Monthly Archives: April 2012

Many moons ago, I wrote a couple of TV shows for a small production company that also produced the occasional movie, either for TV or theaters. The producer — we'll call him Mr. Producer — had a fellow on staff to act as his "reader." We'll call him Mr. Reader. This is another anecdote about what often happens to scripts when they get submitted in Hollywood. Mr. Producer had neither the time nor the interest in reading the many scripts that were submitted to him, mostly by agents but occasionally by friends or friends of friends. That was why he needed Mr. Reader. The job of Mr. Reader was to read those scripts, write "coverage" for the files and then to politely reject them.

That was not a joke. His job was to reject every single script. That was the assignment.

Mr. Producer made one or two movies a year. He was not a writer, not in the slightest, but he wanted a little pride of authorship in the films he produced. Any movie he made had to originate with an idea of his.

It could be the vaguest of ideas. One time, he had the notion that it would be interesting to make a movie filled with slapstick about an ordinary guy who's very clumsy. That was the totality of the concept. He called in (one at a time) a couple of good, experienced screenwriters and told each this whim and said, "If you have an idea for a movie about an ordinary guy who's really clumsy…something that could be filled with slapstick…come back in and pitch it to me." Each came back with such an idea and he picked the one he liked and hired the writer to develop it.

But understand this: If before he'd had that initial thought, you'd submitted a slapstick-riddled script about a clumsy guy, there's no way Mr. Producer would ever have made it. It never would have gotten past Mr. Reader and if by some chance it did, Mr. Producer would have rejected it. Because it didn't originate with him and he wanted every movie he made to begin with him so he could feel it was "his" movie. (For some reason, he didn't care that much about the point of origin on his TV projects.)

So why did he need Mr. Reader? Because if you want the agents to treat you like a real producer, you have to accept script submissions and respond to them. Mr. Reader would take the pile of scripts and read enough of every one to write the coverage, which was a one or two page memo-to-the-files that briefly summarized the plot and quoting One Great Moment in the script. That was an important part: Citing One Great Moment. Mr. Reader told me that was sometimes the hardest part of his job…finding that One Great Moment.

Then he'd give his recommendation, which was — always — that the script had great merits and the writer had talent but that this particular effort was not right for Mr. Producer's company at this time. And then he'd make up some reason why not.

If an important agent phoned Mr. Producer to ask, "Hey, didn't you just love that script I sent over last week?", Mr. Producer would consult Mr. Reader's memo and say, "Oh, yes. What a great idea…a script about [whatever Mr. Reader said it was about]!" Then he'd add, "Your client is very, very talented. I especially loved the bit where —" and here he would cite that One Great Moment and then he'd say, "I'm afraid though this isn't quite what I'm looking for right now."

If pressed to explain further, Mr. Producer would cite Mr. Reader's reason and the agent would be disappointed but satisfied. He'd go back to the client and say, "I got Mr. Producer to read your script. He really liked it — especially [One Great Moment] but it's not what he's looking for at the moment." That was how it worked. Every time.

In theory, having Mr. Reader read those scripts might have had its value in that he could have discovered a great writer and suggested that person for when Mr. Producer had one of his ideas…but I don't think that ever happened. Mr. Reader liked to call in folks who'd written recent hit movies he'd liked.

As I said, I worked for him on some TV projects. I got the distinct impression that he wasn't reading what I wrote, either — and I was writing material he was going to produce. He'd tell me he'd read it and that it was fine and he'd send it over to the network…and if they had notes, he'd pass them on to me. Once, I asked him of a script I'd handed in, "Did you think the scene in the gymnasium was too long?" He said, "No, seemed about right to me." There was no scene in that script in a gymnasium…but I wasn't about to point that out. I liked having a producer who didn't read the script. It was one less person to tell me to change things.

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.