Alternate Techniques

Market Your Screenplay

Many unconventional approaches to promoting material in Hollywood have been applied, some with considerable success. Most guidance on selling screenplays is designed mainly for the newcomer to the scene who doesn't have many personal contacts in the business.

Contacts

Knowing people works the best, as in any field, and we all might be surprised by how many Hollywood contacts we already have if we were to call around to our friends.

Surefire technique

Attending Hollywood parties, going to Hollywood A.A. meetings, posing as the pizza delivery guy, tossing scripts over backyard fences--each has been tried, sometimes successfully. A surefire technique, given the nature of human beings, is the hairdresser. If you can work something through the talent's hairdresser, you might very well have a future in Hollywood.

"The better part of valor is discretion."

William Shakespeare

Stay sane

The main caution with all of these approaches, of course, is the need to stay within reasonable bounds of socially acceptable behavior, to dance that fine line between chutzpah that everyone admires and brazenly outrageous behavior that makes everyone avoid you. In a related discipline, one actress who reportedly rained her headshot down on Hollywood studios from a helicopter was immediately "out", and another who proclaims his interest in becoming a Hollywood acting legend through a megaphone on his art car while trawling the streets of L.A. just cannot be taken seriously. Similar stories abound about writers who have "gone over the line".