)

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Works Cited:

Agate, James (1972). Around Cinemas. New York: Arno Press/New York Times.

Bartlett, John. Familiar Quotations, 10th edition. 1919.

Bellis, Mary. "The History of the Motion Picture". 4/8/08

<http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blmotionpictures.htm>.

BlueCat Screenplay Competition. 4/26/08 <http://www.myspace.com/bluecatscreenplay>.

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