Courtney Chambers at 2012-01-26 19:38:29:

A first draft will sell every time. Your ideas are fresh and never encumbered by those pesky rewrites that only clog the process... Go ahead and send it in!

Zach at 2012-01-26 21:00:32:

Whoa, whoa, whoa... In regards to number 9: I didn't want to steal intellectual property I wouldn't have protested SOPA. Them apples is free for the pickings...

Alex at 2012-01-26 22:03:57:

I'd like to tack a corollary onto this, which is that if you DO a re-write, you only tweak lines of dialog, you don't address any of the substantive issues with the story. You should only ever make micro changes, not macro ones.

Debbie Moon at 2012-01-27 04:32:27:

Mismatch your budget and your potential audience. Fill your downbeat mumblecore indie with huge special effects sequences and a cast of thousands. Everyone loves to spend hundreds of millions on a movie that will only play to the arthouse crowd...

Steve Trautmann at 2012-01-27 11:40:26:

Write an autobiographical slice-of-life drama about the day you sent off your college admission packet, and your parents took you out to dinner, and the whole thing is told in real time.

Annika at 2012-01-28 14:53:05:

Get irate at people who don't dig your autobiographical slice-of-life drama about the day you sent off your college admission packet and your parents took you out to dinner and the whole thing is told in real time and avenge yourself upon them by making your next script about a misunderstood writer who writes a brilliant autobiographical slice-of-life drama about the day he sent off his college admission packet and his parents took him out to dinner and the whole thing was told in real time but he was rebuffed by Hollywood idiots at every turn so he finally decided to do the whole thing as a play and garnered huge success -- as well as the cute pixie-Indie-arty-dingy-intellectual love interest -- in the theater world, only to have those same snide Hollywood bastards come knocking at his door in an ironic twist of fate ending.