Time for Part 13 in this series of cautions and recommendations to folks who want to sell their writing or sell more of it. Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 can be read here, Part 3 can be read here, Part 4 can be read here, Part 5 can be read here, Part 6 can be read here, Part 7 can be read here, Part 8 can be read here, Part 9 can be read here, Part 10 can be read here, Part 11 can be read here and Part 12 can be read here. Part 13 can be read starting after the little line below…
Writers — especially new ones — are always being asked to write on "spec," which is short for "speculation." It means if the editor or producer or other "boss" likes it and accepts it, you get paid for it and if they don't, you don't.
Should you work this way? Occasionally. There's a gamble involved and in this world, there are good gambles and bad gambles. In my 47-year career as a professional writer, I would guess that about 10% of the time I've been asked to write on "spec," they were good gambles. This is not to say I didn't foolishly take some of the bad ones.
What do I mean by "good gambles?" Well, let's say you have a chance to buy a ticket in a lottery. You invest five bucks in a ticket, they sell 500 tickets and if your number is picked, you win a million dollars. That's a great gamble. I'd take that gamble any day. I'd buy as many tickets as I could in that gamble.
OK, but what if instead of selling 500 tickets, they sold 500 million tickets? Not such a good gamble. Maybe you could invest that money in something that stands a better chance of yielding a return on it.
In the lottery analogy, the odds are easier to assess. When writing jobs are offered, it ain't so simple. How much, in terms of time, are you investing? What are the rewards — monetary or otherwise — if they do accept your work? How many other submissions will yours be competing against? You may not know the answers to those questions so you may not be able to gauge how good or bad a gamble it is.
A big mistake some writers make is to do too much spec work. A very large percentage of it leads to nothing and often not because someone didn't like what you wrote.
Often, your submission does not get read or properly considered. Also too, there are times when you send in your spec entry and it turns out that the "buyer" really isn't in a position to buy. They misrepresented to you how firm the project is or how firm their financing is…and you realize that this one was a much worse gamble than you were led to believe.
Also, as we'll discuss, it can put you in an unfavorable negotiating position…plus with some potential employers or buyers, the mere fact that you were willing to write with no guarantee of payment makes you and your work seem less impressive.
You can even — and this does not happen as often as many writers think but it does happen — leave yourself open to having your ideas stolen without anyone actually hiring or paying you. (In the near future, I shall be devoting at least one of these columns to discussing that.)
Still, you do need samples of your writing. Once in a while, someone will hire you as a writer because they meet you and you make a good impression. Or they're impressed by your past credits or a recommendation from someone they trust.
Usually though, they want to read something you've written, preferably something not wildly dissimilar from the kind of writing they need. If you have a published article or book or a script you sold that fills that need, great. That might do fine. If you don't, you might have to write something up since it's unlikely anyone is going to pay you to write what you need to have.
Back in the seventies as I've mentioned here, I broke into TV writing partnered with a very smart guy named Dennis Palumbo. We got a fair amount of work based on a spec M*A*S*H script we wrote even though the producers of M*A*S*H (who read it and said they liked it) never quite had need of our services. When Dennis and I went our separate ways, I had this problem: Our agent had no sample of solo M.E. writing he could send someone.
I am told this has changed a bit in Hollywood but at the time — mid-seventies — if you wanted to land a job writing for an existing series, you had to show them a script, purchased or otherwise, for an existing series. They didn't want to see something original. They wanted to see if you could work with existing characters and an existing format and write something true to both. That's why Dennis and I had written that spec M*A*S*H.
Why M*A*S*H? Because you should always aim high. That was then considered one of the two best-written sitcoms on the air, the other being The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The agents we secured, in part because of our spec M*A*S*H, told us that 90% of the spec scripts being done to try and land comedy writing assignments just then were M*A*S*H or Mary.
After the split, I lunched with Bernie the Agent and asked if I should write one of those, sans Dennis. Bernie instead suggested I whip up a spec for the then-popular series, Maude, and he suggested I do it in a helluva hurry.
Why Maude? Because Bernie represented the producers and all or most of the story editors on Maude. He could definitely get a Maude script by me read by the top guys there. They had tons of spec scripts submitted to them and very few of them got read by anyone with the power to say, "Hey, we're hiring this guy!" Mine would be.
Why in a hurry? Because Maude was just about to "staff" for the new season. They would soon be hiring additional story editors and committing to freelance writers. Also, Bernie could furnish me with copies of a number of Maude scripts from the previous season — which he did.
So of course I agreed to do it. Has any writer seeking a job on a TV series ever had more going for him? Besides, I needed a writing sample anyway and with Bernie (and the Writers Guild's established minimums) protecting me, I wouldn't do the work, then find out later that it paid poorly.
I read the scripts Bernie sent me. I studied that week's episode of the show. I came up with an idea. I wrote a script. I delivered a copy of it to Bernie. Total elapsed time from when he told me to do this to the moment he had that script: A bit less than a week. That's pretty fast.
Bernie read it right away and called me. "This is perfect," he said. "You really captured all the characters perfectly, especially that Mrs. Naugatuck." Mrs. Naugatuck was the crusty British housekeeper on the series played by Hermione Baddeley.
The first housekeeper on the show, Florida, had been spun off to her own series, Good Times, and replaced by Mrs. Naugatuck, who I thought was very funny. In my script, I had not made the mistake of basing the entire story on one character — that's a no-no in a spec script because you want to show you can handle all of them — but the feisty cleaning lady was central to the plot.
One nice thing about having a "connected" agent like Bernie was that things happen fast. He messengered my script over to the show's producer who read it that very night. The next morning, Bernie called to say, "He thought your script was very well-written." Since he led with that and not with "you got a job," I sensed a significant "but" coming…
"But we were too late. They filled their last open story editor slot yesterday."
Okay, fine, I thought. I knew that was a possibility. But what about just writing for the show? And though shows rarely buy spec scripts, you always fantasize that they'll think yours is so spectacular, they'll make an exception. Or at the very least, they'll say, "This is so close to what we need, we have to have you come in and we'll find a story for you to write for us." Either of those would have been a perfectly fine result.
Bernie began reading me a note from the producer and he later sent me a copy. It said, "Mark has obviously studied the show well but in his script, he does so many things that we no longer want to do with the show, including the fact that we've decided to drop Mrs. Naugatuck. Last week, we had a meeting where we discussed ten different things that we want to stay away from in the new season and I think he did all ten." (They later apparently changed their mind about dropping Mrs. Naugatuck because she remained on the series, though in what seemed to me a reduced role.)
Also, he said, they already had a script in the works for the new season that was in the same arena as mine. That happens often. Around this time, Bernie's partner Stu sent me in to see about writing an episode of What's Happening? and I went in with six ideas for episodes. One, they hated. The other five were all too close to other stories they already had in the pipeline.
The note from the Maude producer did include a nice consolation prize and reason to believe I might still write for the series. As soon as they were ready to start "breaking" new stories, they wanted to talk to me about maybe doing one of them. For the moment though, they were too busy for that. Two months later when they did invite me to pitch ideas, I was the one who was too busy.
Okay. A couple of things to note here…
- I had darn near every possible access and consideration a writer seeking a job on Maude could have and…
- The producer thought my sample script was "well-written" but…
- I still never wound up writing for Maude but…
- That spec script was by no means a waste of time.
On that last point: Stu and Bernie were able to use it to get me a lot of other work. I suspect it also helped convince them that I was worth trying to sell as a single. When a team splits up, often one member of it proves to be half-a-writer or less on his own. Stu and Bernie had one of the top agencies at the time and if Bernie hadn't liked what I'd written and if the guys at Maude hadn't been at least a bit impressed, I suspect I'd have had to go look for a new agent. It was worth writing for that reason alone.
That Maude hadn't swooped me up instantly did not discourage my agents or me. As most teachers of TV writing will tell you, a spec script usually does not impress the folks in charge of that particular show. They have their own proprietary views of their show and where they want it to go at the moment.
You, not being on the inside, are usually out of the loop on that, trying to write the show as it was in the past. A producer of some other sitcom who read my Maude script wouldn't think, "Oh, he did all ten things they want to stop doing on the show." He'd more likely (I'd hope) think, "Boy, this guy really captured the Maude series. Maybe he could do that with our show."
That may cause some of you to wonder why Bernie had me write a Maude to submit to the Maude staff and not, say, a Mary Tyler Moore Show. And the answer to that is that in this case, he knew they were looking for a story editor who really knew their characters well. If he'd just been trying to get me a freelance assignment, a Mary might have been better…though even my outta-date Maude did get me an invite to come in and pitch ideas.
Today, I might not write a spec for an existing show. What producers want to see seems to have changed and today, I might write the pilot for a series of my own invention or a TV-movie script or something else original. That seems to be the norm these days but in the seventies, they wanted spec scripts for existing shows.
As spec work goes, this was a good gamble, one of the better ones I've taken. What would a bad gamble look like? I will be devoting the next column in this series to that question but here's a preview. It would involve one or more of the following situations…
- You're writing something which if one particular buyer doesn't buy it, you can't really sell it anywhere else.
- You're writing something for a project that you're not 100% certain will ever happen at all.
- You're writing something and your fee, if they like the work, has yet to be determined.
- You're writing something for people who, if they do like your work, might not have the money to pay you.
- You're writing something where the terms of employment — who'll own it, credits, whether you receive royalties (and if so, how much), how many rewrites they can demand of you, etc. — have yet to be determined.
- You're writing something for people who really aren't sure what they want.
- You're writing something for people who just might not even read what you hand in…or have it read by someone with actual hiring/power in their company.
- You're writing something for people who are soliciting so many auditions and so much spec work that the odds are pretty damned daunting.
If one or two of those things is true, it might be a bad gamble. If three or more apply, well…it's your time to waste. But like I said, I think most writers who are looking for work expend way too much time 'n' energy on endeavors that are unlikely to lead to real, paying jobs. In the next one of these, we'll talk more about bad gambles.