Read 'What happened to Dish Dogs?' at http://www.SellingYourScreenplay.com.

You can find a little background on Dish Dogs here:  How I optioned and sold my first screenplay Dish Dogs

Shortly after Nathan Ives and I optioned Dish Dogs we took a couple of passes at the script making changes that the producers requested.  We met with Sean Astin who was interested in directing the script.  He seemed to like the script but had a lot of problems with it, too, and many of his friends and family seemed to be trying to steer him away from the project.  After meeting with him he seemed to want lots and lots of changes which I didn’t think were needed – and in fact the producers were telling us that they didn’t think it needed any further changes either.  I never heard exactly what happened but soon afterwards we got word that Sean was no longer the director on the project, which suited us just fine since he seemed to want too many changes.

In hindsight this was the biggest mistake we made in dealing with the producers.  Nathan and I should have really fought for Sean as a director.  Sean seemed hard working and eager to make a good movie.  Our script had problems and Sean recognized that even though Nathan and I didn’t.  If he had directed the film I think he would have made the effort to work with Nathan and I on the script and together we would have made a good film.

A few months later I called the producers and asked them how things were going.   I could hear the producer I was talking to cover the phone and say, “hey, it’s one of the original writers on Dish Dogs.”  I knew that wasn’t a good sign.  Basically the funding was moving forward very slowly and the producers and director were just waiting around for filming to begin.  With literally nothing to do they just started to re-write the script almost out of boredom.  One of the producers had given the script to his hairdresser and gotten notes from him!  I’m not kidding.  Nathan and I read the new version of the script in sheer horror.  It went from our script that the producers said needed “no changes” to something completely different – and in our opinion worse.

We had a few meetings with them and were willing to work with them to make changes but at that point the script wasn’t ours anymore and they didn’t really want to hear what we had to say.

Nearly six months into the option they got their funding and paid us for the script.

Nathan and I were on the set several times and they were always very gracious to us.  In fact they were some of the coolest dudes you’d ever want to hang out with on a movie set.  Unfortunately we had very different artistic sensibilities.  It’s hard to say whether our original script was really better than what was produced, maybe, maybe not.  Our script did have problems but I don’t think the producers were able to solve the problems and in trying they ripped the heart and soul out of the story (at least in my opinion).

I’ve posted the script online and you can still buy or rent the movie so you can weigh in on which version you think is better by leaving a comment below.

It’s available from Netflix on demand as of this writing or you can buy it from Amazon here: Buy Dish Dogs at Amazon.com.

If you want to read the original screenplay you can do so by going here: download the original screenplay for Dish Dogs.

The screenplay is formatted incorrectly so please do not use it as any sort of style guide for screenwriting.  The original screenplay was written in Word Perfect 5.0 before I had any sort of screenwriting software so I used custom macros to format it.  The macros didn’t work (of course) when I opened it years later in Wordpad so the formatting was lost when I created this online text version.

Read 'How long should it take to write a script?' at http://www.SellingYourScreenplay.com.

I got this question recently:

“How long should it take me to write a script?”

This really varies from writer to writer and depends a lot on how much time a writer has each day to devote to writing.

When I first moved to Los Angeles I worked part time (about 30 hours per week) and was going to graduate school part time (two classes per semester) and I was able to write about two scripts per year.

On the other hand after I sold my first script, Dish Dogs, I quit my “day” job and did nothing but write screenplays full time.  I was able to pump out 10 spec scripts (along with several small writing assignments) in about 2 years.

Currently I divide my time between my web projects and my film projects so I’m writing one or two scripts per year.  On my most recent film project, Man Overboard, I was an executive producer and was involved in much of the production process.  This is the direction I see my career going.  I’ll probably be spending more time pushing my projects to fruition and less time trying to write lots of material to send out.  I wouldn’t recommend this to a new writer.  I think it’s important for new writers to spend lots of time actually writing so that he/she has lots of material to send out.

What about you?  How long does it take you to write a script?

Read 'How much should a writer get paid for their screenplay?' at http://www.SellingYourScreenplay.com.

When I optioned and sold my first screenplay, Dish Dogs, I had a friend who worked in development who gave me a great piece of advice about how to negotiate my writing fee.  He said, “You get what you can take.”  This is sound advice for anyone who’s ever negotiated anything.  As with most things in the entertainment industry nothing is written in stone so your writer’s fee may well be determined by your negotiation skills.

Keep in mind the psychology of the producer or director who wants to option your script.  When a producer is reading scripts they have too many to read and most of them are terrible so the writer has to work hard to even get the producer to read their script.  Once a producer has read your script and likes it they’ve probably read 100 scripts or more and they don’t want to have to go back to the drawing board and look for another good script.  So for a brief moment you, the writer, have a good deal of power.  Once you sign the contract you lose pretty much all power again so make the most of it while you have it.

There are some general guidelines that you should keep in mind when you’re negotiating.  As a rule the screenwriter will get between 2% and 3% of the production budget.  The production budget typically does NOT include insurance costs which can be 15-20% of the total budget – this is normal so be prepared for it.  When a production company says that the budget is around $2 million the writer will probably only get paid based on a budget of around $1.6 million.  Using this example the writer would get between $32K (2% of the budget) and $48K (3% of the budget).

In addition nearly every producer will give a writer around 3% of the “producer’s net gross” which usually amounts to nothing but is good to have in the contract in case the film is a box office smash.

The WGA has their own standards which you can find online at their website.  They change often so check out their website to get up-to-date amounts.

http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=1027

However, unless you’re a fairly well established writer a lot of the producers you’ll be dealing with aren’t WGA signatory producers, which means they aren’t bound by anything the WGA says.  If you keep in mind the 2% to 3% of the budget you’ll usually be within the range of the WGA anyway.

If a producer wants to pay you a lot less than 2% for your script something isn’t right.  Even if the budget is very low by using a percentage as your fee the lower the budget the lower your fee is so most producers like it this way.

Most producers will want to put in some sort of cap, also.  Try to fight this.  Most of the time you won’t be able to stop it so just try and make it as high as you can.  I usually ask a producer what he thinks the least the budget will be and use that amount as the floor.  For instance if he says he won’t make the movie for less than $1 million then I’ll try and put in a floor of around $20K – $30K for my fee.

This post is only meant as a general guideline.  A screenplay contract is quite complicated and you should always consult with an entertainment attorney before signing any contract.  This post (and any other post on this website) should not be a replacement for seeking sound legal advice from a lawyer.

Read 'How I optioned and sold my first screenplay Dish Dogs' at http://www.SellingYourScreenplay.com.

I’m sure many people reading this blog have looked at my IMDB link, but if you haven’t have a look at it. You’ll notice my first writing credit is a film called Dish Dogs starring Shannon Elizabeth, Sean Astin, Mathew Lillard, and Brian Dennehy.

Dish Dogs started out as an idea I had in college – a sort of modern day Easy Rider about two guys who would drive around the country washing dishes at local restaurants, never staying at one place for more than a few days. I washed dishes at a Chart House Restaurant in high school and I saw firsthand how easy it was to get a job as a dishwasher and thought this was a romantic and somewhat plausible premise for a script.

I had told my college buddy, Nathan Ives, about the idea and he liked it. After sitting on the idea for several years he asked if he could take a stab at writing it. After we talked about it for a while we decided to try and write it together – it became the first script we wrote together and has been an enduring writing partnership.

So Nathan and I wrote a draft of the script and we started to pass it around to our contacts. Nathan worked at Digital Domain (a special effects company) so he gave it to a few people down there. While no one wanted to buy the script, people seemed generally pretty positive about it.

At the time I was working on a master’s degree at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) in communications with a screenwriting emphasis. One of the other students, Stan Williamson, had recently optioned his script Just Write. I asked him how he had optioned it and he told me he submitted it to an ad in The Hollywood Reporter. I had occasionally seen these ads placed by producers looking for scripts and even submitted a few times, but I had never gotten a reply so I had never done it with any consistency. He told me that he had been submitting to them for 10 years and had optioned quite a few scripts that way. So I too began to submit with extreme consistency.

After 9 month of consistently submitting (probably hundreds of submissions or more) to every post in The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety where someone was looking for a script I started to get a few replies from people. One guy was thinking about hiring me to re-write a project he was working on. One company was looking to hire writers to write their ideas. And finally a production company liked Dish Dogs and wanted to option it. They paid us $500 for a 6 month option and told us they were going to make the movie for around $2 million. Nathan and I were ecstatic.

It turned out to be quite lucky that I was able to sell the first script that I optioned and it ended up getting produced. Usually options don’t turn in to actual sales. Since then I’ve probably had 25 options that never went anywhere.

I’ll leave the actual process and the re-writes of the script for another post – it didn’t exactly go as planned. Hopefully there are some lessons in my experience for you. I still occasionally look in the trades for posts but it doesn’t seem like producers post there any more, most of the equivalent postings have gone online to places like Craig’s List. Check out my post about submitting to Craig’s List.