The role of the screenwriter is not just to write and rewrite. The real value of what has been painstakingly put together is in the marketing, and that is as difficult, if not more so, than the writing.
My latest film script, The Syrian Heart, is with 20 agents. It has been in their inbox for one month and nothing has whetted the appetite so far. Not that this is the end of the matter but it is the writer (even one tied to an agent) who has to push the marketing buttons to give or place the script where it should be.
In the appraisal that I have had so far the de facto rejection is possibly AI generated. We’re not taking on new clients (not really what I after). I once had a meeting with a London film producer who gave me the odds of a newby screenwriter. He told me the process his company went through in their hunt for new scripts: firstly he would receive 100 scripts. Of them, 3 would make it. Of those (and put them into another bunch of 100), 1 gets further scrutiny. In the end, the company make three films a year and all of them came from a three-picture deal with the agent who manages author Wilbur Smith.
There seems to be a businessman that is needed as subtext in every writer’s script. Some kind of business plan or investor chronicle that sits between the lines of why a script might make money. That’s why I consider collaborations as the best way to get scripts over and above the skip of scripts that exist.
I have taken The Syrian Heart to a handful of agents who represent the actor who would play the main role. They all like what they saw and so with one part of the triumvirate in place (the other being the director), then Hollywood might take notice.
Les Rowley's world 