Patient Characters and Timing Key in Plotting Success

Stephen Greenfield and Chris Huntley were classmates at USC Film School and did Imax special effects in the early 1980s. With a mutual interest in writing screenplays and Greenfield’s background in computer programming, they decided to start a company to sell screenplay software that Greenfield would develop himself for the earliest word processors. In the leanest years, Greenfield says, the company and its founders learned to survive on a shoestring budget, but the sacrifices paid off recently when a “dot-com” firm acquired part of their product line. He spoke to freelance writer Karen E. Klein.

We started the company with a loan of $19,500 from my father, but we had to purchase $12,000 or $13,000 in computer hardware to get started, so there was no money really left over for salaries for 10 months while I was writing the first screenplay software. I remember pulling pennies out of a penny jar to go to McDonald’s to eat. My partner and I were sharing a house, neither of us was married, and he was still working in the special-effects area. We didn’t have a lot of expenses, so it was a good time to take that kind of risk, but it was still scary.

Screenwriters were just starting to discover that the personal computer was ideally suited for long documents that were constantly being revised, but once they had spent $6,000 or $7,000 to buy a computer there was no software that would format their work into a standard screenplay format. Our product, Scriptor, did just that. It was released in 1983 and we priced it initially at $495. We had 10 people who bought it over a couple of months. We figured we needed to drop the price to $395, and suddenly 30 people bought it. And then we dropped to $295, and it really started to sell, and that’s been the price point where it has stayed ever since.

As the company kept growing, my partner and I were taking modest salaries and reinvesting in the company all the time. When sales started to get overwhelming, we hired our first employee--even though we were nervous about it. After we did it, though, we realized how important it was to invest in a staff. Eventually we hired our first office manager, and our first support person and our first programmer. Soon we started bringing on higher-priced talent, and at one point there were several engineers working for us that had salaries higher than ours. It was weird, but we knew we were building something important and we tried to take a long-term view of that.

We tried to develop a company that had all the right underpinnings to become what we dreamed it would be, even if it required a lot of sacrifice initially. Our focus has always been investing in the technology. We often poured money into development techniques that were considered beyond those that a tiny little company would endeavor in, such as developing software that had cross-platform technology that allowed it to be used by both Macintosh and what were, at that time in the late ‘80s, DOS users. Big companies thought it was impossible to do that, but we did and it allowed us to address both markets at a time when the entertainment industry was just beginning to embrace the Macintosh.

It hasn’t always been easy. When I was planning to get married and buy my first house about six years ago, the banks looked at our business statements and felt we weren’t taking out enough money for ourselves. It was very hard for me to get a loan, because virtually every banker I spoke to gave me this attitude. It was a difficult thing to face at that time and I wondered whether my partner and I hadn’t taken care of ourselves well enough. But then I realized that if I had taken large amounts of money out of the firm before we reached maturity in our cash flow, the company never would have gotten to the level it has.

All the things we’ve invested in all these years have paid off for us. Scriptor marked the birth of the film and television production software industry. In 1994, we received a Technical Achievement Award for it from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences because of the impact that the software has had on the industry.

After the success of Scriptor, in the mid-’80s, we developed budgeting and scheduling software for the film industry that also became very successful, software called Movie Magic Budgeting and Movie Magic Scheduling. A number of companies became interested in that software and last year Creative Planet showed up at our doorstep and offered to purchase those assets from us. We thought about what we were doing as a company and realized we wanted to focus on the creative writing tools and sell the production software so it could be developed further, so we closed the deal with them last Nov. 17.

From an investment point of view, that sale was the payoff of a very, very long-term investment. All of the work and money we put into high-quality software development is what made our programs unassailable by competitors and what made it attractive to these buyers. I think sometimes you have to bite the bullet and put in all the quality you can even before you know what the return is going to be, because you may only have one shot to convince the public that your product is the best one out there.

If your business can provide a lesson to other entrepreneurs, contact Karen E. Klein at the Los Angeles Times, 1333 S. Mayflower Ave., Suite 100, Monrovia, CA 91016 or at kklein6349@aol.com. Include your name, address and telephone number.

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At a Glance

* Company: Screenplay Systems Inc.

* Owners: Stephen Greenfield and Chris Huntley

* Nature of business: Development and marketing of creative writing software

* Location: 150 E. Olive Ave., Suite 203, Burbank 91502

* Founded: 1982

* E-mail: sg1@screenplay.com

* Web site: https://www.screenplay.com

* Employees: 30

* Annual revenue: $4.5 million