The moment I graduated high school, I could hardly contain my excitement. My entire life, I had been a mediocre student at best and high school was certainly no different. Maybe if I had been taking classes that actually interested me (what a concept), my academic career might have turned out quite different.
Regardless, I was ecstatic just to be out there in the “real world”, even if it was just a minimum wage job at Lincoln Mall in Matteson, Illinois. So, as I’d mentioned in my last entry, by summer I’d completed my first screenplay On the Edge of a Cloud.
Not knowing anyone in ‘the Biz’, I read as much as I could on how a nobody like myself should even attempt to actually market a screenplay. I quickly learned a few things.
First of all, you needed a literary agent to submit a screenplay to any legitimate producer or production company in Hollywood. Also, in order to sign with a literary agent, you needed to be at least eighteen years old.
Now being only seventeen at the time, I found myself in a rather precarious situation. I didn’t want to wait six months until my next birthday and lose all this momentum.
I decided that since no literary agent would sign me as a client, at least until I turned eighteen, I had to take matters into my own hands. So, I called the DGAw (the Directors Guild of America West) and ordered the 1986 Member Directory.
Every single member with an address received a letter from me that summer. Not just directors but also assistant directors, production managers, unit production managers, etc. Everyone.
I also purchased the latest edition of the Hollywood Creative Directory, a listing of every production company in Tinseltown along with the contact information of every one of its executives and officers, including their titles.
And finally, I made several phone calls to the Screen Actors Guild, where I was able to obtain the contact information of the agents and managers who represented the dozen or so actors that I believed would be a good fit to star in the next great summer blockbuster (a.k.a. my movie), including Michael Schoeffling.
I decided this was it, my one shot and I needed to make the most of it. In all, I mailed nearly three thousand letters in a one month span. The good ol’ three percent rule, thankfully, proved to be right on the money for me that summer. The walls were slowly starting to come down.
I received just over a hundred requests to read my first screenplay, mostly via mail but there were a few memorable phone calls. Out of all the requests to read my screenplay, I actually received two money offers for an outright purchase.
Looking back nearly a quarter of a century later, I really do wish I would’ve just taken the money but I suppose everything happens for a reason, right? At least that’s what I try to tell myself, even now, to this day.
I was young and quite honestly, I thought the offers would keep on coming. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Still. . . it would’ve been really nice to be able to say that I’d sold the damn thing.