How to Send Movie Scripts to Studios

Series Summary

Becoming an indie filmmaker is a more attainable dream now than ever before. Home technology allows ordinary folks to shoot a movie, edit it, lay down music for the background, and even create a movie trailer. However, selling the finished product involves a lot more. There are storyboards to draw, scripts to write and funding to obtain. The tricky part is getting a studio to notice. In this free video series, a director and filmmaker provides tips for the aspiring filmmaker. Learn how to start a movie studio, how to write dialogue for a film and how to write test scripts for movies. Discover the importance of lighting in movies, find out what a production assistant does, and learn about film narrative. Do some research, get the proper equipment, and start making movies with these filmmaking tips.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jerry Drake and I'm going to talk to you about submitting your script to movie studios. if you're sending a story or a script to a movie studio they're probably going to ask you to submit it with a release form. Basically what that says is, look, if our studio comes out with a movie that kind of resembles your script, you're not going to hold us responsible, you're not going to sue us for stealing your idea. It's kind of goofy, you know. It's a little unsettling but from their point of view it makes sense. They can't have everybody that submitted scripts to them come in and saying, hey, you know my movie had a character named Joe. When submitting to a studio, try and find somebody there that you want to read your script and attention your script to them. Even put on your envelope, put requesting materials by so an so, so you know that the script will get on that person's desk or their assistants desk at least. The last thing you need to do is submit a script to a studio or a production company, just generally and have it sit on the front, you know the front desk. The best way to get your script to a studio is to know somebody there or have a connection. Now, that is where managers and agents come in to the ballgame because they are the connection. So, try and find an agent if you can. That's one big piece of the pie. Now when submitting your script to anyone, don't think that you're going to do something different and something special and you're going to put it all in colored paper or paper, draw some frilly stuff on it or make some different text or submit it with pictures or whatever. Just follow the format, meaning white pages, currier font, make sure the margins match up to what's expected in the industry. Just a plain simple cover page, title page with you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, by so and so and that' it. Don't get fancy with submitting your script. People do not like that. And the reason behind it is, look if your scripts good the words are going to speak for themselves. You don't have, nobody's going to be fooled by fanciest and nobody's going to think, oh wow, look this person really cares about the material. Look how much they put in to, to making this something special. That doesn't fly. If anything, they're going to be turned off because they're going to say, why in the heck is that person spending time doing something stupid versus rereading their material and making their material better. It's just, it's demeaning and it'll get you booted right out the door. Now the proper thing in submitting a script is the pages are three hole punch, and you submit it with these brass brackets. And you can buy them at Staples or any Home Office store. But what's funny is although you have three holes, you only use two. People that use the third one, you know it's an amateur, you know it's somebody that doesn't know what they're doing. oftentimes I've worked at companies where somebody submits a script and they put three brackets, one in each hole, and they just throw the script out automatically, because the person there is like, this guy doesn't know what he's doing. So you put one in the top and you put one in the bottom and you leave the middle one blank. I don't know why, but that's how you do it. So follow the format."