Screenwriting : Location, location, location by Rose Buscholl

I understand, I live in the middle of Iowa!

Vancouver is a film making mecca. Get over there. Start there.

Through the magic of the Internet, writers from all over the world can now have their scripts rejected as easily as any writer in a media center like LA or NY can.

I have sold to NYC and UK from Sydney.

It is not who you know as much as who knows you.

It's all highly contextual to who you are and your strategy/attitude. There's also pros and cons both ways.

There are people who can walk out of LAX and find lucrative work during the taxi ride to Burbank. Some people are just like that. Born networkers who can talk their way into any job. I watch people like this pass me by all the time as I'm on that path of connections they build. It's amazing to watch.

There are also people (probably the vast majority of aspiring writers) who could spend ten years rattling around the studio system and never even get read because they're too timid to network effectively and too inexperienced to leverage an opportunity.

I know people who've been in LA their whole lives, working in the business every day, who have no more access than the writers I see in forums. If anything, they just have more people trying to suck away their time and climb over them to get ahead.

You can do your own litmus test with this. Anyone not making powerful connections here or via other platforms aren't likely to do much better via in-person networking, which is 10x harder and 1,000x less frequent. It's a significant skillset few have.

On top of this, there's the factor of survival. If you're writing on spec/assignment from a country with a low cost of living and a weak currency, pay is going to go a much longer way and any savings you have will last a lot longer too. I mean, I personally write professionally from an area where the cost of living is half that of LA.

There's way too much romance associated with this concept of walking into a city and networking. The point-one-percent who succeed are the exception that proves the rule.

I live in SF and I feel like since it's in California, it gives me a slight advantage over screenwriters living in other parts of the world because I'm a 1-hour plane ride to LA and can pretty easily pop down there for any kind of meeting. Hollywood is an old-school industry and a lot of industry pros/execs still prefer face-to-face for most types of meetings. That said, given today's video-conferencing technology there's no reason you can write and market (and sell) scripts from anywhere in the world. It's just that being closer to LA does provide a slight advantage when it comes to being available for meetings.

Thank you everyone for your comments they have all been awesome.

Dan M - way long ago I was.

Eh, I live in Canada too, and I was also wondering about that.

I live near Edmonton, AB. It is getting easier for me to connect remotely. Especially since Covid started. I would suppose that if your wanting to be in a writing room it would defiantly affect your chances of work. If your an idea person writing spec scripts I don't think it matters much anymore.