Make it happen

Let me ask you this simple question... who has the key to Hollywood for you? Is it Christopher Nolan? If you could only get your script to Natalie Portman would you be straight on the A list? Do you also believe in the tooth fairy? Bottom line, you are the only person who can make your dreams come true.

Easy to say right? The biggest problem I see with "aspiring" writers is that they expect that Hollywood will hunt them out, will knock on the door and hand them a check, simply not gonna happen bub! Being a screenwriter is NOT a get rich quick scheme, it's not a lottery ticket but so many people think that it is.

Last week I was handed a story by a guy I would call a very casual acquaintance, he told me that I was going to love it and that it was amazing. He later went on to tell me how we were going to make this film and distribute it worldwide all by ourselves and make 100's of millions of Dollars, alarm bells were ringing in my head. So I took the story, more out of courtesy than anything else and despite it looking like a twelve year olds homework I read it. I read a page and I was already struggling, there was no story it was as if he'd sneezed every idea he had onto a page and handed it to me in the hopes that I'd make his movie career.

And so a few days later I bumped into this "writer" again, he asked me what I thought of his story and as I told him that it wasn't ready to be a movie, that he needed to work on it for more than five minutes. His smile changed to a frown right in front of my eyes, I thought he was going to cry but instead he went on a rant about how I don't know a good thing when I see it and that he'd sue me if I ever made a film from the story that he wrote.

As I tried to encourage him and tell him that if he wants to be a writer that I would teach him the basics but that he would have to commit to it and work very very hard. He told me to "get lost" but in less nice terms and then proceeded to tell me that he really thought that I would have told him that it was great and that we'd go into production and make millions!

So the point of this blog? I see something like this nearly every week, people who see the film business as a route to fame and fortune within a very quick timeframe. Well it just isn't like that, this is a business and in order to make the big money and have the big profile you need to work hard, work hard and work hard. As the great A.C Lyles told me at Paramount recently "To make it in this business you need to be three things, obsessed, obsessed, obsessed!"

So please, don't think that this is a get rich quick scheme, it's a business and like any business the harder you work the more you'll get out of it.

Write On!

Dave The Screenwriter

OH and BTW on the right you'll see an ad for my crowd funding project, if you have a couple of spare bucks then check it out and become part of independent film history!

Good Luck.