WSF

Dear Screenwriter,

Access to producers, studio executives, and your potential agent or manager can take many forms.  The most obvious, and most direct, is a face-to-face sit-down with the production companies of your choice. Sell yourself and your screenplay to them, and the agents and managers beat a path to your door.

ACCESS is not merely “access.”  Timing is critically important.  A production company representative is much more likely to pay attention and want to hear your pitch if your script is the hot new contest winner than if that person thinks your script has been shopped around and rejected all over town.

The Most Access … Perfect Timing

That is why we changed the timing of winner announcements for the Expo Screenplay Competition.  For years, this top contest announced winners at the end of the last day of the Screenwriting Expo — just as the Expo pitch fest, known as the Golden Pitch (and possibly the biggest pitch fest in existence) — was ending.  That didn’t make sense.  So now, winners of the Expo Screenplay Competition are announced the evening before the Golden Pitch begins.  So if you become a semifinalist, finalist, or an award winner in the Expo Screenplay Competition,  you and your script are the hot, newest winners in town.

Expo Screenplay Competiton winners (and AAA Screenplay Contest winners) receive free entry to the Screenwriting Expo, the biggest and most prestigious meeting on screenwriting in the world, and free tickets to pitch to the production companies,  agents, and managemetn companies of their choice.  And because we think this prize — face-to-face access — is so important, we have increased the numbers of free pitch tickets for winners.

Keeping Your Script In Their Minds

It takes time for the value of a script to percolate through the system at any production company, and through the entertainment industry generally.  That is why the Expo Screenplay Competition and the spring AAA Screenplay Contest offer multiple forms of access after that initial flurry of pitching at the Screenwriting Expo.  See below for the multiple ways in which winning and high-placing  scripts receive wide attention in the months after our contests.

No, We’re Not #1 … But We Try Harder — And You’re Not Fighting Such Harsh Numbers

Yes, a couple of prestigious screenplay contests do receive more “automatic” attention from Hollywood than ours do.  But here are three observations about that fact of life:

1. We work harder at getting your screenplays noticed.  Just peruse the list below and see what I mean.
2. If your script is one of 6,000 entries, your chances are numerically one in 6,000.  We receive fewer than half as many submissions, boosting your chances of being noticed.
3. Smaller production companies know that when they express interest in a script from one of the most Hollywood-prestigious contests, they’re competing with bigger, more well-heeled producers.  They know they’ll have to pay a premium for a script that wins at Nicholl or Sundance.  So some don’t bother, or don’t pursue those scripts.
4. Perceptions differ from contest to contest about what makes a great, marketable script.  No single contest can possibly consider the entire range of possible stories that will make it onto the big screen.  So it is worthwhile to enter more than one contest, allowing different sets of judges to see your work.
   

So I invited you to read on and learn more about the Access Prizes and the entire prize list of the Expo Screenplay Competition, and I hope you will consider entering.

Best wishes and write on,

Bill Donovan, Publisher, Creative Screenwriting Magazine