Hey everybody, guess what? You can now make comments!
Yes, you could have made comments before, but they did not appear immediately because some genius out there created a spam bot that would add oh, about 10 comments each day with links to pics of you-know-who and his or her you-know-whats. We at Scripped also believe in innovative publicity, but hey, not on our blog. So we had to screen each one, and I got tired of it.
Last night, as I spent 5 hours doing the door shift at the venerable Muddy Charles pub, I installed reCaptcha on our blog. Now the spammers can’t leave their digital poop on our doorstep, and you can have the immediate gratification of seeing your comment posted right away. Just click the comments link below, write your comment, and enter the two words in the reCaptcha box before you click submit or hit enter.
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.
I just watched Purple Violets on iTunes. I needed something to occupy the 4-hour bus ride between Boston and New York this weekend, and I figured I should catch up on some movies.
I also learned that Purple Violets was the first major motion picture to be released on iTunes. I figured I owed it to Edward Burns to have a look.
It’s a movie about the complex romance between two authors and their friends. I always find it a bit odd when writers write about writing. Being at MIT and enjoying math theory a bit too much, I think of it as a fractal. You know, one of those things like a letter A which, when you zoom in, you see is composed of other little A’s. And when you zoom in on them, even more tiny A’s.
But that’s not really what I was thinking about as I watched Eddie’s movie. I was actually thinking how lucky we are to have him involved with Scripped.
In the coming months you’ll hear more from Eddie and Aaron Lubin, his partner in production. With their input and guidance we will build Scripped into the superb online screenwriting community we know it can be. It is our summer goal to make this the most happenin’ place to write, protect, and even distribute your scripted content. You can also expect to hear from Eddie and Aaron directly through a few new features we’re building right now.
If you have any ideas, please don’t be shy. Tell us by commenting here or writing to us at contact@scripped.com. We love to hear from you. Even Sunil and Zak will spend their weekends checking the Scripped email inbox.
I know because I check it too.
Below is a copy of the press release that we issued today!
Los Angeles, CA – On Monday, May 19th, Producers Edward Burns and Aaron Lubin reached an agreement to join Scripped Inc.’s Board of Advisors. Scripped Inc. is a digital media startup that launched “Scripped Writer,” a web-based screenwriting software platform.
Burns and Lubin will help the web-based startup’s short and long term business strategy. Scripped launched the beta version of its web-based screenwriting software in January of 2008 and has since built a user-base of over 5,500 writers from all 50 states, as well as from 50 different countries. Scripped is currently being used by students from UCLA, USC, Santa Clara University and Grand Rapids Michigan Middle School amongst a host of other educational institutions.
“We are thrilled to add Ed and Aaron to the advisory board,” said Sunil Rajaraman, president and CEO of Scripped, Inc. “Their industry knowledge will help us guide our short and long-term thinking. We want to provide the best possible services to our user-base and Ed and Aaron are the right guys to help us reach that goal.”
“Ed and I are excited to be joining Scripped’s Board of Advisors,” said Aaron Lubin. “We think the site will provide cost-effective access to screenwriting software and resources for aspiring young writers to succeed. We are looking forward to collaborating with Sunil, Ryan and Zak to help make this site a success.”
About Scripped, Inc.
Scripped Inc. developed Scripped Writer, the first completely free web-based screenwriting software for writers. Scripped Writer is an innovative software that functions like a standard word processor but automatically formats and catalogs each screenplay element according to industry standards. Scripped was co-founded by Sunil Rajaraman, Zak Freer and Ryan Buckley; Rajaraman is a former senior strategy consultant, and UCLA Anderson MBA student, Freer is a producer/director and graduate of the Peter Stark Producer’s Program at USC and Buckley is a dual degree student Harvard and MIT. To learn more, visit http://www.scripped.com.
About the Producers
Edward Burns has written, directed, starred in and produced eight feature films, including the award winning Brothers McMullen, She’s the One, Sidewalks of New York, The Groomsmen, and most recently Purple Violets. Burns’ gained worldwide critical acclaim for his performance as Private Richard Reiben in Saving Private Ryan. In addition, Burns has starred in several feature films, including James Foley’s Confidence opposite Dustin Hoffman and Rachel Weisz, 15 Minutes opposite Robert De Niro, and most recently the 20th Century Fox hit romantic comedy 27 Dresses opposite Katherine Heigl. To learn more, visit http://www.edwardburns.net.
Aaron Lubin has produced several feature length films including Looking for Kitty, The Groomsmen, Ash Wednesday and Sidewalks of New York. Lubin produced Purple Violets with Burns, which was the first feature length film to debut on iTunes. The move to release Purple Violets on iTunes was considered a pioneering move in the film industry, and the movie has since received positive critical acclaim. Purple Violets won “best feature film” at the Savannah Film Festival. Additionally, Lubin worked on the NBC television show The Fighting Fitzgeralds starring Brian Dennehy, as well as several Saturn commercials, in producing capacities.
To my loyal readers: I am sorry. I let you down. I, like many before me, did not complete the Frenzy. I had a vision, I had an idea, and I let the idea sit, then fester, and then dissolve. And now it is May.
I blame it on my schooling. MIT and Harvard, while probably not any harder than other programs once you’re in, still do a good job of lathering it on from time to time. We also had a huge month for Scripped. Lots of documents to be written, people to contact, and planes to catch. Sunil and Zak would not have been pleased if I didn’t put 100% into our latest round of document edits. Fortunately, we have some big news to show for it (just stay tuned… :0)
But I digress. The point of the Frenzy, I’m well aware, is to let all matters of the other 11 months outside of April go the wayside. I understand that, but like so many things, it is easier said than done! Instead, I will make it my own personal mission to do a great screenplay this summer, when the 3 of us Scripped founders go full-time at the same time for the first time ever. I’ll have 3 months to do it. That should work better.
To those of you who finished, I salute you! Congratulations for completing your first (or thereabouts) screenplay, and thank you for using Scripped. We are honored to serve, and please believe we sacrificed our own participation to make sure that your experience was the best it could be.
Minus that little glitch on April 1, I believe we have delivered. As you go forward in your writing careers, you can count on us to continue to provide the best screenwriting experience on the Net.
Writing is a strange thing. For me it comes and goes. There are times in my life when I’ve been diligent and writing is easy; at other times, it feels forced and I don’t do it. But it has been a part of me for as long as I can remember.
When I was very young my mom would sit me down and make me write an essay when I did something wrong. I had to explain in my own words what happened and why I behaved the way I did. After we talked about my actions, she’d give me a hug and go on to correct my spelling and grammar. I learned early on that writing well was important.
I had my first poem published when I was 6 years old. It went in some sort of children’s writing compilation and I didn’t care much about it then. It was a poem called “The Kerplumpkins” that described the history of a family of gnomes that lived in a pumpkin patch. Or something like that. I don’t really remember, and I think any copies of that poem are long gone.
At the 8th grade graduation I won the writing award. It should have gone to my friend Jose, who beat me in the spelling bee competition that year and is now a writer with the Washington Post. He and his team recently won the Pulitzer for their coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. He’s also just a really good guy.
When I was a student at UC Berkeley I found that the easiest way to get stuff done was to write about what I wanted. I had a passion for environmental sustainability back then, I still do, and I decided to see how far I could take it. So I wrote some proposals like this about ways to institutionalize sustainability that got all the way up to the chancellor. He liked my writing well enough to fund a few of these ideas, and ultimately I pulled $100,000 out of him. The American Association of Universities in Washington, DC kept him from retiring and he and I managed to stay in touch. I’ll visit him out there in a couple weeks.
Finally, when it came down to applying to grad school, I moved in with my grandpa in Lafayette, CA to conjure up my inner applicant. I wanted to get into top schools, and I decided to shoot for policy programs. So I wrote.
My Princeton Woodrow Wilson School application was due first. It was tough. I didn’t feel good about my story or my writing. I had friends offer edits and I still didn’t like my application when it went in. I didn’t even make the waitlist. Cambridge University’s Land Economy was next. I got in. Phew. But Harvard was the real prize and I didn’t want to reuse the old essays.
I remember sitting in the back patio of my grandpa’s house with a glass of Trader Joe’s red wine. It would usually be 8:30pm, my favorite time of day during the Bay Area summer, just as the sun sets. I took that time to rethink, rewrite, and then reedit each of the five essays required by the Harvard Kennedy School. This time it was just me. No friends, no mom, just my thoughts and my story. I wanted to get in by writing with my heart first. I know that sounds corny, but it was important to me at the time. I felt good when I sent it off.
And then I got in. I spent a few weeks in Europe and saw the World Cup in Berlin. It was 2006. When I returned home in August I had a text on my phone from Sunil. He said he had a great idea. It was Scripped.
I moved to Cambridge, MA and together we started writing. First it was a business plan, then it was about 10 emails a day. And now we’re helping other writers do more writing.
I like to write. It’s always a rewarding process. Sometimes it feels like exercise, but I eventually break through the wall and can coast for as long as my wrists can manage. But for me this is just a hobby, not a job, and it is unfortunate that artists have to struggle to make a living. That’s why I’m sympathetic to the WGA strike.
I like Cambridge. With the bricks, the history, and now, covered in snow, it feels almost surreal. With some 50 colleges and universities in the Boston area, it’s also a great place to go to school. I was in Harvard Yard when the writers descended. I was looking for a place to study and heard chanting. Curious about who would protest around Harvard, I followed the noise and ran straight into a long line of picket-yielding actors, writers, and other WGA strike sympathizers.
I paced alongside Chuck, an actor from New York, who believes the studio position is unfair. He recognizes the sacrifices that both sides are making by pursuing this bargaining strategy, but insists it’s the only way for the writers to get the compensation they deserve.
Ever the entrepreneur, I told him about Scripped. I explained that I’m a student at MIT and that my friends and I produced a free online screenwriting software and are offering it for free to writers. So instead of spending $200 on software like Final Draft, you can use Scripped for nothing. He thought this is a great contribution to the strike. I like to see it as even more than that.
We created Scripped to try something new in a rapidly changing market. We are artists too and want to provide useful services to the writers who need them. We also think interesting things can happen when a great group of writers shares some cyber space and is able to collaborate on new pieces of writing. Ultimately we want to improve the quality of scripted online video. That’s what drives me, at least. I can’t really speak for Sunil and Zak.
Seeing the writers march and picket through Harvard Square brought much of what I’ve been reading and hearing about home. To see and talk to real writers involved in the struggle, in a region about as far from Los Angeles as you can get, pronounced the importance of the strike and the impact that it is already having.
I was glad to see the strike in person, but I’m more glad about the other eyes and ears they reached. Parents with their kids, tourists, and local residents each got a taste of what the WGA and the writers are trying to do. I hope Scripped can expand the impact even further.
This is not an advertisement for Apple (you can barely tell that I’m using an Apple from the grainy image), nor is it an advertisement for http://www.scripped.com (the world’s first web-based, free screenwriting software), but it’s just a random blog site from an overworked business school student trying to launch a website. I’m at Coffee Society in Cupertino, CA trying to think of everything that could potentially go wrong with our official launch on January 8th, 2008. I am not making crazy New Year’s plans, had a pretty quiet Christmas, and actually worked pretty hard during my vacation in Spain this past week (except for the 6am night at the discotheque - yeesh).
Zak Freer (a former college classmate, USC Film School graduate, and recent winner of the Hollywood DV Short Film Festival for “Best Horror Short), Ryan Buckley (Harvard/MIT MPP/MBA student, hippie, former consultant and generally good guy) and I started Scripped a little over a year ago and we finally have a beta site. I can’t tell you how much we’ve learned over the past year about entrepreneurship, each other, and how optimism needs to be tempered with a good dose of realism. We thought we would have a full site with all of the bells and whistles 8 months ago, we’ve changed the business model at least a dozen times, and we thought we would be way further along than we would be at this time. That being said, we’re happy with where we are, what we’ve learned, and we appreciate all of the support that our friends, family, and classmates have provided over the past year-and-change.
We were fortunate enough, thanks to a classmate of mine at UCLA, to make a connection with the Writer’s Guild. After a couple of successful meetings, we were able to come up with a pretty good barter: the WGA Foundation, the not-for-profit arm of the guild, will send two writers to UCLA on the 8th of January, and we will plan the event. In exchange for filling all of the seats in the audience, and taking care of the logistics, Scripped Inc. gets full sponsorship of the event. I think that’s a great deal. This is a huge opportunity for us to get some publicity and network with the guild (and take business plan number 15 to the guild in hopes of getting support and goodwill). If you’re interested in attending the event, email me at sunil@scripped.com. The two writers are superstars - one was nominated for the Academy Award for Field of Dreams (which he also directed), and the other was the former chair of the screenwriting department at USC.
Tuesday Jan 8th, 6:00pm-8:00pm, UCLA Anderson campus, Panel Discussion about the strike. Come with your questions!
More to come tomorrow - I am too busy burning a hole in my stomach with all of the caffeine I’ve had here… Thanks for keeping up - I’ll post every night ’till the event (and the night of the event, though admittedly, I have a bottle of Absinthe which I brought from Spain and I plan on opening after the 8th is over).
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