To celebrate the holiday season, Santa has collected a sack of scripts for your reading pleasure!
Screenwriting is the art and craft of writing scripts for films, television, and other visual media. Screenwriters are responsible for creating the dialogue, plot, and characters for a film or television show. Screenwriting can be a challenging and rewarding career, but it can also be highly competitive. Successful screenwriters often have a strong understanding of storytelling, character development, and the structure of films and television shows, as well as excellent writing skills and the ability to collaborate with others.
They also have to network, constantly promote themselves and be very, very lucky.
Let’s discuss two sources of scripts: The Black List and The Stunt List.
The Black List is an annual compilation of the most popular unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, as determined by a survey of film industry executives. The list is compiled by Franklin Leonard, a former development executive at Warner Bros., and is announced every year in December.
Each year, a group of over 250 film industry executives are invited to participate in the survey, in which they are asked to identify the best unproduced screenplays that they have read in the past year. The screenplays are ranked based on the number of votes they receive, and the top screenplays are included on the Black List.
Scott Myers, of Go Into The Story, provides some excellent analysis of this year’s list:
- There are 74 screenplays on the 2022 Black List (There were 73 screenplays on the 2021 Black List).
- Over 300 film executives at major financiers and production companies voted on the 2022 Black List.
- 9% of the scripts on the 2022 Black List have a financier attached (16% on 2021 Black List)
- 59% of the scripts on 2022 Black List have a producer attached (78% on the 2021 Black List)
- 64% of the scripts on the 2022 Black List are repped by agents
- 88% of the scripts on the 2022 Black List are repped by managers
He also teases out these themes and groupings; well worth exploring:
- Athletes on the Brink
- Hollywood Plays Itself
- Political Insanity
- The Sisterhood of Song
- A New Voice in Screenwriting
- Scripts By Agency
- Scripts By Management Company
- Unrepped Scripts
The Stunt List is a wonderful example of promotion, pitch decks and scripts, collected by Ash Lazer and Eric Moyer.
They list Originals (spec scripts) and Stunts (based on existing IP for entertainment purposes only.) For instance, this stunt script will appeal to fans of SNL and Die Hard: https://www.ericmoyer.com/dielaughing.pdf
My take: reviewing these log lines, pitch decks and scripts is a great education. I really enjoyed Die Laughing — it would make a great group read!