Professional Studies- Primary Research

To enhance the credibility of the report and to make it more relevant and personal, I'm conducting a short questionnaire that features questions that are orientated towards screenwriters. This will give me a better idea of the answers I can form in my report and will help build up my research. There are many different services you can use to conduct a questionnaire, the popular services seem to be SurveyMonkey and GoogleDocs. I used GoogleDocs to develop my questionnaire because I already have an account with Google and I'm more familiar with their layout and services. The questionnaire consists of 8 Questions and range from multiple choice to written answers. I distributed the questionnaire on various different screenwriting forums to reach the audience I need for the responses, some of these included, Empire Magazine Forums, Screencraft and Reddit/Screenwriting. The results are compiled and processed by Google and offer two different ways to view them, either through graphs and charts or just a table of the responses. I expected a better response for the screenwriting forums but ended up with limited participation from them with only 26 responses in total. I was able to view these responses and calculate the percentages of the answers and include them in my report to back up some evidence that is in the report. The primary research was definitely worth doing and helped support views and answers in the report but I think I need to research better was of distribution or distribute it way earlier than I did.

Link to questionnaire:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/10_SOZ1s86drB2NTHXuuZ8skY1L45kqI7mTncq0bxwDc/viewform

    

Professional Studies- The Hollywood Blacklist

While researching historical events in screenwriting's history, I came across a hugely influential and important issue in the development of modern screenwriting as we know it. The Hollywood Blacklist is a term used describe the events that happened in the late 1940's - late 1950's where screenwriters, actors, directors and even musicians were denied employment because of their suspected political beliefs. A blacklist of names was created making employers aware of which individuals not to employ and this directly damaged the careers of many screenwriters and directors working in the film industry at the time. The main political belief the blacklist targeted was those in membership with the communist party. A group of ten screenwriters and directors were citied for contempt of congress and blacklisted after refusing to answer questions about their alleged involvement with the communist party. This group was known as The Hollywood Ten and consisted of:

• Alvah Bessie - Screenwriter 
• Herbert Biberman - Screenwriter and director
• Lester Cole - Screenwriter 
• Edward Dmytryk - Director
• Ring Lardner Jr. - Screenwriter
• John Howard Lawson - Screenwriter
• Albert Maltz - Screenwriter 
• Samuel Ornitz - Screenwriter
• Adrian Scott - Producer and screenwriter
• Dalton Trumbo - Screenwriter

These ten were the most famous out of the many hundreds and hundreds that were blacklisted.

This helps show that screenwriters have been struggling throughout time to sustain their career and events like this make it harder and harder for them to become successful, providing evidence for my report and backing up my assumptions about the screenwriting business.

Professional Studies- Useful Reports

To help build evidence and key points to prove important issues raised in my report, I thought it would be useful to search for existing reports to are relevant to my topic of screenwriting and that could be used in my report. I previously looked into writers guilds and discovered they publish yearly reports on the organisation and a report called "Schedule of Minimums" that look into the minimum salaries for writers. There annual report on employment and earnings can be found here:

http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/who_we_are/annual_reports/annualreport14.pdf

This report includes important statistics that will be useful to my report, like the amount of members who are reporting earnings from screenwriting.

Another interesting report I discovered was developed by BFI (British Film Institute) and looks in to the film industries statistics and the film economy in the UK and international. They also offer a statistical yearbook that looks back at all the films of the year through the important numbers they generate. These reports can be found here:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/education-research/film-industry-statistics-research/reports

A company by the name of Film L.A. Inc have a report into feature film production in 2013 and has numbers on the amount of films released and the popularity of filming locations which may prove to be useful in some parts of the report and should be considered just in case. This report can be found here:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/custom/Embeds/2013%20Feature%20Study%20Corrected%20no%20Watermark%5B2%5D.pdf

Of course as well as these reports, I will be conducting my own primary research by developing a questionnaire and distributing it across screenwriting forums to achieve the best responses that will help my report. The questionnaire will have important and relevant questions that are personal to the report and the results will be used to argue its case in the report.  

Professional Studies- Writers Guilds

I've begun research for my report which is focusing on the successfulness and sustainability of screenwriting. I've decided to look at writers guilds and associations first, to understand how they work and why they are established. There are many different writers guilds but the three main well established guilds that appear most are:

• WGAW (Writers Guild of America, West)
• WGAE (Writers Guild of America, East)
• WGGB (Writers Guild of Great Britain) 

Together the all three writers guilds have a combined total of 23,000 + members.
The purpose of these writers guilds is to represent and support writers working in media, they negotiate agreements with studios and employers that cover contracts, minimum fees, advances and royalties.

The WGGB offers full memberships to writers who have accumulated 8 membership points. The way a writer can manage to get membership points are:

• For each single piece of written work of any description for which reasonable payment has been received under written contract, in terms not less favourable than those existing in current minimum terms agreements negotiated by the Guild (where such agreements exist) - 8 Points
• For each single piece of marketed written work produced or published commercially other than under the terms of the previous paragraph- 4 Points
• For each completed year of candidate membership (up to four years) - 1 Point
• For each self-published work- 1 Point  

The writers guilds have fought for fair pay of writers for quite some time and negotiate often to reach an appropriate deal between the two. An historic event in the WGAW and WGAE's past is the 2007-08 Writers Guild of America Strike. This took place between November 5, 2007 and finished on February 12, 2008. 12,000 screenwriters were apart of the strike and it resulted in the writers receiving a new percentage payment on the distributors gross for digital distribution. Many television companies struggled to keep up with regular programming and had to reduce the amount of episodes in certain seasons of shows or even cancel the show entirely.

Web links:

http://www.writersguild.org.uk/join-new/fullmembership

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_Writers_Guild_of_America_strike

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writers_Guild_of_America,_East

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writers_Guild_of_America,_West

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writers%27_Guild_of_Great_Britain

Professional Studies- Successful Screenwriters

With it getting close to start my upcoming report I decided to gather some basic research that will become helpful when I start my in depth research. The report is focusing on screenwriting and turning it into a career so I thought it would be best to look into some of my favourite screenwriters and some popular screenwriters to see how they started out and how often they create and sell there stories and scripts. Also to look into some screenwriters who have wrote popular and successful films who haven't wrote any scripts after that. I've also found that screenwriters tend to transition into directors as well so theres another aspect to the career for those who turned into screenwriters/directors and those who are only screenwriters.

Screenwriters to look into:
Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) - Transitioned into director
Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Transformers, Star Trek) - Writing Duo
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street) Writing Duo and Directors
Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights) Writer/Director
Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained, Pulp Fiction) Writer/Director
Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, Moneyball) Writer- Film & TV
Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles) Writer/Director
John Logan (The Aviator, Rango) Writer

Highest Paid Screenplays:
Deja Vu - Terry Rossio and Bill Marsilii- $5 million
The Long Kiss Goodnight- Shane Black- $4 million
The Sixth Sense- M Night Shyamalan- $2.5 million
A Knights Tale- Brian Helgeland- $2.5 million