u/TysonChxNugget

Hello everyone,

I went to school with the goal of becoming a writer/director, but suffered an injury that limited my mobility and ability to be on set which made me primarily focused on screenwriting. As I near the end of my recovery, I have wanted to step back into directing. I recently moved to LA from the Midwest, and wanted to know if anyone had advice on finding work or seeking directing roles if my reel is primarily made up of student films. Let me know if this reel “sizzles” enough to gain traction for micro-budget (or even no-budget) short film and proof of concept work, or if my focus should be on writing and putting a project of my own together.

Thanks!

I sent a cold query to Zero Gravity last night and got a read request sent back this morning. I have seen people saying that they request to read every query they receive (unsure if this is true), but it was still exciting to get the opportunity to send it out. If you are/have been repped by Zero Gravity, how quickly did they get back to you after you sent over your screenplay?

Is anybody else following along with The Black List substack and video series to check off boxes as they write their newest project? Do you find it easy to incorporate the checklist into your story? Does being commercial make something better, or just easier to sell? Is being “commercial” more difficult in relation to specific genres like comedy or family features?

Maybe it’s a lofty goal, but I’m hoping that by following these guidelines I can write something that would be considered commercial by a Black List reader, but also has the feeling of a late 90s/early 2000s SNL movie. Using sci-fi as a subgenre since that seems to be really trendy right now.

I am a screenwriter, primarily writing farce, and have felt discouraged after noticing that the rules of farce are basically exactly what script readers have been trained not to like.

Farce is all about build up, so it tends to start slower in order to establish rules. It relies on a lack of logic, miscommunication, and caricatures of known archetypes. The A plot and B plot tend to feel completely separate at first, then connections are made later in the story leading to an eventual collision in the final act. The pacing needs to remain consistent, jokes/dialogue are repeated to build a joke across all 3 acts, the timelines are short, and the stakes have to feel relatively low to make things funnier when a character’s reaction feels over the top.

Most (if not all) of these things would be seen as negatives for a professional reader if they were to give a recommendation. A farce would most likely be quickly passed based on the first 5-15 pages. So my question becomes, are the “guidelines” taught to script readers killing a specific type of comedy? Could this contribute to low budget comedies disappearing from theaters?

And in order to keep this from feeling overly negative, what is your favorite farce?

Just wanting to see how common it is for people to receive the same score across every single component of a Blacklist evaluation. For context, I received my evaluation today and while the reader praised my script as a quirky, mad cap comedy with a great premise and jokes that land consistently throughout the script…they scored me 5’s in every single component. I am more than willing to accept the script needs work, I just feel like no variation in component scores is strange.