You have to admire the balls of the 30-odd producers, agents and commissioners who spoke at the London Screenwriters’ Festival this weekend. The event was packed with hundreds of writers, every one of whom wanted to pitch their script to these speakers. You could see the terror in their eyes sometimes – like an animal ready to bolt from a predator at the first sign of a logline.
So I wondered if this brand new festival, brainchild of Guerilla Filmmaker (TM) Chris Jones, was fundamentally flawed. But unlike Cannes, this was not a festival about doing deals. I think what it was really about, was allowing the members of a lonely profession to connect with their professional community. I actually met several other writers who work in the sci-fi/fantasy genre, to my great surprise.
The highlight of the festival for me was a talk misleadingly entitled “How to Write for Hollywood”. One of the two speakers was Michael Bassett (not England manager), who directed a UKP20 million fantasy movie called Solomon Kane, without any of the finance coming from Hollywood. Admittedly I had never heard of the film, but it goes to show that it can be done, and the advice that he gave in the round-table Q&A afterwards was really thought-out and practical.
Elsewhere I was able to connect with several other Screen-West-Midlands-funded delegates, a writer of The Sarah Janes Adventures and a video game producer. I also took part in the fun of Speed Pitching, which is like speed dating but less embarrassing. Five minutes with an agent, then a honk of the comedy horn, then five minutes with a producer, then another honk, and onto another producer (who Carl and I had actually pitched Dark Side to several months ago), then honk again and it was all over. None of the pitchees were seriously looking for acquisitions, but it was good practice.
The build-up to the festival last week encouraged me to have a play around with some new poster art for Dark Side, since the existing image (based on the first photo you see on this site’s gallery page) was likened to a publicity still for a Swedish TV show by someone we met in Cannes. If you fancy some new desktop wallpaper, you can see what I came up with here.