If you survived that paragraph and still want to be in the business,
good. Such a reality check is necessary because dreams don’t come cheap –
but they do come if you keep at your writing and keep making
connections along the way. That said, writers take many paths to their
careers. I’ve known ski instructors who passed spec scripts off to the
wives of producers who eventually hired them.
I’ve known limo drivers to
producers who gained their trust traveling the 405 for a year and I’ve
known writers who passed spec movie scripts to the boyfriends of former
college roommates who happened to be directors. (I’m still waiting for
the story of the female writer who gets to pass her script off to the
former female college roommate who happens to be a director so we can
skip this middle-girlfriend step.)
Most of the women I know (or know of) who became writers and
producers came out of the writer’s assistant world – and that list
includes Kathleen Kennedy (who once assisted Stephen Spielberg and now
is his producer), Marti Noxon (who assisted Rick Rosenthal and Barbara
Hall before breaking in on Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and me,
who worked as an assistant for several shows (so many kept getting
cancelled) before being hired on staff. So I know of what I speak and I
still recommend to my students that once they graduate from our Stephens
College MFA in Screenwriting program they apply for jobs as assistants
to writer-producers.
Before one applies one has to have prepared a portfolio of several
solid, well-written, stand out spec scripts so that once their employer
asks them what they do, they have something ready to share that will be
too good not to produce. That entails writer courses that allow you to
build up that portoflio. Some people ask if you need to go to college to
be a writer – since Truman Capote didn’t. Nor did Maya Angelou. But I
did and I advise aspiring writers to as well because a writer needs both
writing classes and a well-rounded liberal arts education that allows
them to contribute to the ever-flowing brainstorm sessions that fill a
writers room when stories are being discussed.To know more visit our site http://www.allindiayellowpage.com.