Blog: It's Not A Competition, But...

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Over the weekend I had some rather LOVELY news about a couple of my scripts. My big High Concept sci-fi blockbuster "Six Billion To One" (under its original name "Alpha Male") made it into the Top Ten of The Big Break Screenwriting Contest, while a script for a short film called "Intern-National Space Station" got into the Quarter Finals of the Marquee Lights screenwriting competition. Both scripts could progress further, to the Top 5 and semi-finals respectively, but if that's as far as they get I'll be MORE than happy, for LO! it's been a bit of a LEAN period for this sort of thing.

Last year I went to a talk by Screenwriting Coach Lee Jessop called "How To Make It In Hollywood Without Moving To Hollywood", a title which appealed a LOT. She said that to get someone to even read your script you need to get PEDIGREE, and one way to do that was to enter COMPETITIONS and get placed in them. I took this advice to heart and have since entered a TONNE of them, and, as you can see from my DELIGHTFUL and not at all SHOW-OFFY writing website markhibbett.com I've managed to do pretty well, getting placed in quite a few of them. What you can't see on that website, however, is the HUGE number of competitions where i got NOWHERE. That information is stored on a document which I keep to myself, logging which script I send to which contest, with notification dates so I can go back and check to see how I did. When results come in I use my Word For Windows SKILLZ to mark them as YELLOW if I get anywhere, GREY if I don't, and with an added SCORE THROUGH if I get nowhere but they send me an email to let me know.

For the past few months that document has been page after page of GREY. Huge long lists of scripts I sent out which either never got a response or, if they did, started with "We were amazed by the high quality of submissions overall but unfortunately ... " It's been a bit depressing to be totally honest, so getting a bit of SUCCESS cheered me right up!

The great IDEA of doing this sort of thing is that Hollywood Agents ring up and say "Hey buddy, I see you done real good in that there competition, so how'd you like a million bucks to write us a hit movie?" As you can see, REALISTIC DIALOGUE is one of my strong points but for some reason this has yet to happen in real life. I remain hopeful but while I wait for that to occur I'm thinking about adding a bit to the aforementioned writing site where you can view the first ten pages of my various scripts. Ideally this would lead to LA Producers to become TANTALISED and use their private jets to send me truckloads of CA$H but in the unlikely event of that NOT happening, it will at least give you, gentle reader, the chance to see what I've been banging on about. If/When I get it sorted out you will be the first to know!

posted 23/11/2015 by MJ Hibbett

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