They say you can't break into Hollywood with a cold query.
They say you can't break into Hollywood if you don't have connections.
They say you can't break into Hollywood if you're over fifty.
Well, they must be wrong, because I just did it.
Yesterday, I signed with Gravity Squared Entertainment, a management company based in Beverly Hills. They work in a variety of fields but their specialty is turning books into movies. As far as I know, they've never signed a playwright before, but they must have liked something about my plays because they're hoping to do the same with them.
Make no mistake. It's still a longshot getting a movie made. Only around 500 feature films are released in Hollywood each year, and although streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Video are fueling a rapid growth in that number, the fact remains that a lot more screenplays end up in the trashcan or "development hell" than on the big screen.
The play that got their attention was, you guessed it, The Enchanted Bookshop. My managers say it has a Night at the Museum or even a Shrek feel, and think it might get picked up by one of those two streaming services, since they're both ramping up their offering of children's films.
Surprisingly, they don't think the script needs much work. The main thing, they say, is that it needs to be bigger. They want to see a lot more book characters popping in and out of the story, so that's what I'll be working on over the next couple months.
But first I need to polish a different screenplay, an original script that tries to recapture the spirit of The Goonies.
More on that one later...
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