Grunt work

There are 298 producers of animated features listed in HCD. The research/marketing task is to go through them, isolate which accept unsolicited pitches and divide these into two piles, those with an email address and those with none but with a fax number. What I hope to do, of course, is do everything by email.

I also looked for non-animation producers this way: I researched and made a list of every prodco that had bought a fantasy script in the past five years. Each of these, then, I looked up in HCD, looking for the criteria above.

Of course, with an agent, I theoretically don't have to do this, but I'm optimistic about the commercial potential of this strange fantasy script I wrote and once I decided it would make a cool animated feature, I decided to go all out. All it takes is some time for grunt work and a very modest fee to use the HCD database for a week. It's spendy to subscribe to.

I'm surprised and delighted at how many producers I can email pitch to. That's the next step, after my week in the database is up. I have no idea, of course, how many producers will ask for the script but I'll try to get a handle on this before I get copies made. My agent, thank the gods, is letting me mail it myself, so I don't have to use him as a middle man, with his contact info on the cover -- saves a lot of time. I let him know who is getting the script so we don't cover the same ground. And vice versa.

I very seldom get this active in marketing. I generally don't like marketing. Not at all. I do passive marketing at best, using InkTip. Just letting my agent run with it. But seldom do I write something like this. Seldom? Maybe never. Maybe it's the one blatantly feel-good commercial script in me ha ha. Who the hell knows where it came from? Am I getting soft in my old age?

With this marketing strategy, I'm doing what I tell my students to do, but in fact I've actually not done it myself for a long time, just letting an agent do it. So it's good to get some recent "in the trenches" experience to share with my students later.

It's all a crap shoot and a numbers game. You have to go about this mindlessly or all the rejection can get to you. Two things happen to young writers who enter the marketplace: the highs get unreasonably high, and the lows get unreasonably low. I remember the first time a producer asked to read a screenplay of mine. I assumed I had sold the sucker! I was so excited. Now, of course, I send the script away and forget about it. What happens, happens -- or, most of the time, not. The great response in LaLaLand is Silence. Indeed a "formal" rejection is a plus because it is SOMETHING.

But, unreasonably so, I just have a good gut feeling about this script. I had the same feeling about my plays Famililly, which won an international competition, and Christmas at the Juniper Tavern, which made it to public television. Sometimes these gut feelings pay off. We'll see how Huckleberry Dream does.

And it has me thinking about another animated feature, this one based on the Russian play I adapted to children's theater decades ago, which is being revived in the fall at Pomona College. It's a classic Good-Evil story -- in fact, the original is a dark satire about Stalin -- and with Sir Lancelot the hero, easily adaptable to kids, and also I think to animation. I don't even have the script any more, so the director at Pomona is having her secretary send it to me (she's in India, where she directs a lot of theater; in fact, she's taking this one there after Pomona).

Grunt work, to get back to the original subject, can become a kind of meditation if your head's in the right space. I'm about 2/3 through the list.