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I have had a story idea rolling around in my head for several years, and I think it would make a very cool movie. A cool plot twist type story, that if done right could catch the audience by surprise, and leave them with a very satisfying ending. I have shared it with a few friends, and they all thought it was a cool idea.
The problem is, I am not a screenwriter, and don't know if I want to learn how to be one. I would just like to work with someone who knows what the hell they are doing and maybe turn this idea into a script. I don't even care if I make much money on this, I just want to take the idea forward and see what happens.
Any suggestions?
Thanks.
Savage Lizard

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]I have had a story idea rolling around in my head for several years, and I think it would make ... I make much money on this, I just want to take the idea forward and see what happens. Any suggestions?[/nq]
Well, Savage, most screenwriters already have tons of their own ideas for cool movie stories. They usually don't have much time to "fit in" writing someone else's stuff.
Unless, of course, you are willing to pay them adequately for the time that they would otherwise be spending working on their own scripts.

You may, of course, find someone willing to take on this task of writing, but you'd want to have all concerns over "who did what & who gets what" ironed out (on paper) before the writing begins.

You should give a lot of thought to how you'd go about marketing any finished script, as well.
Good luck.
Doug
"I'd do it, but I'm too busy."
Just a virtual guy... in a virtual world

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[nq:1]I have had a story idea rolling around in my head for several years, and I think it would make ... money on this, I just want to take the idea forward and see what happens. Any suggestions? Thanks. Savage Lizard[/nq]
Well, SL, your situation, I'm afraid, comes up all the time. Pretty much every working writer, screenwriter, novelist, or what-have-you, has run into - pardon me for putting you into a category somebody like you.
That is, somebody who has a "great idea for a movie/novel/story" but A) isn't a writer, B)doesn't have the time, desire, or willingness to master becoming one and therefore C) wants share the great idea with the pro writer, have the pro writer do the actual writing part of the work and then the "somebody" and the pro writer will split the proceeds.
Now, you indicate above that you don't care if you make "much money" on this but I wonder if you would care if you didn't make much money, while your writing partner, on the other hand, made a great deal of money say, you made five or ten grand, while he made six or seven figures?
Because, presuming you really did have a great, original idea for a movie (and such ideas, by the way, are about as rare as mushrooms on the moon) there are places that you might go to try to sell it. Not many because very few producers are really interested in buying "ideas" as such (Robert Kosberg buys ideas he has seminars where people pitch ideas to him and he'll actually buy some of them). That's because a good idea, by itself without a writer to execute it and a producer to bring it to the screen, isn't worth much of anything.
So generally, five or ten grand is all that those producers are up to pay for such a thing. And having paid it, they will then have to find a real writer to attach before they then go out and try to sell it and that writer the real writer, will almost certainly expect to be paid anything from several hundred thousand dollars up beyond a million dollars to turn the idea (which he and the producer may very well change in any number of ways before taking it out to try to sell it) into a finished screenplay.
Plus, of course, you understand that you, the creator of that idea, won't be involved at all.
But for those producers to lay out even that amount of money is very rare because really good ideas are, as I indicated, very, very rare. These are professionals who see thousands of premises for movies every year and really new, different and good ideas are extremely unusual.
Like new inventions, most people who think they've come up with something new are surprised to find, when they send it off to the patent office, that their "new" idea was not only patented twenty years before, but thirty other people have submitted virtually the identical invention before they came up with it the same is true for brilliant new ideas for movies fifty thousand screenplays were registered with the WGA just last year, and the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that.
The fact that an idea is new to you doesn't mean that it's new.

So the scenario that you imagine where you and a pro writer, in some sense "work together" you providing your idea (for which, at most, you might get five or ten grand) for free and him providing professional writing services for which he might normally get paid a quarter of a million dollars or more, for free to yield a finished product that would be, inevitably, a rather uneasy partnership.

As somebody has already indicated you don't get to be a professional writer if you don't already have your own ideas, for which you don't have to pay anybody else you get to keep one hundred percent when the script sells.
Plus, a creative partnership between a professional and a non-professional is a very tough thing. Whatever you do for a living whatever your profession is (obviously not writing) imagine trying to share the responsibilities for doing your job with somebody who has a great idea for doing something in your line of work (or at least he thinks he does) but, in fact, doesn't actually know how things are really done in your business but he wants to work with you, as a partner. And share your salary.
I suspect that things would get pretty tense.
And that's really why what you suggest is very unlikely to come to pass. As a professional screenwriter, with produced credits, with an agent in Hollywood, with producers who know who I am, et al it's hard enough to write my own ideas, to get them heard, to sell them.

If I read a story, or an article, or what-have-you, that I thought would make a good movie, I might try to option or buy it then try to sell the project with me attached as a writer.
But the last thing in the world that I would ever do, would get myself into an arrangement where I was co-writing a screenplay with a non-pro as a writing partner.
NMS

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]I have had a story idea rolling around in my head for several years, and I think it would make ... I make much money on this, I just want to take the idea forward and see what happens. Any suggestions?[/nq]
Hey, there was that guy on eBay who was auctioning his screenwriting services. Maybe the two of you should get together.

Stephen Mack
"Nobody's smart enough to be wrong all the time." -Ken Wilber

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]But the last thing in the world that I would ever do, would get myself into an arrangement where I was co-writing a screenplay with a non-pro as a writing partner.[/nq]
Me too. Unless she had really big bazooms, of course.

"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you've got something to say."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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