I think one of the worst notes I think I've ever received was Ang Lee on 'Brokeback Mountain.' He came in on coverage, and he was like, 'More, more handsome.' I was like, 'I'll try that.'
I worked in Hollywood as a reader and a would-be writer for about 6 years before I sold my first story.
A lot of feature films do two pages a day.
It's not like I have boxes of scripts arriving at my door.
When I graduated college I needed to make money while I was pursuing acting, so I read screenplays and made a living writing coverage on them for studios.
The way you get your script to the right people is that you put it in an envelope. It's easy. The difficult bit is writing something that is so good people will take a punt on a brand new writer.
The absolute base-level thing that you do as a new screenwriter is send out query letters. Literally, you just say, 'Hi, Mr. So-and-So,' and you give them a one-sentence description of one of your scripts. You send it out to a list of people you found on the Internet.
I've written about 15 screenplays and they all sold - they were all sold on pitches.
My experience is that's rare - that you have a script that is... what they call 'film-ready.'
I was full time on 'Party of Five' for one year, then more like a creative consultant for two years, where I was in the writing rotation but didn't have to go in every day or cover the set until midnight.
There used to be a period of time when you'd shoot big studio movies where you would shoot a couple of pages a day. For a TV show, you've gotta shoot seven to nine. The schedules are much more compressed.
The Indian film industry does not believe in investing financial resources in scripts.
I was reading scripts, doing coverage, for CAA. Reading hundreds and hundreds of scripts across the board, from blind submissions to 'Brokeback Mountain'. It was not always a pleasant task but something, in hindsight, I'm glad I did.
