Find out how the big guns got their big feet in that tiny door.
Most of us have probably gone down a similar path in hopes of getting that foot in the door: Try to make connections with producers, agents, and creative execs through queries, cold calls, blind submissions, and waiting tables at Musso and Frank’s. Upload your screenplays to online databases. Submit your script to awards, festivals, and screenwriting competitions. Or hike Runyon Canyon until your feet fall off hoping to bump into Natalie Portman or Channing Tatum so you can fake twist your ankle and when they stop to help, mention you have a script JUST PERFECT for them.
Suffice to say, this well-worn path rarely takes us anywhere. Rather, it’s usually some sort of unexpected combination of luck, talent, and more luck that makes that big break happen. Just take a look at how these now-famous writers got their big break.
Quentin Tarantino: Don’t Underestimate the Community
Quentin Tarantino (One Upon a Time in Hollywood, Inglorious Bastards, Kill Bill, Django Unchained, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, etc., infinity…) hand-wrote True Romance on a pad of paper while working at the Video Archive, a video store in Hermosa Beach. When he finished it, his co-worker and friend, Roger Avary (Rules of Attraction, Pulp Fiction, Killing Zoe), was the first to read it.
“He not only read it, he typed it up,” Tarantino said. The video store brought him into contact with the film community and from this, he got work as an assistant on a Dolph Lundgren exercise video. From there, he got his first paid writing gig – the script for From Dusk Til Dawn. This got True Romance noticed… and he was given $3 million to write and direct Reservoir Dogs! The rest is, well, you know the rest.
Read the full article:
https://thescriptlab.com/blogs/16514-10-stories-of-how-famous-screenwriters-broke-in/
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