FADE IN:

CLOSE UP OF YOU, screenwriter extraordinaire ready to conquer the world. You’ve gone to the best film school your parents’ money could buy. Maybe you’ve even PA’d for a bit on some low budget fare or student films. Think you have what it takes to make it in pictures? Imagining your latest spec script being auctioned off for big bucks and catching the attention of a major Hollywood star?

Don’t go shopping for Porsche’s just yet. You might just have to settle for a KIA.

Even if you graduate top of your class from one of the top film schools – USC, UCLA or NYU, there’s no guarantee that you have any more of a chance at being a working writer than Joe Schmo who graduated from Stamford with an MBA or a junior college pottery major who’s uncle has a regular golf game with a studio head.

Hollywood is and always has been about relationships. Yes, it’s about knowing your stuff, understanding how stories work -- including the fact that what works as a story in print does not necessarily mean it will work on the big (or small) screen. Three act structure is not a myth, nor is Joseph Campbell (although he is a hero and a myth master, for sure).

Going to film school, reading lots of screenplays and comparing them to the films that are made, watching The Writer’s Room and going to WGA screenings to hob nob with the hoi poi and hear success stories from your fellow scribes can be encouraging and inspiring.

Placing well with screenwriting competitions like the prestigious Nicholl Fellowships, still the top dog in screenwriting competitions, followed closely by those from Final Draft, Disney, Sundance, Slamdance, Script Pipeline, Writers On the Verge and others might get you enough money to stay in LA long enough to secure an agent and maybe even get you a few meetings with lower level development execs. All this is very exciting. Your mother will be so proud. So will your father and high school friends back home who always knew you’d be famous one day. You could build great buzz on your Twitter feed with all the praise your brilliant, fabulous, precious screenplay garners.

And then what?

Unless you have a trust fund or a couch to sleep on and relatives to keep your gas tank and belly filled, you will find yourself highly unfulfilled being broke and jobless in LA. Sure you could get lucky. If you win the Nicholls or one of the top contests, there’s work and money to get your career started. But when you look at the odds of around 10 in 10,000 who hit that jackpot, the reality that you might be writing your next screenplay between breaks at your job at Starbucks as a Brentwood barista.

What about on the job training, you say? You could get a job in the industry as a writer’s assistant.

If you want to be a TV writer, working as a writer’s assistant on a sitcom or drama is a good way to get your foot in the door.

If you want to write for film, working as a writer’s assistant is a good way to get your foot caught in the car door, as you take the famous writer-director’s car into the shop for a tune up.

Depending on who you work for, being a writer’s assistant can be learning experience more valuable than film school, or it can be a low paying dead end job that eats up all of your time leaving you unable to write. The best chance at a balance would be an assistant job in Hollywood that enables you access to schmooze with people who could help get your script into the right hands one it’s finished and will give you a few spare hours that you can use to either write or sleep with. It’s not easy but it can be done.

You could also end up writing your heart out and still end up like Cossette in Les Miserables, morally compromised, penniless and dying of a nasty disease.

For one thing, you’re not considered a “real” screenwriter by Hollywood standards unless you are in the Guild and by that we mean the Writer’s Guild, either WGA West or WGA East for you those of you who write for Woody Allen. You can call yourself a screenwriter and in LA everyone has written a screenplay; however, you won’t be able to get health insurance for it or be allowed to vote on the Oscar for best screenplay, and you’ll have to sneak into the WGA screenings on Doheny if you are not a full fledged, paid screenwriter in the writer’s union. Being in the guild also means that if the union goes on strike, so do you – lest you will be branded a scab. You don’t want to be a scab, way too crusty.

How you get in the guild is a regular Catch 22. A conundrum. You can’t get in the guild unless you’ve written for a signatory company. And you probably will not be hired by a signatory company, unless you are in the Writer’s Guild. Good luck figuring it out. People have solved Rubick’s Cubes in less time. Desperate scribes have been trying to buck this strange system and break in for years. Some come up with creative ways. Others spend their lives in quiet desperation knitting tiny little Kwanzaa caps for kittens.

What about getting an agent? Or a manager? The difference between writer’s agents vs. managers is about 10-15 percent. Agents take out ten percent of your cut; managers get 20 to 25% of it. Your manager could also produce your movie, or get you an agent. An agent could be the one who sells your script or brokers a deal. It’s an incestuous relationship that ultimately could lead you to a big pile of nothing, as there are many screenwriters out there with some fabulous agents and managers that haven’t sold as much as an infomercial.

The last word on what it means to be a screenwriter is this – film is a collaborative, visual media. This means, that with the hundreds of people it takes to create a cinematic achievement, such as Transformers 17: The Revenge, the writer, the person who created the story, the reason for the movie’s very existence to begin with is thought of as low man on the totem pole. Expendable.

Sure you get a byline, but depending on how many people end up rewriting your original story and turning it into THEIR original story, you may lose even that (which is why you need to belong to the Writer’s Guild, to protect your authorship rights). Once you sell your script, it’s out of your hands. They can do anything they want with it. It is the buyer’s property. They can turn your tragic dramatic story of a drug addicted prostitute living on the streets into a romantic Cinderella story.

The other way to look at it is that an unproduced screenplay is a pretty much pointless item. It is a paper paperweight. An unfinished product. A dream deferred.

• More