Hollywood's Insurance

It happens every day. A writer slaps down "FADE OUT" on their "brilliant" first draft and sends it to Hollywood.

And when I say it happens every day, I mean every day. Roughly half a million scripts per year get sent out like this.

Half a million unpolished scripts that look like monkeys wrote them.

Let's be honest here, no one has a good first draft.

And Hollywood knows this. That's why they have insurance:

Readers.

Trained individuals who's main job is to weed through that endless mountain of scripts to try and find the ones that will become cinematic gold.

It's a pretty sweet deal for the executive. Instead of sloughing through script after script until his eyes bleed, he gets to kicks up his heels with dry martini (or what ever executives do) and live the life.

But the reader, like any good insurance, is very good at his job. Even the slightest whiff of un-professionalism will turn that six months of your life into six months heartache.

Typos, bad grammar, bad punctuation, bad format, unorganized story telling, lack of clarity, lack of white space, telling not showing, unfilmables, unlikeable hero, no subtext, no subplot, no stakes, no conflict, no rules, no set-pieces, too much information of the cover, not enough information on the cover and worst of all, not having an amazing concept. These are just a few of the things that a studio reader is willing to chuck a script for.

I've heard readers judging a writer just because he fastened his script with too many brads (it's one on the top and one on the bottom by the way).

--

So this is where we come in.

Since Hollywood has its insurance, we thought it was only fair that writers had insurance as well:

The Reader Proof Blog.

Through this blog and our website, our goal is to save as many scripts we can from L.A.'s garbage dump.

And the best part is: Most of it's easy.

Some of it will make you want to pull your hair out, but overall, most of it's easy.

A half a million scripts is some major competition. Even the greatest writers in the world need help to shine through.

And that's what we're here for.