MEET THE READER: I Can Write Your Screenplay For You, Wholesale

• A few promote themselves as low-cost alternatives, stating that if you hire a WGA screenwriter (in other words, an experienced professional) to write your script, it will cost you somewhere between $72,000 - $136,000 (these numbers are the 2017 WGA minimums for a feature-length screenplay). These companies promise to do the job for much less, although even the cheapest one will still run you around $10,000 and one of the more expensive companies I surveyed was charging around $4,000 for a treatment and an additional $25,000 for the screenplay.
• All of the companies promise that their staff writers are “industry professionals,” but are rather vague on specifics. One company states that all of their staffers have had screenplays produced, but fail to indicate how many screenplays a writer may have had produced, whether or not they were feature films, what the titles of the produced films were, how long ago they were made and so on. The suggestion, of course, is that you’re going to be assigned to an experienced, working pro, although it’s hard for me to imagine any currently-working pro is going to have either the time or the inclination to take on a mercenary assignment for far less than basic minimum wage. Not to mention that any screenwriting working regularly in the professional moviemaking industry would have to be a member of the WGA, which prohibits its members from working for a company that is not a signatory to the Guild’s MBA (which these companies are not) or for working than less for Guild minimums. So, the chances are that your material is probably going to be assigned either to another up-and-comer such as yourself, an old-timer who hasn’t worked in a long time, or someone whose produced work has either been student films, shorts, or low-budget, non-union schlock. Which is not to say that such writers can’t be talented and/or capable, but they’re not exactly what the companies give the impression they are offering.
• One company’s pitch states that one of the reasons you should use its service is that if you do, you won’t have to go to all of the trouble of studying the art and craft of screenwriting along with all those pesky screenwriting terms such as Fade In, Voice-Over, Scene Headings, and Dissolves (I wish I was kidding about this last bit, but I am not). In other words, they can help you become a screenwriter faster because you won’t have to take all that time to actually learn how to be a screenwriter.
• This same company suggests it will save you money to use their service since you won’t have to buy expensive screenwriting software such as Final Draft. A few hundred bucks for FD versus $20,000 for one of their screenplays—the savings are obvious.
• Some of these companies seem to be aiming their pitches at non-English speaking writers, suggesting that using their services will help these writers generate “American-style” scripts that have a better chance of selling in the American market.

• First of all, if you hire someone to write your screenplay, then is it really your screenplay? Sure, you will own the copyright, but it’s not your work, so while it might legally be your screenplay, it’s not really your screenplay, if you catch my drift?
• If you represent a script as being your work, but it isn’t actually your work, isn’t that fraud?
• It’s not clear to me who using one of these services can possible result in a quality final product. The services these companies are offering are essentially to create a single draft of the screenplay. But, as any experienced writer knows, a single draft is never enough. The first draft of a screenplay is always the starting point, but scripts are not written, they are rewritten. And rewritten. And rewritten—again and again and again to develop and hone the story and the characters and the dialogue until the result is as close to perfect as the writer can possibly make it. This is the only way to produce good work. I’m sure these companies will be happy to have their writers do draft after draft for you, but you’re going to pay for those additional drafts. You’re going to pay for those additional drafts.
• And will the results ever be any good? A script is not good just because it tells a good story (which by itself can take many drafts to develop). A good script is good because of the way that story is told—because of the specific vision and voice that a writer brings to the material. But whose vision and voice is being reflected in a script generated by a writing service? I can only assume it’s the staff writer’s, not the purported author’s. Which means the piece really has no voice or vision at all. Which means the script can’t ever really be good.
• I suppose a writer can use one of these services to generate a first draft—to just get the basic idea down on paper—and then do the subsequent rewriting and development himself, but that doesn’t quite track for me either. I’m assuming that the reason a person would use one of these services in the first place is because they feel they lack the ability to generate a good script on their own. So if they don’t feel capable of writing that first draft, why would they think they could do a good job on subsequent drafts?
• What happens if a studio or a producer options or buys the screenplay generated by the screenwriting service and then (as they most certainly will) wants a rewrite or two or five? Who will do the rewrite—the person whose name is on the cover or the person who actually wrote the screenplay? Will the identified author tell the studio or the producer that she/he/they didn’t write the script and will need to get the actual writer to do the changes? Or will the author keep quiet and secretly contract with the company to get the rewrite done? And what happens if the original writer is not available or no longer with the screenwriting company—then what does everybody do?
• What if a studio or producer reads the service-generate screenplay as a sample and likes the writing enough to hire the identified author to write an entirely new screenplay on an entirely new subject. Will the identified author then contract with the service to do the assignment or come clean and tell the producer or the studio that they need to hire the actual writer to do the job?

• I once wrote an entire column about the many times I’ve been approached by people asking me to write their screenplays for them—not producers wishing to hire me to write scripts for their projects, but aspiring screenwriters who have ideas for screenplays that they assure me are guaranteed blockbusters, but for various reasons do not want to write themselves. Some of these folks ask me to polish their rough drafts; most want me to pen the entire thing from scratch. The compensation they offer is always no money up front, but the promise of a percentage of the proceeds from the big sale they are positive the script will generate. The percentage they offer me is always less than the one they intend to take, because, after all, they came up with the idea. All I would do is write the characters, action, and dialogue. And, of course, I would take second position in the “written by” credits because, once again, they came up with the idea, which we all know is the important part.
• Every few years, someone comes out with a screenwriting program that promises to write the screenplay for you. The program provides templates for various types of genre stories along with a list of tropes from each segment. You can either select the trope or fill in your own idea and the program will insert it. It will also suggest be best archetypal characters to fill each role the narrative template requires (leading man, damsel in distress, wise old advisor, etc.). It will also provide suggested dialogue that you can alter as you see fit. The scripts generate by these programs are always fresh, vibrant, original, and engaging. Not. Ever.
• There are lots of books and classes out there that purport to tell aspiring screenwriter how to sell their ideas as pitches or treatments without ever having to actually write the screenplay. This is not something that ever happens in the real world for writers who are not already established professionals—nevertheless it’s a dream that never dies.

Need help getting past the reader? Download our on-demand webinar, The Top Reasons I Pass on a Script: How to Go From Pass to Recommend