Fees

Contest fees are really getting out of hand. A decent idea is the "Hollywood Book Festival," a conference and competition to highlight books that deserve attention from Hollywood as possible movies. The fee to enter a title, however, is $75. I consider this outrageous. Only the best contest of them all, the Nicholl Screenwriting Competition, has kept its fees low ($30) but then it's run by the real power dudes down there, the Academy. Most contests while not an outright scam nonetheless charge far too much and exist to take advantage of the dreams and unrealistic expectations of newks. Except for validation and ego-stroking, damn few contests actually help a writing career. Something else they don't tell you. Now the former two things are important, and sometimes damn important -- but you have to understand what's real and what's hype. Hollywood, of course, has more hype than any other community of creators.

Changing the subject. Just sent off a grant application for the review. No fee! For operating expenses basically, which are astonishingly low. I can't imagine not getting a grant but I've been wrong many times before. It just seems to me that we (the staff) are doing something ahead of the curve and doing it well -- and since we're all volunteers, it takes damn little money to do it! So it doesn't break the bank to throw a little change our way. We'll see.

I did some minor rewriting in the first act of the screenplay. Everything I changed was to lower the budget or make production easier. For example, on a ranch, my location, changing horses to open ranch cars. What I have it mind is finding a location with property, the filmmakers can set up camp, shoot everything there, and be done and gone with great efficiency.