If you are working on — or worse, thinking about starting work on — a spec screenplay, stop right now.
This is the bad news just delivered at my favorite writers gathering, the Palm Beach Writers Group: Hollywood does not want any more spec scripts.
In case, you’re not familiar with the term, a spec script is a screenplay written on speculation that it will sell. At any one time, there are thousands upon thousands of writers churning out dialog and action scenes for the big screen – when they are not writing the Great American Novel.
Truth be told, I have not thought of writing a screenplay since I attended my first screenwriting workshop, Robert Mckee’s 3-day Story seminar, in April 2015. Even so, it came as a bit of a shock when this month’s speaker at the PBWG lunch, Nora McDevitt, an award-winning filmmaker, pronounced the spec script dead.
Novels, Not Screenplays
“Write a novel, not a screenplay. The market for spec scripts has gone,” she said. Producer and writer, McDevitt, added, “Writers of novels become screenwriters, and working screenwriters are brought in to do adaptations [of novels.] It’s mitigation of risk because it’s very hard to make money in movies these days.”
The numbers confirm her pronouncement: In the heyday of the spec script in the 1990s, you could count on Hollywood buying more than 100 spec scripts a year. In 1995, studios purchased 173 such scripts, in 1996 the number was 155. Last year, those numbers fell to 61.
Bottom line, Hollywood now wants novels which have been test-marketed and are already a brand. Think Gone Girl and Fifty Shades of Grey. Indeed, this week’s big-movie release, Widows, commissioned Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl as screenwriter, while the story is based on a successful British TV series created by Lynda LaPlante of Prime Suspect fame.
Gone Golden Age (of Spec Scripts)
Nora is not the first to note Hollywood’s current desire for previously published works. Earlier this year, the L.A. Times sounded the death knell for spec scripts while looking back to some of the great movies that started out as original, unsolicited scripts. For example, wait for it, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Thelma and Louise, and Jurassic Park for which author Michael Crichton received $1.5 million with a cut of the gross profits.
My own inspiration for writing my first screenplay several decades ago, was Joe Eszterhas’s, Basic Instinct. The movie starred Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas, and Eszterhas was paid $3 million for it in 1992. It seemed, back then, easier to write a screenplay than a novel — especially with screenplay software like Final Draft.
Of course, it’s not easier at all — which you find out pretty quickly at a screenwriting workshop like McKee’s Story seminar. Fortunately, as the name of the seminar suggests, McKee, besides teaching the basic structure of movies, dissects the elements of story-telling down to principles which can be adopted by novelists, playwrights and storytellers in general.
Female-Centric Movies
Articles abound claiming the spec script is not really dead . I still get newsletters and emails from screenplay contest organizers encouraging me to submit my spec script for consideration (for only $59 entry fee, $29 for second or third scripts.)
However, it’s pretty obvious where Hollywood producers are getting their scripts these days –especially if those producers are female.
Actress Reese Witherspoon (pictured) is perhaps the best known among them. She produced Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, and turned to another bestselling author, Liane Moriarty and adapted her novel, Big Little Lies into the HBO smash hit series of the same name. Kerry Washington of TV Scandal fame, has established her own production company to produce a movie based on the bestseller, The Perfect Mother by Aimee Molloy.
Both actresses are among seventeen named earlier this year by Elle Magazine as starting their own production companies. More recently, Nicole Kidman who starred in Big Little Lies, announced she’d bought the movie and TV rights to Liane Moriarty’s novel, Nine Perfect Strangers — before the novel was even published in the U.S.
It’s also evident that the content is female-led — another change of heart by Hollywood which for years claimed that a movie could not make money with a female in the lead role.
“Nobody Knows Anything”
As timing would have it, the news that Hollywood screen writer, William Goldman (pictured in tux) had died at the age of 87 was announced as I was driving back from the PBWG lunch. Goldman who penned the spec script for Butch Cassidy won a screenwriting Oscar for that movie starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman.
Goldman is also famously known for having said about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” The full text of that quote is as follows: “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess — and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”
So, maybe you just put that spec screenplay aside. Don’t toss it in the trash can, just yet.