Great interview. Thank you, Marc and Scott. My takeaway(s): *CUT! Make my scripts uber-lean. *Go All In. Be the athlete-writer, by watching movies, reading scripts, writing pages.

Kudos to both Marc and Scott for the interview. My takeaway is also the importance of Less is More.

Thanks for reading and commenting, guys. I'll be checking out the comments all week and am available to answer any questions if anyone wants to ask anything.

What tips do you have for getting scripts into the right hands? My partner and I are almost ready to start sending our first script out and I'm searching everywhere to find managers and agents emails, but it's tough.

Marc Teichmann, I know it's tough, and good luck to you--this is a rocky part of the journey! The Hollywood Creative Directory, ImdB Pro, and several other pay-sites offer contact information for managers (when first querying, agents are not the destination; managers are.) The discussion boards at DoneDealPro.com have LOTS of insight into the querying process and how to find managers' e-mails. Check out DDP, and you don't even need to go ask HOW...just check the archives and you will find DOZENS of posts on this very subject. Also, check out the Black List for the last several years, and get a feel for who the managers are that are selling things and getting scripts out there, especially if you are writing in a genre similar to what they are repping. Then find e-mail (resources as listed above, plus Google--it's all out there); craft a killer query/log line/cover letter (tons of ink spilled around the internet on this as well); and carpet bomb the town. Lots of folks I know will send upwards of fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty query letters requesting a read from a management company--and get maybe a 10% read request rate. Those are loose numbers, but just a caveat that it's a TON of papering the town, but it only takes one rep to love your stuff to push you forward. FINALLY, please make sure your script is REALLY ready...have you had professionals read it? has someone other than you and your partner proofread it? Have you had a table read with actors to hear the words up on their feet? Have you had five or ten people who will not BS you give you their responses? If and when "yes" to all of these--GOOD LUCK!

Marc M: If you don't mind, I'd like to feature your response here in a separate post. I have said much the same in the past, but your take is really good with some nice specific tips. Thanks for taking the time to answer.

Good to see a fellow Marc with a C!! There's too many damn K's running around haha. I really appreciate the insight. I just joined DDP so I'll have to start checking out the forums. I know this is going to be hard, but it's the part I've been most looking forward too. For me, this will mean that it's real now, it's not just a hobby. Putting my script out there is what I've been waiting for. I'll send out 500 emails if I have to. We should be finishing this draft later this week, then we're going to have some people read it and make whatever corrections we see fit. Then off we go! Congrats on your success, can't wait to see Inside the Machine!

@Scott, please feel free to use my words in any way that can benefit the GITS community! @Marc T, sounds like you are on your way and have the right attitude. It's a great (and scary!) feeling when you start treating this like a job and not a hobby--good for you.

[...] “The first book I got [to learn the craft of screenwriting] was, of course, Screenplay by Syd Field. Since then, I got another twenty or thirty books or so. I’ve read them all; I’ve learned from every single one of them. But for me, the four single biggest resources to becoming a professional screenwriter were: Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat; the UCLA Professional Program in Screenwriting; reading hundreds of scripts; and writing tens of thousands of pages in my life (thousands in journals, hundreds in school and professional reports, hundreds in short fiction, and hundreds in screenplay format.)” Marc Maurino Interview with Scott Myers at Go Into The Story  [...]