Screenwriting Competitions

I don't know where I stand. Are they rigged? Are they legit? I took my first foray into the wonderful world of screenwriting competitions last summer after completing my first feature-length spec script, PAPER AIRPLANES, and then submitting it into a generous cocktail of about twenty competitions and festivals. From renowned competitions such as the Sundance Institute's Screenwriters Lab, to obscurities like The Page Awards, there never seems to be a shortage of places to send your work. For a price. Seasoned vets always say you should never submit your scripts to anyone requiring you to pay a fee. Are they right? Are screenwriting competitions nothing more than juicy blood clots for the vampiric organizers to slice, drain, and feed on naive, working-class writers worldwide?

I'd like to think that screenwriting contests exist as a rare portal into the otherwise impenetrable walls of the screenwriting business. Really, who wants to sit at home for six thousand years writing query letters to every management company or agency who, when they receive your pleas, will most likely file your hard work directly into the metal Ikea trashcans underneath their balsa wood Ikea desks (no knock to Ikea - I actually own a thing or two of theirs - artistic license, baby!).

After racking up a pretty expensive credit card bill last summer for enlisting PAPER AIRPLANES into every screenwriting haven I could find, I was sorta bummed to find out that I only placed in the finals and semi-finals of about eight of them. It SEEMED pretty rad, but then I thought: maybe they let everyone into the finals or semi-finals just to keep encouraging them to submit their work year after year, until one day, you're fuckin seventy-eight years old, and you get that golden ticket of an e-mail: You've finally won, you old cock! And it only took you fifty-two years and ten failed careers to do it!

This year, I righteously vowed to ONLY submit my new script, WARLAND, to the most prestigious of competitions: The Sundance Institute and the Don & G Nicholl Fellowship. Drafts improved, characters strengthened. I became more confident in my story, and two competitions that aren't really even competitions, but fellowships (I call them contests because they still require an entry fee) turned into SIX new ones that I whole-heartedly justified. Well, my final draft of WARLAND is still being pollished, so I missed out on Nicholl. I made the deadline for Sundance (easy since they only require the first five pages, an essay or two, and a biography - until August). Now, I have four more competitions to submit to. I'm not going in blind as I did last year. I've carefully narrowed my selection. I've chosen the right competitions. Will I get that golden ticket of an e-mail? Or will I come back fighting next year with the gripping tale of an escaped, female convict who secretly undergoes genital reconstructive surgery at a back-alley clinic so she can screw her abusive husband and then tell him that he's officially slept with a man - and submit this story to THREE justifiable competitions? If you'd read that story, go to hell.