Gavin Polone reveals what gets read in Hollywood…and he oughta know. Mr. Polone is a top producer with recent creds as an agent and manager. (He represented Conan O'Brien when Conan got and lost The Tonight Show.) He is absolutely right that folks in the TV and movie business who have the power to do anything good with a script receive way too many of them to ever read.
I don't think I've ever mentioned it here but I briefly worked on the TV series, MacGyver in its second season. It was not a happy month of my life — that's all it lasted before they wanted me out and I wanted out and I'm still not sure if I managed to quit before they officially fired me. Anyway, a few weeks before I was hired, one of the producers made a remark in TV Guide along the lines of "We're always looking for good stories." Something innocuous like that. I mean, isn't every TV series always looking for good stories?
An awful lot of people — most of them, I suspect, not already in the TV business — took that as an open invitation to write a script and submit it to the show. The deluge was beginning about the time I arrived: "Spec" MacGyver scripts arriving every day by the hundreds. A large room there that otherwise might have been my office became the storage place for them. Each day, a guy from the mailroom would come by with a hand truck and deliver the latest arrivals…and I'm sure that by the time I left, there were well over three thousand scripts in there. I am not exaggerating.
They were largely ignored, at least while I was around. Every so often, someone would peer into the room, gasp and ask, "What the [f-word] are we going to do with all these?" There was the obvious fear of lawsuits. If we broke a new story for the show about MacGyver cooking a meatloaf…well, there was probably a script somewhere in those piles about MacGyver cooking a meatloaf and its author would never believe no one had read his submission before we came up with our story.
But that aside, how could the show ever deal with all those scripts? If there's a gem in there, how do you find it?
The producers and story editors might at best each have time to read two or three a day. That's on a day when the workload on that week's script and next week's script was light, and at least during my brief stay on that show, there were no such days. It may seem unfair that someone could go to the trouble of writing an entire 60 page script and have no one on the show read it…but tell me how to arrange that. (By the way: I never opened any of those scripts but one of the secretaries there told me there were quite a few in excess of 100 pages or even 200.)
Anyway, read what Mr. Polone has to say. It's a pretty honest appraisal of the way at least some producers and agents operate. Not all. But a lot.