Rewriting the Way to Sell a Script

Three years ago Eva Peel wrote “White Elephant Story,” a family-friendly tale about a boy and an elephant. Then she tried to get it read by a film producer. And tried. And tried. . . . She called friends at CBS, where she’d worked for a decade, principally in children’s programming, to learn the secret of getting a filmmaker to take a look. Their response, in essence: “Good luck.”

Now, Peel is a when-life-hands-you-a-lemon-make-lemonade sort. Her response was to start Spec Script Marketplace, a bimonthly newsletter showcasing--in classified ad format, 50 words or fewer--plots from aspiring screenwriters. A listing costs $39.

She reasons, “In a town where everybody from your grocer to your doctor to your mother has a script you really must read,” one ad is roughly equivalent to a 30-second phone pitch--and that, she says, is as much time as an “outsider” is going to get from a producer.

“Outsider” is the key word here. Peel is one, as she found out. So are many of the writers trying to sell their stories through Spec Script Marketplace.

There are 8,500 members of the Writers Guild of America, West, most of them hoping to sell to films or television--and, says spokeswoman Cheryl Rhoden, “in any given year 50% do not make income from writing.” They are the people Peel--herself a guild member by virtue of having sold an unproduced sitcom--wants as clients.

In Spec Script Marketplace, she says, “buyers can check out 100 projects in the time it takes to read one script,” and from 50 words one can tell whether a writer’s coherent. Yes, there’s the specter of getting ripped off, but, Peel points out, would-be pirates get only an appetizer.

But Rhoden says, “Guild policy is to recommend to writers that they do not openly allow their material to be circulated outside of their control.” Its registration service protects them “if they ever have to sue.”

Peel is not promising to turn a never-published homemaker into the next Joe Eszterhas and, in fact, couldn’t produce a housewife phenom if asked.

“If you’re going to be in the 2% to 3% of outsiders who get through, you’re going to have to have good material,” Peel says. “Good ideas are a dime a dozen.”

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Further bad news: The spec script market “has significantly cooled off” since the ‘80s and early ‘90s, says Justen Dardis of the Agency for the Performing Arts. “It used to be that you could sell a badly written script as long as it had a really good idea,” but no longer.

So does the aspiring screenwriter have a realistic chance of making it big through Spec Script Marketplace?

“I’d venture to say no,” replies Dardis, “only because the odds against any script being picked up are pretty high, particularly nowadays.”

A writer’s chance is much better through an agent, says Dardis, but “it’s really hard for someone in Iowa to get an agent . . . getting their work read can be next to impossible. There’s just this huge wall. We tend not to take that stuff seriously.”

Only about half of Peel’s clients are from the L.A. area. The list includes a cardiologist from Houston and a St. Louis real estate developer.

Since Peel’s birth 40-plus years ago in Transylvania she has:

* Been a program buyer for Israeli television in Jerusalem and a reporter-critic for Cinema Magazine in Bucharest.

* Lived in France, Germany, Spain and Canada.

* Started a company, Smart Cookies, specializing in making customized chocolate-covered fortune cookies. “Did not get rich. Learned a lot.”

* Met and married Angeleno Robert Silver, an engineer by profession who restores classic Mercedeses.

In July 1996, Peel launched Spec Script Marketplace out of her Santa Monica home office.

Two scripts in that first issue each drew seven queries. They were “Criminal Passions,” a veteran writer’s comic thriller set on the French Riviera, and “Black & White,” a courtroom drama by an entertainment lawyer. Both were optioned, neither produced.

To date, she’s “aware of 18 or 19 options or shopping agreements” resulting from listings and of one project that went into preproduction. But Peel knows of no films that have been made.

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Rob Marcarelli of Malibu-based Marcarelli Productions has been subscribing to the newsletter for 18 months and has read about 25 scripts posted there.

“[As] a smaller independent film company, we’re looking for things that haven’t already been passed on by all the agents and all the studios,” he says. “It’s better to get stuff fresh out of the box.”

Marcarelli says, “We have not been disappointed in general by the quality of the screenplays. It’s not like getting something from a [film] student.”

One of the scripts Marcarelli optioned is by Brentwood-based writer Roger Stone and partner Bruce Jacobs, an action picture called “Underground.” Stone summarizes the film’s plot: “A nuclear warhead is loose in a cave system . . . next to the San Andreas Fault. A team of experts has to go down and retrieve it.”

He advertised it in Spec Script Marketplace in April and feels he got his money’s worth.

“What was supposed to happen happened,” he says.

A typical issue carries about 170 listings and to date, Peel says, more than 70% have elicited at least one buyer query. Encouraged by the response, she and Howard Miebach, editor of several industry reference books, have since started Spec Book Marketplace, a quarterly listing of published or unpublished books with film rights available.

Spec Script Marketplace does little advertising.

Peel explains: “Los Angeles is full of people who firmly believe that because they can watch a movie, they can write a script. . . . I really don’t want them.”

She sends free trial issues to “every movie buyer I can find who’s legit”--currently 1,250 buyers, producers and studio executives. If they like it, she asks them to subscribe, at $99 a year.

“If a writer called these companies,” she says, “they’d hang up so fast. . . .”

Half of those who place blurbs in Spec Script Marketplace are Writers Guild members, Peel says, and 60% have agents.

“Everybody in town has a script that their agent doesn’t like--and they love,” she says.

All listings are anonymous, in part to protect older writers no longer considered au courant (Translation: Nothing sold in three years).

Meanwhile, Peel is working on two thrillers of her own. No, she doesn’t list them in her newsletter, citing “a humongous conflict of interest.”