City of Screenwriters

Throw a stick into a crowd in Los Angeles and you'll probably hit an aspiring screenwriter. According to LA writer Chuck Palachniuk, no one in Tinsel Town is ever more than fifty feet from a screenplay. They're packed into car trunks, stuffed into desk drawers, tucked away in briefcases, and stored in computers. And every one of them, if you believe the author, is a surefire box office hit. In the vast aspiring writer community, the unpublished screenplay has surpassed the novelist's manuscript. Because people prefer TV over books, that makes sense. Still, the odds of selling a screenplay are worse than becoming a lottery millionaire. In the screenplay business, it's hard to know when hope and ambition fade out and foolhardiness fades in.