Today is the one year anniversary of my iPhone. I have been on the phone for 34 days and 9 hours in that time. I am both shocked, and mildly depressed at that fact. What could I have done during those 34 days instead of being on the phone? I suppose Scripped wouldn’t be where it is today without all that phone time!
Happy Thanksgiving….
I write this from an empty bar named “The Muddy Charles” on the MIT campus. Serving pitchers of Bud and Sam has been my Monday afternoon routine for months now. Today is the first time I’ve had the bar all to myself.
It usually bustles with the likes of the 3 Peters: PB, PC, and P… something. There’s another guy who downs a pitcher while doing the Boston Globe crossword puzzle. Some do construction jobs on campus, others are MIT staff, and there is at least one emeritus professor, an old lovable man named Bernie who teaches astrophysics.
I like it here. It’s one of just a few hubs in the MIT community. Hubs are important to have, no matter what community you belong to, and if you’re somewhat of a binge networker like me, you try to infiltrate the leadership. It’s why I couldn’t just patronize this cozy little campus pub; I had to be a bartender! And as expected, the networking is great. Coincidentally, this picture of me in Variety magazine was taken at the Muddy. The fireplace in the background keeps us warm when it’s 30 degrees out.
Anyway, let me bring this back to Scripped. I set up a profile for Scripped in the VenCorps community, a new “community-powered capital” platform set up by a big-time venture capital company. Since they’re still in alpha, I can’t provide any links, but suffice to say we managed to get in pretty well with these folks too. Just today it was announced that Scripped took 3rd place in a “showdown” against 9 other other startups who made it into the finals. We’re very happy with that.
The irony of this is, of course, that Scripped is still a closed platform. We are aware of that and can’t wait to watch the networking that you’ll do when we blow the lid off this thing. Rest assured we’ll make sure it’s safe to do so and all the legalese is done properly. It’s mostly script and idea protection that is drawing the process out, but we’ll get there.
In the meantime, keep on writing…
Ryan
This is certainly a difficult question to answer because of the sheer number of choices and the vagueness of the criteria. Everyone who you ask will give you different answers, and I thought long and hard before narrowing my list down to these five (actually six) individuals.
Any great screenwriter list must start with Woody Allen, who remains prolific to this very date. His work in the seventies remains seminal with films like Annie Hall and Manhattan deftly blending comedy and drama into one tight package. His work since then has been more hit-and-miss, but has always included strong movies like Deconstructing Harry, Match Point, this year’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and the crown jewel of his screenplays: 1985’s Hannah and Her Sisters. It may be hard to remember now, but Allen’s work was and still is revolutionary.
One of the founding fathers of Allen’s best work was the great Billy Wilder, who will go down as one of the great directors of all-time, but should not be ignored for his writing capabilities. He had a hand in penning almost all of his classic oeuvre: Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, The Apartment – do I need to continue?
It may be cliché, but I would add Quentin Tarantino to the list as well, if only for his rat-a-tat-tat dialogue and use of non-linear structure in his writing. His script for the upcoming Inglorious Bastards is some of his best work, and maybe the misstep of Death Proof is truly behind him. The Coen Brothers – Joel and Ethan – have proven to be masters of finding comedy is the darkest of places and with last year’s No Country For Old Men, finally proved that they could also make a deadly serious film.
Finally, no list of great screenwriters is complete with William Goldman, probably the only individual who almost everyone can agree should be included here. His adaptation of All the President’s Men is legendary, but it’s the feel-good buddy story Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the timeless charms of The Princess Bride that will be his legacy. He is simply the best.
They are too green to be included, but I wouldn’t be surprised if two individuals who are doing their best work right now find a way to be mentioned in this space a decade down the line: Peter Morgan and Christopher Nolan.
I also would like to make special mention of two television writing duos, who revolutionized the medium in their own times. Larry David & Jerry Seinfeld helped turn “nothing” into entertainment, and Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant who’s work on The Office inspired countless copycats – both on the big screen as well as the small.
Hey everyone, check out this article on VentureBeat.
For those of us on MySpace, it’s a terrific example of how social networks are influencing the way multimedia is consumed. Why leave the computer to watch the Simpsons? Well, that’s old news, actually. Better yet, why close your MySpace page to watch that episode when you can get it on the same screen? And through viral effects, your friends will quickly see what you like to watch.
Want to see what we watch? The Scripped MySpace page is at http://www.myspace.com/scripped. Come on, be our friend. Can you think of any cool applications for screenplays on Scripped?
Interesting article here about Microsoft Office versus Google Docs. When we go around talking to people about Scripped, we inevitably get the question, “What about Final Draft and Movie Magic? How do you guys compare?”
Of course we can’t compete with the installed software on every feature. It’s not our intent and we don’t want to have to charge you guys for writing services. In fact, we want to give writers every reason to come on board and join the Scripped crew. The fact that Google gets over 4 million people a month to write online means there is hope for a many 10s of thousands of people to write screenplays on Scripped.
But the other point of this article is that the old installed guys will innovate, and that’s why we were happy to announce a partnership with the other big software product in the biz, Movie Magic Screenwriter. It’s a match made in Hollywood, and one that I wouldn’t expect from Google and Microsoft any time soon.
Did we not call this? The evidence of a tidal shift in monetization of online video keeps building. YouTube is selling keywords, much the same way its regular search cousin, Google, does. Interestingly, YouTube alone gets more search volume than all of Yahoo’s properties.
So what does this mean? We’ve been harping on this internally for some time now. When YouTube makes money, it’s just the first step in a series of events that ultimately helps the screenwriter. The story goes something like this.
YouTube sells ads for chess sets next to your video about chess-playing aliens. Let’s say YouTube makes $40/year on all clicking going on around the clip you uploaded. You get a (optimistically) 50% cut of that and think, wow, for an annuity of $20, I just have to put up a catchy video? Awesome! Net present value of an annuity at a 6% discount rate is a cool $333.
So how do you beat the odds that your video is well-watched? You make sure it’s scripted, of course! YouTube is flooded with ad hoc improv. Scripted videos will rule the day. And where do you get that script? At Scripped.com, obviously, and you pay some fraction of your NPV for it. That’s how YouTube making money puts money in writers’ pockets.
Oh, and with companies like Auditude making headlines by associating you as the owner, no matter where the video is streamed, that $333 is just the baseline. It’s all up from here.
Ryan
In a final push in what must be the most posts ever put up on the Scripped blog in a single day, I offer this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-handel/hollywood-under-siege_b_143373.html. Don’t let the “Huffington Post” URL fool you. This is probably the most thorough and insightful piece on the evolution of Hollywood and the Internet that I’ve come across.
Ryan
I’m writing about the Kennedy School not because it’s relevant at all to screenwriting, but because it’s kinda fun to write about. It is Harvard after all.
In the early mornings in the Harvard Kennedy School forum the tables are filled with mid-career students. They study Dutch labor markets, development in Niger, and leadership failures. They come from around the world: one mid-career I met recently holds office in Nairobi, another is a woman from Pakistan had a staff of 1,400 when her office suffered a suicide bombing.
Before I enrolled here I knew that people like this existed. I knew somewhere in the world there were those who risked their lives to eliminate corruption and have to convince their employees to come back to work after a 17-year-old boy detonated himself in the lobby. It’s the stuff of movies, but it’s also real life.
My favorite mid-career student is someone I sat behind on a small bus on a field trip to West Point. She is a photographer named Laura Rauch and her work is beautiful. Each picture she showed told a story. She knew the subjects and gave the context that led her to that particular village or hospital. She was embedded with troops in Iraq and followed Hillary Clinton and John Kerry around during the election. She also took some great pictures of Las Vegas. I’d guess she’s in her 40s. A real-life steely action hero journalist. Again, the stuff of movies. So maybe there’s a tie-in after all.
I was on the phone yesterday with Steve Schwartz of Chockstone Pictures. He searches for stories that have real meaning, perhaps the kind of film that would fly under the coverage radar. Participant Media, the company that brought us Syriana, Thank You For Smoking, and Good Night and Good Luck might be the closest big firm to Steve’s vision.
In seeking his projects, Steve looks for scripts that are unique and based off of real experiences by real people. I can’t help but think he should survey my older classmates. Or better yet, I’ll get them to write their stories on Scripped and tell him to search for loglines (when we get that function up… soon!)
It’s what we’re here for, after all.
Ryan
I read the other day that Youtube is going to start to stream feature length films. If studios hope to make DRM work, they’d better act quickly. People are starting to believe that the amateurs can make things happen, and the net is the way to go… Here’s yet another example of that:
http://www.cinematical.com/2008/10/28/details-magazine-wants-your-movie-pitches/
Much has been written about lower employment, a down economy, and now-falling gas prices. I’ll save all that for the Business Week editors. But what inspires me today is the New England fall, a palette of colors spanning from mild yellow to dirty red. And the fall also reminds me of Scripped.
Many of you don’t know that Scripped came into being two years ago, in the fall of 2006. I remember sitting at the big Au Bon Pain cafe in Harvard Square, my shoulder holding the phone to my ear so I could hear Sunil and Zak’s chirpy voices as I typed away at the first outline of what we soon called Scripped. Two falls later, look how far we’ve come. We have a simple but effective website, over 10,000 happy users, and a number of high-profile advisers.
Where’s all this going, you might ask? What will become of this place when the leaves turn color in 2010? Well, for one thing, we’ll have a new governor in California. For another, we’re pushing to have 100,000 writers and 250,000 scripts. Sounds like a lot? Not really.
Since launching last winter, we’ve added 10,000 users with hardly a marketing budget. We did it by making some friends with bloggers and partnering up with a few great organizations, especially Script Frenzy. And with some super cool search engine optimization wizardry, we’re now #2 or #3 when you search for free screenwriting software. And the world of writers out there we have yet to reach.
When the wind blows around Cambridge, MA, a shower of leaves follows. I’ll miss this place if I graduate and move back to California. We Californians don’t really get what seasons really are. I’m glad to have spent this time out of my element, and it reminds me how big and beautiful this great country really is.
Thanks for your continued support, everyone!
Ryan
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