This is the third in a series of essays here about how professional or aspiring professional writers can and must cope with two various kinds of rejection — rejection of your work by the buyers and rejection by various folks in the audience. Part 1 can be read here and Part 2 can be read here.
There are all sorts of reasons why as a writer, your work gets rejected or fails to sell. We'll be discussing a lot of them before I finish this series but the one I'm trying to get out of the way here is that sometimes, you're pure and simple playing an unwinnable game. You're submitting your writing to someone who cannot buy it. It's like if you and I had twenty bucks between us and no interest in purchasing a new car but still, since it doesn't cost us anything, we walk into the store down on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills that sells Maseratis and act like we're in a buying mood.
The salesguy can fast-talk and charm and offer us a great deal and even promise to arrange the sexual activity of our choice. It's still going to be No Sale and it's not like he's peddling an inferior product. We just ain't buying. In much the same way, it doesn't really cost anything for a publisher to advertise that he's looking for manuscripts or for a producer to spread the word that he's reading screenplays. He doesn't commit himself to spending a nickel and he doesn't even have to read what you send him.
Why would someone who wasn't prepared to buy try to look like he was? Maybe because we're dealing here with businesses where looking like you're active and busy and successful can be just a step or two away from actually being active, busy and successful…so image has its value. Often too, you're dealing with people who are quite sure they're about to be in a position to buy something and they just can't wait to get started. Or who are in denial that they aren't about to publish a book or make a movie.
Well over ten years ago, I was approached by a small animation firm that wanted me to come up with a feature they could produce. I told them an idea I had and they loved it…or at least, they said they loved it. Anyone can say "I want to produce this" but it becomes a very different statement when the next step is a large financial commitment. Still, they bragged they had twenty million dollars in financing and they seemed to be honest, skilled, enterprising, etc. I try to avoid talking money with people who want to hire me but before I could suggest they contact my agent, one of the folks there blurted out a range for my fee and it was a very nice, acceptable range. "Give my agent a call," I said, "and we can get started on this."
It was all going so well until the next moment. That's when they said they'd be contacting my agent the moment they closed their deal for the twenty million dollars.
You see, they didn't actually have the twenty million. They were about to get the twenty million. Until they had it, they couldn't give me a contract…and until I had a contract, I'd be working on spec. I decided not to do too much of that despite their urging that I get started.
As I said, it's been over ten years and they still don't have this financing. Every year or two, the head guy there phones and assures me it's coming, it's coming and, hey, it's up to thirty or forty mil now! He usually calls it a "done deal," a phrase I almost never hear with regard to a deal that is actually done. I tell him, "Fine. Call me when you have it and we'll start." If I'd started back when we first began discussing this idea of mine, I could well have spent a decade working on a project that was never going to happen, never going to pay me.
Moral of the Story: Don't kid yourself into thinking there's an opportunity where there isn't one. This may be tough because — to use a phrase I always thought was pretentious — writers are dreamers and it's easy to dream a successful, unrealistic future for yourself. Also, it may be tough because people you encounter may look like genuine buyers. They may appear sincere or even actually be sincere. (This animation producer really, really thinks all those millions in financing are a "done deal.") They may be well-connected. They may even be actively in business with others…and here's where I should tell you about Mr. Frack…
Frack, as I'm calling him, is an active producer of motion pictures in Hollywood. You may well have seen a film with his name on it. If he was interested in your spec screenplay, you'd have reason to be excited. But the harsh truth is that he would never be interested in your spec screenplay. Every movie he has produced since his first success has been a project that he originated.
They started with a one-sentence idea he came up with…or a topic that interested him. They've all had some subtle autobiographical component. He simply doesn't want to expend two years of his life on a movie unless he feels a great emotional connection to it and your idea won't do it for him. It has to be his idea. So he hires good writers, gives them some basic premises and ideas and let's them whip up scripts under his supervision and steering.
He doesn't get or even seek a writer credit. He doesn't contribute enough to deserve one. He just contributes enough to feel he provided the seed.
I have not been one of those writers but I worked for him on another project, a prospective TV series that his company wanted to co-produce. Since it was a co-production and television, he didn't feel the need to put himself at the top of the flow chart. But I lunched with him and sat in meetings with him…and I met Geoffrey. Geoffrey was his Director of Development. This was a fancy way of saying that Geoffrey was the guy in charge of receiving screenplays that were submitted to the company, reading them and then giving each a polite, professional rejection.
Geoffrey told me they got between twelve and twenty a week. He sat in an office all day and read them…or at least, read enough to write a little piece of coverage for each explaining dispassionately why the material in question, while perhaps wonderful in its way, didn't fit with the company's current needs. He could give just about any reason except the real one: Because it was already written and Frack didn't want to produce something that was already written.
I asked him if he ever read scripts that were so wonderful, he recommended the writer for one of Frack's self-generated projects. He replied, "I read lots of wonderful scripts by very talented writers. But every time Mr. Frack decides what kind of movie he wants to do next, he always seems to have a writer in mind."
Geoffrey has been doing this for Mr. Frack for at least ten years and before him, there were other Geoffreys, all charged with the same mission. It was and is imperative for Frack to remain on good terms with Hollywood agents. He needs to deal with them to get the writers he wants to hire to work from his rough blueprints. He needs to deal with them to get directors, stars, cinematographers, composers, etc. You stay on good terms with agents by considering their submissions and by giving them the ability to tell their clients, "I just submitted your screenplay to Frack Productions and they always read everything I send them."
And they do. They just don't buy them.
Do the math and it's not impossible that Frack Productions has rejected 15,000 screenplays. That could be 15,000 writers who wondered, perhaps with some amount of despair affixed, what was wrong with their brilliant script. Each had no way of knowing that what was wrong with their script was that they'd written it.
I believe that writers (and actors and other creative folks) who believe they'd had a large number of rejections are foolishly including in that number a large number of turndowns that were never in a million years going to happen. They submitted to or were submitted to people who were in no position to buy or not really interested in buying. That's frustrating to the rejected person but if your screenplay is rejected by someone who couldn't have bought it and maybe didn't read it, that's not the same thing as when it's submitted to someone who had the power 'n' budget to buy it who then read it and decided it wasn't right.
If your work gets to someone who can't say yes, why score it as a loss for yourself when they say no? I mean, it might be a loss in terms of marketing but it's not a failure of the material. Don't treat it as such. You have a different problem there, one we'll discuss later on in this series.
This is almost all I want to write about rejections that aren't really rejections. The last aspect of that I need to cover is when you submit not a bad piece of writing but the wrong piece for the buyer's needs. We'll get to that next time.