There are many great things about being a screenwriter. You get to live in Los Angeles. You get paid to write. When you are even moderately successful, there is a chance that more people will be exposed to your writing than will read the most successful novel of the year, which is weird, but, for you, cool. Your work comes to life.
There are many things about being a screenwriter that are not great. You have to live in Los Angeles. The people paying you to write generally don’t want you to write anything good. When you are even moderately successful, there is a chance that more people will be exposed to your shitty writing than will read the most successful novel of the year, which is cosmically depressing and, for you, humiliating.
The most difficult part of being a screenwriter, though, is that most of the time your work does not come to life. Instead, it is read by a handful of people, and then never, ever read again. The fact is, scripts are not read to be read. They are read for a purpose. To get an agent. To get hired on a show. To get made. Once a script has served its purpose – or, more often, failed to – it disappears and nobody wants to talk about it or even acknowledge it ever existed. It’s like your first marriage, except you put more time into your script.
I don’t hope to change any of this – and would it matter if I did? – but I’m posting a few of my own scripts here just so that they might be read. The only purpose is that you might enjoy them. This isn’t everything I’ve written – I haven’t included any episodic television, for example, or anything I developed at various networks and studios – but this probably represents something of me as a writer and person. Which will make you sad. (Please note: I occasionally rotate scripts on and off this page, so if there is something missing here that you’ve seen before, it will come back, but it might not be for years and when it does it will probably feature a character who regrets going to law school.)
I guess I should probably say this now, but wish I didn’t have to: As with everything on this site, these are copyrighted, usually by me, sometimes by a studio, or another publication. I can’t imagine you would ever try to take these things, because that would be really weird and also dastardly and unwise, but if you are giving some thought to doing this, please don’t. Write your own stuff. I’m sure it will be better than anything here and it will be yours.
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