The first round you have from 5:00PM Friday to 9:00AM Monday to write a 5 page scene (Pacific time of course, so that kind of sucks for us East Coasters). A weekend for 5 pages is not bad at all, especially since they provide the characters and the premise. May not be perfect, but you can pump out something somewhat readable. Round two, you have 16 hours to write a 5 page scene. And if you think that's ridiculous, then wait til you hear what the last round is. A 5 page scene in 90 minutes. 90 minutes?! Clearly the people who thought of this contest are not only not real screenwriters but have no idea how to write a decent script. I hope they don't expect anything fantastic out of this contest. I feel like this is along the same lines as Matt joking about someone writing a script in one weekend.
Oh and I forgot to mention how they decide the winner. They take the top 3 scenes from the third round, professional actors perform them in front of a live audience and the audience decides which scene was best. I don't know about you guys, but I would be completely embarrassed to have a scene I wrote in 90 minutes performed in front of a live audience.
Well, we'll see how it all goes, I suppose. Silly people make me laugh.
Okay, a couple of things you need to think about with this, because I think I originally sent out the announcement. First, contests are what they are. Second, yes, the audience decision-making seems goofy, but... doesn't the audience really decide which films are successful? It's not the critics or the film professors. Third, yes, the 90 minute round seems like a joke and it's not the best way to write a script, but it's the way many films are actually created, with panicked rewrites being done under extreme pressure. The writers who can handle that kind of pressure work consistently and make scads of green. Keep us posted on how you make out.
ReplyDeleteI apologize if I offended you. I agree that audiences decide what films are successful, but how many audiences see the first draft of anything? And I understand the pressure of rewrites, but isn't that usually going off of something you have already and fixing it or going from something that's already pretty well developed? I don't know, it just seems a little odd to me. Thanks I will, we'll see what happens I guess.
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