"Bullitt" screenwriter Alan Trustman sells his unproduced specs on Amazon.com

UPDATE: 7:30am PST - That didn't take long!  Alan Trustman replied in comments.  His comment and my reply have been added to this post.

Over the years I've seen a number of strange and desperate ways that people have advertised their screenplays.  Some opt for spamming, some set up websites for their scripts, and other shoot short films promoting their work.  Tuesday's Variety featured a method that surprised even me.  Screenwriter Alan Trustman took out a quarter-page ad which - even considering the hard times that the print industry has fallen on - couldn't have been cheap.

The headline blared "SIX GREAT UNPRODUCED SCREENPLAYS" and a full scan of the ad follows:




14 paragraphs and 673 words in all.  I'm not retyping all of that.  Frankly, with all that text, the writer is lucky I read all of that.  That's actually a big issue I have with this ad - it's a mountain of text.  There's nothing to really catch the eye or entice someone to read it all.  He even buries the lead, for it takes him until the third paragraph to get to the real point of his message.

"Many years ago, I started at the top, writing two classic movies, thanks to a brilliant agent, a dynamite producer, and a major star who understood that I understtod him.  I had it, really them, all, - and then I didn't.  Thereafter I had a couple of other screenplays produced and left the business.


"In subsequent years, from time to time I wrote an additional nine screenplays, but I never became a participating member of the Hollywood community, and was unable to sell screenplays from a home 3,000 miles away, without an agent, manager producer or star."

Though the ad doesn't name those "classic movies," it's signed "Alan Trustman," who is the 80 year-old screenwriter behind Bullitt and The Thomas Crowne Affair.  According to this NY Post article, Trustman was once the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, having sold Bullitt for $1 million in 1968.  He claims to have written that entire script in one day.

There's also an interesting quote from Trustman, "The number of people in the industry who can read a script and picture the movie is very, very small," he says.  I've not met more than ten of them in all my years."

And that's why I struggle to understand what Trustman hopes to achieve with his ad.  As he informs us "I have decided to publish my best six unproduced screenplays on Amazon and advertise them in VARIETY, the NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW, and on the internet."

If I didn't know that Trustman had such a notable career, I would have written this ad off as the work of a rank, naive amateur.  I don't understand why anyone would believe there was any kind of market for an unpublished screenplay.  Trustman himself says that few people can read a script and picture the movie - so why does he believe someone would pay $9.99 for one of his scripts?  I'd wager he probably spent more on the ad than he'll make on those book/screenplay sales.

If he's trying to get attention in the hopes some producer will buy those scripts, the ad is a poor marketing tool.  It's wordy and the six pitches he includes are hardly enticing.  They're not loglines so much as weak teasers like:

"THE JUDAS PROPHECY is a novelized screenplay.  Does anyone want to make a good commercial Dan Brown style movie?"

and

"TWENTY-TWO LOVERS is the love story of a detective and a talented woman whose lives intersect early but do not meet in person until the very end of the movie.  Again, who has the courage to play the lady?"

With respect to Mr. Trustman, if those loglines were part of a query letter, I can't see many people requesting to read the script for free.  I'm not going to spend 2/3 of the price of a movie ticket on any of those scripts.  And frankly, it seems like Trustman would be smart enough to figure this out too.

If there's one thing that aspiring screenwriters can take from this it's that this business is rough.  A writer with two classic movies and the largest writing paycheck of the time still saw his career fall on hard times.  A man with his experience should probably know better than to expect an ad like this to do anything for his career or his income.  If he was just out to educate, or merely wanted his words to find an audience, he'd probably put his scripts on a website and offer them for free - so that leads me to believe that this is an action taken out of desperation - a last resort.

I wouldn't suggest any screenwriters emulate Trustman's ad if they want to get their scripts read... but then again, he got me to write an entire blog post about it, so maybe he knows what he's doing.

UPDATE: Alan Trustman commented below.  Since some of you don't read comments, I thought it wise to add his to the original post.

Great blog! I loved it!

Why the ad?

Because this fat lady decided to sing.

The scripts are good, probably better than good, and there are people out there looking for money-maker movie movies. If somebody bites, great! If not, I have had the fun of saying what I had to say.

And you’re absolutely right about the pitches. I never could write pitches and I never could pitch.

If you send me your address, I’ll send you the books, and you can then write another blog savaging the scripts! 

My reply:  Thanks for the quick response, sir, and I'm glad you enjoyed the blog.  I know that my free time being what it is, I can't find room to read and review six scripts on the side.  In fact, there's ONE "favor" script that I've managed to not get the time to read across a couple months!

But I am intrigued to check out perhaps one of them.  I'm leaning towards THE JUDAS PROPHECY, as it sounds like the most exciting and marketable of the six based on that logline.  Let's open it up to a little debate.  Readers, which one would you read and why?

Reader mail - Should my script have its own website?

Ron asks:

What do you think of those personal web sites a writer creates to market their screenplay? Does it scream "amateur"? I know a writer has to do all they can to get their work read, but do you think that it might have a negative connotation in a producer's (or whoever's) mind? That the thinking might be the writing should be good enough to stand on its own, that it shouldn't need a slick web site to get attention?

I'm not aware of any rule about this, or even industry conventional wisdom - but I tend to think it's cheesy and screams "amateur" at the top of its lungs. I've seen, well, a LOT of these sites and not once have I ever been impressed. Not once have I ever felt it ever does anything to cast the writer or his work in a good light.

With short films and webseries, I totally get why they merit websites of their own. That's content. They're brief 1-5 minute bits of entertainment that have a shot at going viral and being discovered by "average Joes." If your short or webseries gets a big enough following, maybe you'll be lucky enough to attract the attention of some development folk or managers and get a meeting. It's happened quite a few times before.

Maybe these screenwriters with websites think that this is their way to land on some producer or agents radar. After all, if it works for web shorts, why not for scripts? I'll tell you why - scripts will never go viral. You're not going to get a massive following of people downloading your script, reading all 120 pages, and then passing it around to all their friends. With viral videos, it's just as much about your following as it is your content. That's how managers and development execs weed out the material that's worth their time. They don't blindly troll the internet and check out just any site - they look for the sites and the videos with the largest audiences.

The other drawback of these sites is that they give WAY too much information about the writer. If a writer has an interesting background - say he spent 100 days as a hostage in the Iraq War - then maybe your bio is relevant. But I don't need to know you grew up in Altuna, that you met your wife in third grade, that you have two lovely kids, one of which is your beloved dog. That tells me nothing about why you are a writer worth paying attention to.

And then there are some guys who list anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen completed screenplays on their website. That's a huge red flag. There's a reason why when you query you really only should push one project at a time. If you say you have ten scripts, most agents will immediately wonder "If this guy's so good, and all of these scripts are strong, why have NONE of them found representation yet?" Some agents also say that pushing multiple projects can show that you can't distinguish your strongest writing from your weakest writing.

Don't try to sell an agent on all your scripts - sell him on the right script.

The way I see it, a website for your screenplay offers no benefits and only drawbacks. No agent is going to troll the web looking for new clients. Any agent that looks up your website is probably doing so only after looking at your query letter. At that point, your victory is getting him interested via your query. Your website can only give him a reason not to request the script.

I'd love to hear from people with contrary views, if you feel there's something obvious that I haven't considered.