What most people starting out in Hollywood assume is that if they have a drive to succeed, talent, luck, and a complete lack of ethics they can get their screenplay in any door, no matter how firmly wedged shut, and once they do, their script is on its way to being produced.

Now, those things are very important, and I would advise anyone who lacks those qualities not to bother with Hollywood, but there is one thing more important:

Who you know.

Let me clarify my intentions:  it is not hard to meet with a studio executive, or an agent, or a manager, or a producer.   Directors… maybe.  But as a writer, you may never actually get to meet with the director in the process of having your film made, so it’s a moot point.

“Who?” you ask me, “Who is it that I’m supposed to know?  Is there some near-divine figure of filmmaking that I am not aware of?”

Well, I suppose you might put it that way.  The most important person in the film industry to know is: You.

You’re the writer… if you don’t know yourself in a coherent and cohesive way, if you don’t understand your journey or your choices or how your actions cause reactions, then you don’t know the stuff that would allow you to write a good script.   And if you don’t have a good script – I can’t stress this enough – it doesn’t matter who reads it.

I’m sympathetic to your problems in this regard: 1) If you know what’s wrong with you, you are going to like yourself less, and 2) If you know what’s wrong with you, you’ll probably also start to figure out what’s wrong with your writing, and you’re going to like IT less.

Tough cookies. 

The world doesn’t need writers because writers are so much smarter than the rest of us.  Having ideas is not the reason you get to be a writer.   The world needs writers because it needs explorers of the human psyche.  It needs people who are willing to figure themselves out – willing to dive into those parts of us we don’t particularly like, and learn to accept and understand them, and then tell the rest of us about that.   We need to be told about ourselves, and the only way to tell anyone about themselves is to realize they’re just like you, under a different set of circumstances and attitudes.

And before I leave you – I’m not saying be serious or be gritty.  Those things are great, but what really gets people are the unexpected things you learn about yourself – the real revelations that you resisted.

For me, I spent a long time resisting the idea that I was funny, because most of the time I’m not.  I spent a long time resisting the idea that I could sing, because I’ll never be really good at it.   But the truth is that I’m very funny when I’m in the right mood, and even worse, I’m a pretty reliable singer in my church choir. 

And now that I know, my scripts know it, too.

This summer, everything comes in threes. “Spiderman.” “Rush Hour.” “Shrek.” “Pirates.” “Oceans 11.” Even “Fantastic Four.” And you know, it never fails. The third installment of a movie series is always the best of one all. Wasn’t that true of “Exorcist 3”? “Godfather III” (Not to be confused with “The Three Godfathers”)? “Thunderball”? “Superman III”? Bikini Beach Party? “Jaws 3D”? No?

Summer is hell. Not only is it hot, but all the writers go away. Like there’s no school. Like the way the shrinks leave New York for the month of August. There is virtually no scripted television on the broadcast networks. And all the movies that come out have been coming out over and over for every summer since 1965. They’re written by teams of writers who have never met and wouldn’t know what to say to each other if they did.

Let’s band together and demand more and better service from the venders who take our money. Tell your cable company that you’re tired of being put on hold and made to hear a recorded voice tell you over and over that most problems can be solved online. Tell your internet provider that you don’t like calling, getting a guy with a thick accent, and then having him get angry because you can’t understand what he says the first time he says it. And, by all means, let’s all write letters to the studios and networks and demand more “Ones” during summer!

Remember “Ones”? Ones were great. “Citizen Kane” One. That was a great movie. “Casablanca” One. Another great movie. Then there was “Lawrence of Arabia” One, “Chinatown” One, “When Harry met Sally” One — I could go on and on. Take the ones I mentioned above, “Godfather,” “The Exorcist,” “Jaws” — all great movies. And the best thing about them all is the fact that you had no idea what you were going to see. It was a fantastic new thing the first time; an experience like nothing else. You walked into the movie theatre to get out of the heat, and you left with a head full of an experience that was fundamentally new.

It took a writer’s imagination to give you that experience. Demand it all year long. The writers who can provide us these new experiences are out there, begging for employment. Don’t let them be silenced by Corporate Greed.

But if we must have “threes,” there are three that I’d like to see next summer: “Gigli III,” “Sahara III,” and “Evan Almighty III.” That’d probably take care of it, at least for a while.