Confession: The first screenplay that I ever wrote sucked. Period.

I think that for most first time writers, unless you're a genius, this is pretty much status quo. Now of course, I didn't think it sucked. While I didn't know or think that it sucked, I did know enough to hire someone that could tell me if it sucked or not.

I can't remember his name, but the first guy (it just happened to be a guy in this case, I've had plenty of coverage from women readers as well) that I hired to read one of my scripts was one of these people that reads (and/or suffers) stacks and stacks of scripts that come into the big studios in LA. These readers then write what's called a coverage report which essentially is the cliff notes version of the script. From these coverage reports, the development execs will decide which scripts from the stack they'll take home for their weekend reads.

The reader that I hired read for some big studios, Paramount among them. I was struck by the fact that despite his connections and working with development execs, he had still never sold one of his own scripts - shows you how tough it is to break into this business..

Anyway..

He basically ripped my script to shreds - and rightfully so, I might add - but the feedback was incredibly useful and from that I basically threw out everything but the concept and started from scratch.

The next guy that I hired was an actual produced Hollywood writer and his name was Mitch Klebanoff. Hiring Mitch was one of the smartest things I ever did because Mitch taught me more than any screenwriting book or class. He completely kicked my literary ass and really got me thinking about story, structure, character development and how never to justify the time that you put into something. If it doesn't fit, throw it out and don't look back - regardless of how cool you think it will look on screen, or how much you love the line that closes the scene. If it doesn't tell you something about a character or doesn't move the story forward, it's filler and basically a waste of screen time.

The other thing that Mitch did was to assure me that every meeting with him would be like any meeting I could expect to have with a producer trying to understand why I put something in the script and what it all meant... I have to admit that there are few things that I've paid for in my life that included someone yelling at me most of the time, but it worked. The fear of fucking up and facing his wrath each week kept me on my toes. The cool thing about Mitch is that if you did a great job, he'd really let you know, but you knew that you earned it.. He didn't give you anything. For that reason, I think he's one of the best writing coaches/mentors out there.

Another thing that I learned was that until you've written at least 5 or 10 drafts of something, it's never done. Someone (could have been Mitch) once told me writing is re-writing, especially in Hollywood.

I have a great relationship with Mitch, and he's done a lot to help me as a writer and producer. One of the things that surprised me early in our discussions was him mentioning that he hires people to read and critique his work (or gets other writers to look it over and offer notes). Why? Because it makes sense. You can't do this in a vacuum. So the other thing that became abundantly clear was that if you can't take someone telling you that you've got a shitty script or just a bad idea, you're in the wrong game.. :)

So, regardless of how much I think I may have learned in my five short years as a writer, I'll always hire someone to do coverage on the script and/or hire someone like Mitch to critique it.

While I have a small group of friends who I know will give me honest feedback, I'd never rely on that entirely before turning something in to either a contest or sending it out to a producer.

I typically start the search for suckiness and the cheese extraction (process by which all the cheesy scenes and dialog are purged) by taking my finished drafts to an English major neighbor of mine who lives up the street and she'll find all the grammatical type stuff and give me a pure review of the story, its good points and bad. I'll then revise and send it out to at least two coverage sites. However, before I do that, I'll typically register with the writers guild (WGAE) - which is as good a method of protection as a copyright, and you get the registration number back a lot quicker.

The two sites that I've found to give decent coverage are www.scriptshark.com and www.soyouwannasellascript.com. You end up paying about $150 a reading, but you'll get back pretty comprehensive notes on problems with story, character development, dialog and an overall rating of the script in a bunch of categories.

If the coverage is generally favorable from the two sites, I'll send it to Mitch to see if it passes his hard ass Hollywood writer test. If he thinks its good, then I'll copyright. While copyrighting isn't a huge pain in the ass, I just can't get myself to spend the money for the certificate if people think the script is shit. Why bother?

I plan on following this same process with this script. So by the time I'm done getting the script in shape, I'll end up spending $800 - $900 just to get enough sample opinions from people in the business to ensure that it doesn't suck and also to help me get the script in shape.

The thing I always keep in my head is that just because I think something is cool doesn't mean it will resonate with enough people to justify me making it or that a studio might want to buy it.

So this ends up being a decision point.

If after getting Heist in shape and the coverage and the Mitch critique aren't favorable enough, I may end pulling the plug on Heist and look for something else to produce.

While I'm on a mission to do this, I have no desire to add my name to the growing list of indie filmmakers that have a great looking movie with a story that sucks or an idea that no one cares about.

Last night, I worked on cleaning the pages up that I wrote on Tuesday night and cleaned up some inconsistencies that cropped up as a result of adding in Gail. This is the infamous ripple effect.. This was a big change, but fortunately, the ripples were small (mainly because the script is still relatively small), but sometimes small changes can have the inverse effect, so whenever you change something, however small, you invariably end up having to read and re-read to catch all the stuff that may have been affected by the change.