In the UK, if you want a screenwriting career, your best bet is probably TV. That way you can make a living from writing 'Eastenders' and spend your free time writing the movies you want to see made.

Otherwise you're probably right that the best opportunity to see your scripts actually get made is in low-budget movies at this point: Hollywood in particular seems to do little now other than spew out sequels, remakes and book adaptions, rather than spec scripts. You also have the option of shooting the movie yourself and making a name that way.

As for agents, the easiest way to get one seems to be to sell a script first. But the main problem most people have with getting an agent is that either the writer won't do TV work, which cuts them out of 90% of the market, or they've written one script and expect that to get them an agent... agents want to work with people who are going to make a career out of writing, so unless you've got three or four decent feature scripts to show them it doesn't make much sense for them to do much with you.

Thanks Mark. So, an ideal strategy would be to have a pilot script for a TV show written, plus a few extra episodes. Then make the pilot yourself and try and get it looked at that way along with your scripts?

Possibly, but you're unlikely to sell a new TV series in the UK: I know people who've had decent scripts and bankable actors attached but still couldn't get the funding. On the other hand if you could make it cheap and get some kind of audience on the web there might be a chance of talking that into a TV series.

AFAIR the usual advice is to write a spec script for an established TV show, and then take that around to the people making other TV shows, as a writing sample. That way you can prove you can write a decent story using existing characters, but don't run into the problem of the people you're pitching to knowing their characters so well that they don't believe your script.

Another avenue you might try is radio: quite a few writers have gone from radio to TV, and it's a cheap way to try out something new.

So if, for example, I had the perfect script/storylines which would reverse Eastenders' fortunes back to 14m an episode I would be in the money, so to speak?

Maybe thats just too much to aim for!

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Originally posted by ironfist550
Whats really knocking me back right now is the overwhelmingly negative attitude I keep reading about how impossible it is to get an agent, nobody buys spec scripts etc and how you've got better odds of winning the lottery than ever getting anywhere!!

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Most writers write out of passion.

The difference in entering the lottery is there is only one winner. If you have a great script the "odds" don't come into play. A prodCo can buy one or four or six scripts - the lottery can only have one winner no matter how "close" the other tickets are.

So if you're in it for the "odds", you'll frustrate yourself. If you really want to write - you'll write. And a writer with several good, finished scripts is more attractive to agents and producers than a writer with a few ideas knocking around.

I know nothing about the industry in the UK. TV is nearly impossible to break into in the States. I get the impression from you UK posters that independent financing of movies is almost non existent. Here in the States it's VERY difficult to get, but it's available.

I do a lot of direct-to-video movies with very low budgets. Is it even possible for someone in the UK to make an independent movie and find a small distributor for video/DVD release?

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The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)

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TV is nearly impossible to break into in the States

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I don't know if they still do, but the BBC at least used to have a program for finding new writers for the shows they make themselves (e.g. 'Eastenders' and the like). Given the number of episodes of the different shows that they spew out, there must be a sizable demand for writers.

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Is it even possible for someone in the UK to make an independent movie and find a small distributor for video/DVD release

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Yes, but it's not easy. Last time I met them, a friend was on the verge of getting about $400k for a low-budget horror feature primarily for the TV and DVD market, and a friend of his had sold a $75k horror feature and raised a couple of million on the back of that for their next movie. I suspect it was mostly foreign money though, not British.

Horror is big at the moment and something that can be done for relatively little money. Of course now that it's big it's going to produce as many bad movies as the low-budget gangster binge did a couple of years ago, but there's always going to be a market for decent horror movies somewhere in the world if you can make them cheaply.

Overall, though, you're right that the real answer is to write some good scripts. There are lots of producers looking for polished scripts with decent stories, and not too many of those scripts going around. Certainly if you go for low-budget horror, all you need to do is write sympathetic characters and you'd alreay be ahead of 90% of the competition: in fact that's probably true of any genre in the UK, for some reason most writers seem to think that we want to watch obnoxious prats posing around the cinema screen, rather than characters we can identify with.

Mark,

Any idea how Shaun of the Dead was financed? I see the director had quite a few TV credits and Simon Pegg was a fairly established actor and writer. I'm sure that helped.

I don't know any details, I'm afraid (I actually met the director at parties a couple of times before he made his TV show, but that was years ago)... but it's pretty sure that having made a successful TV show was a good way to get the movie rolling :).

He's also made at least one feature before, though it was shot for about $10,000 on 16mm. That one wasn't a great movie, but was quite amusing in places.

one must admit that the film industry is HARD to get into, and to find support for.

but if someone really loves to write, really loves and has a desire to make movies.. not for the money but for the passion, then someone is bound to pick you up, as long as you just keep doing it for the passion.

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Originally posted by gelo

one must admit that the film industry is HARD to get into, and to find support for.

but if someone really loves to write, really loves and has a desire to make movies.. not for the money but for the passion, then someone is bound to pick you up, as long as you just keep doing it for the passion.

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I must admit, I do it for the money.

Sure, I love what I do, but passion doesn't pay the bills. My primary reason for working as hard as I did to get into this biz was and still is money.

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The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)

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Originally posted by MarkG

I don't know any details, I'm afraid (I actually met the director at parties a couple of times before he made his TV show, but that was years ago)... but it's pretty sure that having made a successful TV show was a good way to get the movie rolling :).

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So is there any way to get financing for a film in the UK without doing TV?

I don't mean big budget films. Something small.

I have directed eight $10,000 to $50,000 films and one $400,000 film. And I've worked crew (makeup efx and pyro) on 14 $200,000 to $600,000 films - all right here in Los Angeles. Lots of these get made in the States every year. Almost none of them see distribution - but they get made. Does that kind of filmmaking happen in the UK at all?

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The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)

wait.. $600 000 movies get made all the time? and most don't get distributed.. that's tough.

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Does that kind of filmmaking happen in the UK at all?

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Yes. Lots of $10,000 movies, a few $500,000 movies. A few get shown in cinemas or on TV, most don't get anywhere... but primarily because most are so bad. Usually it's due to huge script problems that should have been obvious before they were shot, but so many of the movies are made on the 'I've got a mate in the government who'll give me lottery money, but I need a script right now!' scheme it's not surprising.

Then again, I saw a British movie a few years back that supposedly had a 20,000,000 pound budget and was serious crap, so it's not entirely the fault of government funding.