Breakfast with Sharks: A Screenwriter's Guide to Getting the Meeting, Nailing the Pitch, Signing the De al, and Navigating the Murky Waters of Hollywood

Overview of Hollywood

There's an old joke about the studio exec who has read a script and someone asks what he thought of it, and he says, "I don't know. I haven't talked to anyone yet." The jest works on two levels: Hollywood is a startlingly tiny community, and in L.A. everyone plays the "six degrees of separation" game to figure out how you already know each other, as in "You just sold Matt at Sony? Ohmigod, I pitched him on Ninja Clown Posse six months ago. We gotta have lunch." As for the second part of the joke, ideas may be king in Hollywood, but this place is not about reinventing the wheel. "Uniquely familiar," a phrase coined by veteran producer Joel Silver (The Matrix, Lethal Weapon), is the stock and trade of Hollywood. In other words, you should think outside the box, but don't try to bring your own box to L.A., because over the past hundred years or so, Hollywood has developed a way to do business and make movies that it is quite comfortable with, thank you very much. The system works in an imperfect way, but it does work. So there's little use in trying to force the town to do things your way. The logic behind the Hollywood development process for a motion picture goes something like this: no matter where you are making movies in the world, if you are producing a product for a mass audience, the various funnels through which your story (the entertainment you are creating) must pass will narrow in order to appeal to the most people waiting on the other side. Typically, mass audiences reduce characters to white hat/good guy and black hat/bad guy. Consequently they like the familiarity and comfort of a twice-told tale. As we shall see, the trick for the successful Hollywood writer is to create a script that is intensely personal, yet still manages to resonate with a mass audience by virtue of its universal themes. A quick scan of the American Film Institute's list of "America's 100 Greatest Movies" shows a number of masterpieces that have accomplished this difficult feat. These are films like Casablanca, The Graduate, On the Waterfront, Schindler's List, All About Eve, Raging Bull, Midnight Cowboy, Rebel Without a Cause, Rocky, Platoon, Easy Rider, The Apartment, Goodfellas, and Pulp Fiction.

While most of us are uncomfortable judging, say, Japanese calligraphy or a Wagnerian opera based on our limited exposure to those art forms, we are all experts on Hollywood simply by virtue of having seen hundreds or thousands of movies in our lifetimes. Few moviegoers have qualms comparing and contrasting The English Patient with, say, Scary Movie. But from inside Hollywood, what you see is an imperfect system that contains vast armies of smart, usually young people in their twenties and thirties, working tremendously hard to make mainly mediocre movies. Why? Because moviemaking looks deceptively easy, but is, in fact, very, very hard. It's a highly collaborative endeavor with dozens and often hundreds of people involved. Perfecting your craft to work in tandem with other craftsmen can and does take many years. That's why even great fiction writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker were never better than mediocre screenwriters.

What Does Hollywood Want?

"I think film schools serve as a good training ground, but there isn't really a replacement for doing it."
--Brian Glazer, Producer, Imagine Entertainment

This book isn't about teaching you how to write. There are lots of other sources to help you with that part of the process. I will state, however, that the fastest, most time-honored way to learn structure and form is to take a favorite movie and, as you view it, type it out into a script. But if you're reading this book, I assume you have already achieved the laudable goal of completing a screenplay. Congratulations on having written a movie on paper! Now you're ready to ask the next logical question: "What do I do with this thing that I've written?" How will you realize your dreams of making a living as a writer in Hollywood with a chance to see your work on movie screens all over the world? That's what this book is about.

One of the first realizations that arrivals to the movie capital of Planet Earth make is that despite having the world's biggest stage, Hollywood is an amazingly insular place. Catch-22s abound, such as that "no one important will read your work unless you have an agent, and you can't get an agent to read your work unless you are referred to them by somebody important who has already read your work." So, as soon as you get here, intent on befriending anyone with access who will read your script, you discover that everybody seems to be a producer or working on a hot deal. You feel as if you're chasing your tail as you deal with some of these people, because, although they promise the moon, from them you see very little in terms of money or the all-important access to the real players of the town. It's so hard to find out who is really who. Believe me, you will get frustrated as you try to cut through the miasma--"What's the deal with this !%*$ town? What is really going on?"