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Just fucking figure it out

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I know nothing about the entertainment industry, but this idea of 'putting in your dues' by working your way up from a menial position based on personal relationships has always seemed naive. Either you can do something or you can't, and working as a dogsbody isn't going to impart those skills.

This advice seems like the equivalent of telling someone who wants to be a game programmer to start in the QA department. You're better off just becoming a programmer. Create a game. Someone with a kick-ass demo is going to get ten times as many interviews as a guy who spends the same time pumping his connections.

Maybe I'm naive about the way television works, but if I wanted to be a writer in TV I'd start by trying to write something that was so good, people couldn't ignore me. And if I couldn't find someone to produce it, I would try to produce it myself. More than one career started with a film that only cost a few thousand dollars to produce. And if it didn't work out, at least I'd have spent the time doing something creative and productive rather than wasting my life fetching coffee and dry cleaning.

You want to know a dirty, filthy secret about the entertainment business? It's a business. Nobody wants to buy "good" scripts, because some abstract sense of quality doesn't pay anyone's bills. What the industry wants is commercial viability. They want safe bets, stuff that will be easy to market. They want sequels, spin-offs and derivative ideas that are familiar but just novel enough to be acceptable. That's what sells advertising, gets the viewers and puts money in the bank.

What writers don't understand (and what they'll rarely be told) is that paying your dues is largely a process of disillusionment. To put it kindly, the industry wants sensible, informed writers who understand how TV is made and know how to write scripts that are easy to shoot and suit the medium. To put it less kindly but more accurately, the industry wants cynical, desperate writers who will write whatever cheap nasty dreck pulls in the viewers.

Paying your dues is like a gang initiation, social proof that you're willing to crawl through Albini's trench of shit to get your script into production. Every menial chore that you perform, every late night you pull, every arse that you kiss entrenches you into the industry, further investing you in the payoff of getting commissioned. The longer you've been a dogsbody, the more confident a commissioning editor can be that you won't argue when they bring in a script doctor, when they ask for a few "tweaks", when they decide that a page one rewrite is in order. They know you won't argue over the casting or ask for too much money.

Entertainment is a shit business, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svCA3DJRgfI

"I know nothing about the entertainment industry..."

Then maybe you shouldn't speak about it as if you do. I have heard the same advice in this article from a number of people working as tv writers (either reading articles, or as part of my mfa in creative writing), and it does seem like the vast majority of them only got where they are by "working their way up". The idea that you can just make something good enough that people can't ignore it is, in fact, the view that is hopelessly naive. It isn't like the internet where you can easily achieve massive distribution. You have to get it in the hands of a very small number of people who are swamped by an incredibly large number of people in the exact same situation as you.

The amount of good content that is generated by writers is overwhelming and, in fact, incredibly easy to ignore. Not saying you can't point to success stories of people who produced their own stuff. You can just point to more stories of people who lost a lot of money producing their own stuff and have nothing to show for it. Building relationships certainly seems to be a more reliable way to go about breaking into the industry.

I'm in LA and in the industry and I agree with you. Take that menial job (although it is hard to work up from lowly PA, but not impossible). But here is the secret: DON'T BE A DICK. PLAY THE GAME BUT DO NOT COMPROMISE YOUR ETHICS TOO BADLY. DO NOT ACT LIKE A TYPICAL AMERICAN ENTITLED BRAT. BE RESPECTFUL.

I know someone who went from an assistant writing position to start in H'wood who is now co-producer of a network smash hit (Glee)... he did it by patiently building relationships and staying positive. I know "screenwriters" who sit at home all day and are supported by their wives... because they have poor social skills and feel they are entitled to money because they are smart. Don't fall into this trap, it's a dead end.

> The amount of good content that is generated by writers is overwhelming and, in fact, incredibly easy to ignore. Not saying you can't point to success stories of people who produced their own stuff. You can just point to more stories of people who lost a lot of money producing their own stuff and have nothing to show for it. Building relationships certainly seems to be a more reliable way to go about breaking into the industry.

Obviously, the answer is to write terrible shit, because no one is putting any of that heaping pile of good content into consumable products.

As many famous screenwriters have been at pains to point out, a movie is a very, very large collaborative enterprise by at least a dozen departments full of people, the leader of any one of which can make or break the results.

What this means is: There are a lot of bad movies made from good scripts. Don't assume that the quality of the average finished film is representative of the quality of the average script, let alone of the skill of the average writer (who is, after all, operating under many, many constraints).

That's nothing new. Read what Heinlein has to say about the making of Destination Moon in 1949 in his Guest of Honor Speech at the Rio de Janeiro Movie Festival twenty years later. It was published in the posthumous tribute collection, Requiem.

Is working for someone as a personal assistant really 'building relationships', though? I suspect that personal anecdotes are poor proof in this case because the huge number of low-level employees who pay their dues and get nothing out of it are hardly in a position to give advice on how to break into show business. On the other hand, if most people are trying to get in through relationships, then you would expect that most people who were successful would have done it that way. It doesn't say much about your relative chances with either approach.

I don't think anyone meant personal assistant. The acronym "PA" means "production assistant". A good description is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_assistant

There is a this american life story about pitching TV shows - can't find it right now though

Supply and demand; the supply of people who want to be writers is too high, and you are going to have to go to great lengths to distinguish yourself or get really lucky. As others point out this may not be the only way in, but don't expect anything to be easy or even merely hard, because every metaphorical door into the place is jammed tight with people trying to get in.

We get the same effect in our industry with games programming. Nothing about games really especially calls for endless deathmarches or 18 hour days with no overtime pay six days a week, any more than any of the many other industries in which programming is as critical or perhaps even more critical (there's more to games than programming) but somehow manages to get done in 40-ish hours a week. It's just the endless hordes of young programmers who think it's what they want to do driving the price through the floor by inflating supply until there's just no incentive for EA to treat them any better; they're not just replaceable, they're aggressively replaceable.

I really recommend against any of these careers, the risk/reward just isn't there. The risk is much higher and it turns out there are many, many other jobs out there that are just as rewarding, except without the possibility of fame for a small percentage of jobholders.

I think this is a common problem for any programming job that's particularly visible or technical. Most programming jobs are boring, frankly, and there are a lot of very smart people in the industry fighting for the few stimulating, high-status, technically-challenging jobs. For example, anything to do with aerospace seems to have competition that puts the games industry to shame.

Obviously it depends on your definition of high-status, but I know a lot of people hiring developers across a range of sectors for technically challenging jobs, and they all have trouble hiring talented people.

Every time I'm advising a young person or young people I always underline that there are challenges everywhere. If I just describe my job, it sounds terrible, very business programming oriented, but in fact in order to make it work I'm pushing myself very hard, lots of server and coordination problems, retrofitting code never meant to do this and doing it in the most developer-time effective manner, and even pushing the cutting edge a bit in some ways. It's as interesting as games programming could be and a lot less stressful, and like you say, there's stuff like this all over.

It may be challenging, but something can be simultaneously challenging and boring. (For me, an MMORPG at high levels falls into this category.)

Spot on. Any time some industry insider tells people they need to work like slaves to get a good position has no idea how economics works. Instead the industry insider should be telling people we have enough people looking to break in and you should work in some other industry until ours settle into a more manageable supply/demand ratio.

I know nothing about the entertainment industry, but this idea of 'putting in your dues' by working your way up from a menial position based on personal relationships has always seemed naive.

I get very, very worried when I see "contribute to OSS" as career advice, for exactly this reason. No, we won't pay you, but if you could grind out some boring glue code for the frameworks that our for-profit businesses use to make money, that would be great. Why, if it turns out that you're good at it, we might even look upon that favorably in an interview... some day.

I think the main reason to "contribute to OSS" is to learn (and demonstrate!) new skills that you would not otherwise be able to learn on the job. Businesses generally are not in the habit of paying people to do something for which there is no business need. So unless you work at Google, you are very unlikely to have an opportunity to build a webserver. Unless you work on the compiler team of a big company (almost all of which require prior experience with compilers), you are unlikely to have an opportunity to build a compiler or interpreter. Unless you work for Google or Bing, you are unlikely to have an opportunity to build a search engine.

But if you contribute to Apache or Lighttpd, you're building a webserver. If you contribute to Python or create your own open-source language, you're building a compiler/interpreter. If you contribute to Lucene, you're building a search engine.

All of these teach you skills that can be very valuable if you start your own company. If you can take your server count down from 27 to 1, that's money that goes straight to your bottom line. If you can spend 3 hours writing a script that fixes a problem throughout your codebase instead of 3 months doing it manually, that's time that you can use to innovate instead. If you can index the contents of the web efficiently, you'll know how to index lots of other things efficiently, and there's bound to be a startup idea in there somewhere.

I don't think "writing some boring glue code for the frameworks our for-profit businesses use" is all that much of a resume boost anyway. Writing Mongrel or Factor or Rails, however...

Contributing patches to Rails is exactly what I am thinking of when I say this: it is a lot of work, visibility for new contributors is poor, and the main beneficiaries are going to be for-profit businesses. Yet I hear otherwise very savvy people telling unemployed CS grads that they should build up their github profiles by, e.g., doing patches to Rails. That strikes me as an astoundingly poor use of one's time -- you don't have a coding problem, you have a marketing problem. Patches have a very poor ROI for personal marketing.

I don't mean contributing patches to Rails, I mean writing Rails. Or contributing features to projects that are viewed as bit more hard-core, eg. Apache or Python, though even there you're often better-off starting a new project than contributing to an existing one.

There seems to be a general cognitive bias in the programming world against maintenance work, which strikes me as a bit dumb because it's both harder and more important than starting new projects. But as long as it exists, I'm going to exploit it, and do high-visibility but useless projects like port Arc to JavaScript or rewrite Tetris in 3 hours instead of contributing patches to JQuery.

>> There seems to be a general cognitive bias in the programming world against maintenance work, which strikes me as a bit dumb because it's both harder and more important than starting new projects.

This is not unique to the programming world. Starting something and finishing it looks a lot more impressive almost evrywhere than making something that exis´ts better. Just think how much more impressive founding yet another non-profit looks on ones cv compared to doubling the projects of an existing one.

Hmmm. If someone put on their CV that they got patches into Rails (or another large, popular OSS project) you wouldn't think of that as a pretty big plus?

Relative to what? I'd think of it as a big plus compared to a guy who never contributed to anything outside of his immediate job duties. I wouldn't think of it as a big plus compared to someone who started Rails, or who wrote Mongrel, or who founded his own startup, or even someone who worked for Google or PayPal.

I suffer from the same cognitive biases as everyone else. Even though I know intellectually that getting patches into Rails now is probably harder than starting Rails was, I'm still more impressed by the guy who started Rails.

I don't want to hire people who "paid their dues" but I do want to hire passionate people, and those that contribute to OSS seem to be the ones actually interested in programming, and that gives them a higher chance of getting along with me and others.

Someone can tell me all sorts of accomplishments on their resume. They can tell me about some cool NDA or Intranet project they wrote lots of code for. But I can learn a LOT more about their skills from their Github page.

So when I tell students to get into OSS, it's not to get free labor or to make them "pay their dues". It's to give them a better shot.

You could say the same about getting a degree, and you actually pay for the privilege in that case. But in both cases it's an okay signal that you're not going to be a total loss, which gives you a leg up on all the other folk who haven't proved anything about their worth (even if they're actually better than you). In theory the more qualified you are the easier it is for you to meet these goals.

It also sounds, with they way you put it, that it's the leaders of Project X, telling you to contribute to Project X in order to be hired by the leaders of Project X. Which is, or would be, scummy but I've never seen that advice. Usually it's leaders of project A saying that you should contribute to X, Y or Z because when they or similarly tech savvy people are hiring they'll consider that a good signal, all the more so if it's a project related to your work).

Contribute to OSS is good for your CV as a way to separate you from the loads of CS graduates who are not passionate about programming. There are people who have CS degrees who can't programme. If you have contributed to OSS then you are probably not one of them.

It's not really an entertainment industry thing.

Someone who's paid his dues by getting a PHD from CMU is more likely to get a job at Google than some guy who just read books on his own. Sure the guy who read books might create some startup, get some heat, and get bought out by google. And that can happen to a writer outside of the industry. But all things being equal, the smart money goes on the PHD.

And sure, every once in a long while you can get someone like Ross Perot, who mounts a serious Presidential campaign with ZERO political experience, but the overwhelming majority of serious presidential candidates paid their dues.

I'm sure the analogy can be applied to about any industry out there.

It's the same thing in piles of fields ranging from sports to law - you have to work your tail off in the beginning for a very marginal shot at getting into the top rungs. Want to be a doctor? You're putting in 80-hour weeks as a resident. Want to make partner at a top law firm? Better be ready to spend a decade putting in half again as much work as your bosses. Want to be the next Michael Jordan? Better bust your ass off every step of the way, from high school tryouts all the way through college. That's 7 years of eating, sleeping, and breathing basketball to even have a shot at the pros.

I once watched an interview of Ang Lee (crouching tiger, brokeback mt. the best director of our time, this is from my twice academy winning professor). Lee told of his early days as a director, when he simply couldn't get any gig for six years. (he stayed home, took care of the kids, and did a lot of cooking.) but he stuck with it, and eventually got some money to make a small budget movie that went on to win some international award, which launched his career. Looking back, he said something to this effect, "of my classmates who studied to be directors, the only ones who ended up being directors are the ones who stuck with directing all the way. Those who found jobs as editors, or critics,.. Those were the lucky ones who found stable jobs. But 20 yes later, they were still editing or crtiquing. None made it to directing their own films. Only the ones who stuck with it."

It depends on your goals and this isn't just true for TV writing - it's true for everything.

I just watched The Social Network, and it's a perfect example - slaving away as somebody's assistant, pumping your connections, doing something on the side, "meeting important people", you will eventually get into one of those exclusive finals clubs, and then live a life of secure mediocrity. Perhaps even at a very high level, making very good money.

If, on the other hand, you're actually obsessed about creating something great, you end up inventing facebook. There's a good chance you'll fail, too but at least you have followed your dreams and imaginations. I guess it depends on what kind of person you are, and what your goals are.

I assume that really great writers - or great anything -never did the connections thing.

True. You obviously don't know much about this industry. I worked for Disney Studios for a while after they bought Infoseek where I worked. Th clash of cultures was evident there as it is here. The main measures of success in the entertainment biz are qualitative, not quantitative despite what financial data and audience measurements can lead you to believe. There are many more talented writers than there are producers to produce their scripts. It's all about relationships and it's also about talent too but talent alone is just not enough. So I repeat the advice: just figure it the fuck out ;-)

I honestly reminds me of two talks from Startup School. One from Tom Preston-Werner of GitHub. He talked about "luck" and how part is chance and part is you. He moved himself to Silicon Valley to improve his luck. He also talked about the basic steps he used to "work his way up" to a success: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178966

The other was from Brian Chesky of AirBnB. He and his co-founders basically did whatever they had to, including selling novelty cereal boxes, to move up. He started his talk by saying how he was "powerless and obscure" and the moves he and AirBnB made, including joining Y Cominator to get to where they were profitable and "on the map" http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383

We may not start out by fetching coffee for Paul Graham's 3nd assistant (I doubt he has one), but we do all have to start from somewhere and make whatever moves we have to in order to move up. That may involve toiling at night, moving to SF or elsewhere, or whatever. But it still just needs to get done.

Enough said, I've got some coding to do this Saturday night.

> We may not start out by fetching coffee for Paul Graham's 3nd assistant (I doubt he has one), but we do all have to start from somewhere and make whatever moves we have to in order to move up. That may involve toiling at night, moving to SF or elsewhere, or whatever. But it still just needs to get done. Enough said, I've got some coding to do this Saturday night.

I know what you mean. I spent part of my free time this weekend teaching myself how LadderLogic works so that I will be more helpful in debugging a certain faulty machine next Monday because I'm not sure we can rely on the folks they're going to call in to give us any kind of fix.

Watch Charlie Brooker's (foul-mouthed) guide to getting a job in TV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIyg2a72uV4

In fact, most of his Screenwipe/Newswipe series is worth a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpVTUdfcEMg&feature=relat...

I think your perception that the entertainment industry is in anyway a meritocracy is naive. There are always exceptions to the rule but for the most part it is still a "it's not what you know it's who you know" industry. This discussion reminds me of one of my favorite all time bumper stickers: "Real Musicians Have Day Jobs."

Well, if you define good as something that is not only a great story but in a list of themes that executives are looking to put up on the screen, then yes, that's probably all it would take.

I've always sort of admired people in the entertainment industry for their ambition and determination. Someone who is taking time off studying CS at Stanford and trying to make a company work is not taking a risk of remotely the same magnitude as someone dropping out of highschool, getting a GED, and working in the music industry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesha#Childhood_and_youth).

If you're a programmer, you have so much to bank on (the CS knowledge/degree) and even if you fail people will be pretty understanding. Try getting a good job in any industry with music skills and a GED.

At the end of the day, a technical stopout founder is taking a smaller risk (really, losing the college experience) for a bigger potential reward (billions) and attractive intermediate rewards (talent acquisition). And frankly, the odds of making it big as a programmer (industry celebrity-big) are not very different from the odds of making it big as a musician (standard celebrity-big).

Kesha described herself in an interview as being "very studious" in high school; she would drive to Belmont University to listen in on Cold War history classes after school and achieved "near perfect" SAT scores.[7] However, she dropped out at age seventeen and earned her GED afterward.[9] She left school after being convinced by Dr. Luke and Max Martin to return to Los Angeles to pursue a music career. They had received Kesha's demo after Pebe passed it to Samantha Cox, senior director of writer/publisher relations at BMI, and were impressed.

Why would she pass up that kind of opportunity? If it didn't work out, she could always go back to college.

Ha. A friend of my father-in-law used to be a Montreal hipster. She and her husband ran a folk club (folk was the indie rock of the day) and Robert Zimmerman came through before he'd changed his name to Bob Dylan. His show was ok. Annette told him, "Kid, you need something to fall back on. Go back to college!" She was fond of recounting her spectacularly wrong moments. (The other was when Leonard Cohen played Suzanne for her and she told him it was dreck and asked him who wrote it.)

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It would have been more admirable if her mother could walk on one leg.

Best advice in this article: stop driving and take public transport. This applies to hackers as well as writers--really, anyone who can do creative / useful work on a laptop. If a typical commute is 30 minutes by car or 1 hour by public transportation, you may feel like you are losing an hour a day leaving your car at home, but you are actually gaining an hour of time if you bring your laptop, assuming you want to spend at least 2 hours a day working on things on your laptop outside work. Other upsides: cheaper, less stress, safer, better for the environment.

Or move closer to work.

When I was in Boston, I had an hour commute, half by car and half by train. Yeah, I could read a book on the train. It was still a pain in the ass, and I could be doing much more productive things at home.

When I moved out to Silicon Valley, my #1 priority for deciding where to live was "It must be within 15 minutes of work." I ended up getting a place that's 5 minutes by car or 15 minutes by bike from work. It was probably one of the best decisions I made moving out here. Now I can roll out of bed and into work, and when I leave work, I'm home and can do whatever I want.

So true. I commute to school by foot, train and subway every day, just over one hour each way and during each trip I get in an extra 15 minutes of walking, 30 minutes of reading/computer work, and about 10-15 minutes reading the WSJ and NYT business and tech sections on my iPod touch, when compared with my classmates who drive. Admittedly, they're usually in their cars for 30-45 minutes each way, but it's not as productive, except maybe as a place for some solitary deep thinking.

Loved this message. Some of the most successful people I know fucking figured it out and just got shit done. Here on HN, we're exposed to countless stories of people with five kids getting shit done, and introverts making sales and getting shit done, and people with no money finding money to get shit done.

Anyone can think of 100 excuses to not push forward, but in the end, we all have problems, failures, and setbacks, and a lot of life is about silencing our own excuses, fucking figuring it out, and plowing ahead.

Disclaimer: Everything I know about Hollywood I learned from watching Entourage...

A big difference between breaking in to the script writing world and breaking in to the web app / internet startup world is the amount of effort required to evaluate your work.

A new web app / start up can be evaluated in a few seconds. We do it all day long on this website ("Check out my new project...").

A new script for a movie or show probably takes a few hours to read (excluding Michael Bay movies...). That's a huge commitment to ask of someone. You always see producers / director being asked to "read my script". That's a lot of work.

So, my guess is that all the work to start at the bottom and build relationships is required because the people you need help from (producers / directors etc.) need to like you before they will invest the 3 hours in reading your script. Michael Arrington doesn't need to like you to take 5 seconds to look at your MVP page.

You could make a 5-minute trailer and put it up on YouTube.

This guy doesn't even include Pareto principle in his guide to success. This guy has us working most of our time getting coffee.

I say, better to write the script without a job and produce a 2 min trailer with your friends and show a couple people, than to work for months serving coffee that you hate and only to work on a script you can't complete.

[I don't support balls to the walls philosophy, only do stuff that gets results, be ruthless about efficiency. Activity is not productivity.]

The Pareto principal is relatively easily applied by young programmers, but how can young screenwriters apply it? It's an industry of relationships. If they are a great writer they might get attention, or their brilliant script might never be read. If they aren't actually talking to people in the industry they'll never know, and if they aren't actually working in the industry the only way to talk people is to randomly harass them so their first impression of you is annoyance. Under that lens, getting people coffee might actually be the best 20% for an entry-level screenwriter.

Reminds me of something I read about the advent of cheap disk-based digital cameras with video capabilities and iMovie when they came out in the early to mid 2000s. The NYT or Rolling Stone or some other magazine interviewed a couple of documentary directors about how they were using these tools to test out ideas or do simple, short pieces.

One of the directors basically said now that these tools were available, people who wanted to break into the industry no longer had an excuse to not make movies. "Lack of available time" might be considered a fallback, but as TFA points out, getting up an hour earlier every day, multitasking during your commute, or switching off the damn TV can work wonders.

You know it's funny you mention that, because I just finished reading an AV Club interview with the producers of the original Saw movies. It was one thing to have a script passed around from place to place, but these guys went the extra step and made a 5-minute short to demonstrate the concept.

Telling people you're talented and showing them you're talented are two different things, and it's surprising how few people take that one step to get into the latter category. And sometimes it's not that difficult to actually do.

So you are suggesting that people who want to make movies should create a trailer as a MVP? interesting concept.

From the interview:

"When we came to L.A., we had our script in one hand and this DVD in the other hand. People liked the script, but they loved the DVD. As you quickly find out in Los Angeles, everybody’s got severe ADD. Reading a script is fairly boring—it’s a nightmarish task. Whereas people loved to be able to put the DVD in..."

I used to be in a business similar to the film business where everyone and their brother had a winning concept, but the people that hand-built a prototype in their garage got the meetings. People are visual creatures, reading about a concept isn't the same as actually touching it.

Isn't that how Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow got made?

The Paris Review ran a series of interviews with successful writers. The one thing they had in common was a fixed, immutable writing schedule. A schedule impervious to deaths of family members (some will take offense to this, but writers aren't necessarily nice people--I grew up with one).

I'm reminded of an alt.writers post from the annals of USENET.

"... My opinion is that if you want to be a good novelist, start by being a bad novelist, not by becoming a good magazine article writer. Start at the top and work down -- don't start at the bottom and work up.

On the other hand, I know people for whom "start small" has worked. But it doesn't for me."

Reminds me of Gary V's line: "stop watching 'effing Lost"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4

Believe me, that's at the top of my list of Things to Do Right After I Get My Time Machine Working. Go back and invest in Apple and Microsoft, bet on the Saints to win the Super Bowl, and try my best to convince the LOST writers that they'd be better off playing World of Warcraft instead.

Yes, you need to just find the time to write and get on with it.

For example I am sitting here on a Saturday evening writing an article on my laptop (as well as occasionally browsing the net!). I could be watching TV or playing computer games or something else, but I am writing.

You need to dedicate time to write, and once you start you will find it easier and easier, and generally quicker and quicker to write. As Nike used to say, Just Do It.

You're so good.

No need for sarcasm. I was just making the point that getting something done requires commitment and often sacrifice.

Try sacrificing something real like time with your family and let me know how it feels. Not everyone has regular TV time to replace.

So if somebody comes up with the greatest script on earth, but doesn't work 17 hours a day as a slave for some TV producer, his script will never be made?

Correct, correct, correct.

Television (and music and film, for that matter) are hardly a meritocracy. What ends up on screens and CDs isn't determined by quality, at least not primarily. There are fantastic scripts out there, masterpieces that will never get made. Crap gets turned into two-hundred million dollar blockbusters.

[EDIT: This gets voted down why exactly?]

Isn't that a market inefficiency just waiting to be exploited, then? Pick scripts on their merit => make better movies => make more money => starve out the studios with irrational practices?

Maybe, but what a serious screenwriter (or HN reader) would consider a good script is not necessarily what will be most likely to get Joe Q. Public, IQ 100, to pay for a ticket.

"Will make money" is basically what I meant by merit, presuming that the goal of the trade of screenwriting is to produce artifacts (scripts) that serve as force-multipliers for the success of the movies that use them. If scripts are not being selected by their merit, then, it is either because the studios are irrational, or because the screenwriters are using a bad definition of merit, and that in reality it is not that there is a surplus of good content, but rather a surplus of crap no one would pay to see.

Because I don't believe that there are fantastic scripts out there not getting made. The crap we see is the best there is, sadly. (I have several friends in the movie industry.)

There were 70,000 new scripts registered with the WGA last year. 70 spec script sold. (Specs are scripts that writers just write on their own, without getting hired by a studio first.) Of those, one in ten will get made into a movie. Thats 7 out of 70000 odds. One-one-hundredth of a percent.

At that level, I think it's possible that some fantastic scripts slip through the cracks.

There's the highly prestigious Nicholl Fellowship, run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, that awards up to 10 fellows a year based on their sample scripts. Scripts judged to be outstanding by actual respected Academy members. Most of those won't sell either, although the writers will get jobs out of it.

The Black List has become more political in recent years, but it's a list of great scripts that don't get made.

The Coen Brothers and Woody Allen seem to be able to make whatever the hell they want, but other geniuses like Scorcese and even Spielberg have projects they've been trying to get off the ground for years, and haven't yet succeeded.

Based on all that, I'm inclined to believe there are plenty of great scripts that don't get produced.

I read this in the article, " You have to be an amazing writer, the best writer people have ever read… and you have to have a large Rolodex of personal/professional contacts who will hire you, rehire you, support you, recommend you."

Based on what I see on TV I have to believe that the Rolodex counts for far more than the writing skill because there's a ton of crap getting produced.

On the bright side, there's way more stuff than I can reasonably keep up with, so the relatively small amount of good stuff is maybe about enough.

I agree that there's a lot of terrible stuff being produced, and you can go to any indie film festival and see movies with great scripts. But when you drop below the A list and look at the marginal, non-blockbuster movies, do you really need a good script to make money? Do producers and directors need a good writer? Is a good script or a good writer an asset to them at all?

To put it another way, what is a "good" script from the point of view of the movie industry, and how many people actually want to write one, and would be willing to put their real name on it?

If you look outside the blockbusters, and even at many blockbusters themselves, most scripts aren't that good. I know a few people who watch a lot of terrible movies who are kind of allergic to quality, or at least allergic to the aspiration to quality. They are tolerant of crap and want their movies to be tolerant, too. A friend of mine is a huge fan of horror and action movies, and the only movie he has ever walked out of was "The Thin Red Line." Why did that movie offend him, out of all the movies he's seen? It wasn't because it was bad. (He and I saw "Deuce Bigalo: European Gigolo" in the theater.) It offended him because it insulted his taste. It aspired to be better than the movies he liked. That's what I'm guessing, anyway.

So if you're in the movie industry and trying to get a non-A-list movie made, you have to think about who's going to go see it. Writing a "good" script by your own standards may be a mistake. Maybe writing a "good" script only proves you don't understand the business and won't be an asset to the people who can help you. Maybe showing some hustle, some talent at getting noticed, and some crass instincts is necessary, not to draw attention to your good writing -- nobody gives a shit about your writing -- but because hustle, self-promotion, and crassness is how you prove you can succeed in the industry and help them make money in the future.

"Based on what I see on TV I have to believe that the Rolodex counts for far more than the writing skill because there's a ton of crap getting produced."

Like, for example, "Reality Binge" or "Celebrity Drive-By"? Which happen to be the author's two shows (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1941257/).

Not only haven't I seen those shows, I've never even heard of them before.

Based on the titles, though, I would hazard a guess that they would trigger my Crap-o-meter.

But as another poster pointed out, "crap" depends on your goals. If eyeballs and ad revenue are the metric, maybe these shows are models of quality.

Discussions on "How to be Successful in $INDUSTRY" really need to clarify the meaning of "successful."

For some, the prospect of selling scripts so long as they are in the realm of low double-digit-IQ appeal may not be considered a win, while others might see that as hitting pay dirt. Either way, you should know before following someone's career advice where it will lead.

The Rolodex counts for more because it's almost always hard to determine from the early script stage what's viable and what isn't. Unlike Silicon Valley, there is not Minimum Viable Product or prototyping in Hollywood - by the time you can see any sort of film, you've spent 80% of your total budget. There's also a lot more emphasis on individuals - if Charlie Sheen goes to Sing Sing, then "Two and a Half Men" is boned, but Facebook can still build products without Zuckerberg

It will probably be made.

I am not sure how true this article is; I know people in college that majored in English or Journalism and got a TV writing job straight out of school. You probably aren't working on your own show at that point, but you aren't spending 18 hour days getting coffee for people either.

similarly. if you create the best web app on earth, but don't spend any time marketing it and nobody sees it, chances are it will fail.

And marketing is making coffee for Michael Arrington?

Wrong analogy. If you build a web app, you need paying customers. If you write a script, you need to get a producer to read it, like it and finance it. Different aims require different kinds of marketing - for writers it's networking on the producer-level.

Which doesn't necessitates serving coffee.

The amount of time and effort put into something is inversely proportional to how likely it is to fail.

This isn't just because of the actual time and effort, but because as others observe this time and effort, they take the thing more seriously. For a startup, this is important because it not only means they're more likely to take it seriously, but that others are more likely to contribute their own time and effort.

Maybe, maybe not. The point is you make your own luck. Work hard == more chances to get lucky.

Correct.

A recurring problem with the creative media industries is that the path from initial concepts to audience awareness is quite lengthy and convoluted. Even great creative products tend to have a preferred niche, and rarely is the marketing information available to nail down niche audiences for a big launch day.

But these industries are still mostly focused around big launches, because they have to completely reorganize with smaller budgets to attack the long tail. Music, comics, and writing have all made some progress towards this reorganization since both their production and marginal costs in digital form are low, so there's a great opening for the non-pop genres. Games are a bit less so, and video probably the least. But what's slowing this process down the most right now is that a niche audience has to be built from scratch, on a per-creator basis.

So either you work within the system and hope for a big door-opening break, or you go completely indie and bootstrap your entire business model, customers, etc. from nothing - which effectively means that even if you are indie, you still need to find a bandwagon to jump onto, or you'll probably never get a critical mass of interest.

I suspect that there's a business in providing aggregation mechanisms for untapped genres; I've just started building something along these lines in the last few days :)

A corollary to the entrepreneur's mantra, JFDI: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/19/what-makes-an-...

Or revealed preference sans expletives:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

I love the message and the attitude in this article. Although it's about writing in the entertainment industry, I like that it's part of the Hacker News list. The point of this article (To get where you want, you have to make sacrifices and work your ass off) is applicable across anything in life. As a hacker, as an athlete as a business person, etc.

This is hard to do. Why do you think there's such a short list of people that are absolute "guns" at their trade?

This snippet basically sum's it for me:

"Yes, it’s hard. Yes, it’s lonely. Yes, you give up many other things that are important to you. But that’s what being an [entrepreneur] is."

similar thought to jffio is behind why i try remember to tell people "because i don't make time" in stead of "i dont have time" when they ask why i havent started/finished the projects i talk about.

making time aka passion, drive, determination is major factor in peoples "sucess"

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