BEST MOVIES EVER WARNS SCREENWRITERS BEWARE OF AMAZON SCREENWRITING CONTEST
Indie Genius Best Movies Ever
Amazon Studios Screenwriters Contest: Writers Beware
Amazon Studios Screenwriters Contest: Writers Beware
Indie Genius Best Movies Ever
The media jumped into all the hoopla about Amazon creating their own studio and having a screenwriting competition to give away $2.7 million to aspiring screenwriters, but they didn’t look at the fine print, but we did.
Best Movies Ever got several e-mails asking me why we hadn’t posted anything about the ‘Amazon Studios Screenwriting Contest‘ since we’ve become known for breaking accurate stories ahead of the more higher profile blog sites, but we wanted to take a little deeper look since it sounded way too good to be true. And as we’ve been in the biz for twenty years now, nothing is ever that way in Hollywood.
On the surface it sounds great, $2.7 million for your script and a development deal which is what every aspiring screenwriter is dreaming of. Well, we’ve been down this road ourselves and been screwed enough times to know we don’t like being a ‘bottom’! I want to share one story on another site (Kevin Spacey’s Trigger Street) where you submit your script and other writers vote on it before getting to the nuts and bolts of why the Amazon Screenwriting Contest is more than meets the eye.
Many years back when Trigger Street started copying the Matt Damon/Ben Affleck Project Greenlight, I thought I’d try my hand at submitting a screenplay that I was pretty proud of. Things started out okay, my script kept getting voted up into the Top 5 all the time. You had to read 5 other scripts and give an honest critique and vote on them. Seemed pretty cool, and I’d never met other screenwriters, just tv writers I knew so I thought I’d found a pretty cool place to meet other good writers.
Then something happened where they changed the format of the site and people were able to rig the voting process. Suddenly scripts that seemed to have written by first graders were topping the charts and the really good scripts I’d read were plummeting quickly downward. Yeah, it may sound naive now, but I never realized that first time writers could be quite the nasty little bunch. I didn’t mind that suddenly my script was being ravaged by nonsensical comments, but it was frustrating since I thought I’d found a cool site that writer’s could go and honestly critique and support each others work.
What really took the cake was when I contacted Dana Brunetti about the oddities and he told me that it was being hammered out, etc. I mentioned that since I knew the editor at The New York Times, they might find their site of interest, and the struggles trying to keep a site from being manipulated with the voting process as was occuring. Brunetti, thinking I was meaning revealing Trigger Streets obvious problems, got rather nasty about it. I found out that other writers had gone through very similar situations.
Thus, that ended my ever wanting to take part in any writing type websites again. Brunetti has responded in the below comment, and yes, the site did mention that Kevin Spacey’s production company Triggerstreet Production has a 90-day option on any of the scripts along with the fact the Spacey might be given a green light. This was confirmed in a BBC interview he did.. They never took very kindly to criticism and when another filmmaker made a hilarious video poking fun at the ‘Trigger Street’ process, they were given a call by the website people and the video was taken down. This all occurred in 2002 and Brunetti has admitted that their site was having those issues that I spoke about. I’m glad to hear that Trigger Street is still going strong and making big filmmakers of everyone submitting to their site. We need more of them. Again, this was my personal experience with the site, although the below comments show that I obviously wasn’t alone.
When I heard about the big announcement for the Amazon Studios Screenwriters Contest, I checked and noticed all the disclaimers with Development Agreement and Contest Terms and Procedures. Most excited newbie writers usually fail to pay attention to those things, and many nefarious sites depend on that ignorance. I was more than a little shocked that Amazon was pretty extreme, but it’s in the details which many except people who know about studio contracts would overlook or just not understand the implications.
Here’s one paragraph that sounds really good and most people may not notice what it’s saying.
Writers are invited to add scripts to Amazon Studios. Filmmakers are invited to add full-length test movies to Amazon Studios. Test movies may be made from your own original script or from any script submitted to Amazon Studios. Test movies must be full length (more than 70 minutes), but they don’t have to be “full budget.” While test movies must include imaginative stories with great acting and sound they don’t need to have theatrical-quality production values. Film fans can review Amazon Studios scripts and test movies, or even upload alternate, revised versions. Full-length test movies will introduce public test screenings to the earliest, formative stages of the movie development process; the Amazon Studios test movie process is intended to guide a film’s development and assess its potential. Amazon Studios has produced five test movie samples, in different styles and genres, which can be found on its Getting Started page (http://studios.amazon.com/getting-started).
Here’s the full Development Agreement from Amazon Studios for you to check out yourself:
Amazon_Studios_Development_Agreement-best-movies-ever
So when you submit your screenplay to the contest, it’s out of commission for 18 months, but it gets better. “You agree to be automatically entered into any future contests for which your work is eligible. The specific contest rules for future contests will be posted on this page when they are announced.” And considering one of the rules of this contest grants Amazon Studios a free 18-month option on your work the moment you upload it, the idea that they can enter you in a contest later and tell you the rules after they do so seems positively batty. The “development agreement” is a contract you’re signing, not an entry form for a contest, and in it, you grant them a free option on your work for a year and a half, and if they do end up producing your work, there’s a set fee. Period. That’s all it is. A set rate. The same no matter what the project is, and no matter what happens with it.
Then we move on to the 2nd disturbing aspect of the contest. once your script is uploaded to Amazon, anyone can revise it. Try to wrap your head around that. Anyone can revise your screenplay. They can do anything they want to it. And if that revision ends up being what gets made, that person becomes part of that set price I mentioned earlier. It’s a mind-boggling proposition, and runs completely counter-intuitive to the idea of giving writers a platform for their work. The thought of some random person having the legal right to revise my screenplays makes me sick to my stomach, and I seriously believe that the people who created the Amazon Studios idea are either very stupid or very evil. It is an idea designed to exploit and strip-mine creativity, and it sounds to me like someone’s idea of a social media experiment gone wildly wrong. There’s nothing about this that sounds to me like it will result in good filmmaking. The entire notion of a “test movie” is bizarre, especially when you’re talking about having people shoot entire feature films as tests. That side of the contest is so much weirder than the screenplay side that I can’t even really understand it.
Collaboration is great with screenwriting when needed, but when the collaboration is foisted onto an unsuspecting script, the results can be rather a crapfest like many movies that get made with 11 writers listed on the script.
Here’s the Amazon Studios Development Agreement for you to see for yourself if this is something you’d want to risk your script with. If you’ve got nothing to lose, go ahead, but I don’t know of any screenwriters in that boat.
Amazon_Studios_Development_Agreement-best-movies-ever
Amazon Studios Screenwriters Contest Best Movies Ever
Now for the parody video that’s already been made about the Amazon Studios Screenwriters Contest Best Movies Ever
Fellow screenwriter’s just be careful with the Amazon Studios Screenwriters Contest and read the fine print as your friends at Best Movies Ever have and it’s not looking good.
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