| [BACK]
My POV
by Brian A. Wilson
The Basics
COVERAGE ON COVERAGE: What it is and how to make it work for you
You spend your life honing your writing skills. You spend hundreds, thousands of dollars on screenwriting classes and books. You invest countless hours writing during long nights, weekends, stolen moments when you should be with your family or working at your day job. All this effort to create Excalibur, your literary ne plus ultra, the big kahuna: your screenplay.
You find a place that will read your script. It may be an agency, management firm, production company, studio, even a major contest that must sort through thousands of scripts.
In virtually all cases, here is what your masterwork will be reduced to:
?A logline and a box score on one page.
?A one-page summary of the story.
?A one-page (or less) summary of the reader's evaluation.
All this will be done well before let's-do-lunch time. Three pages that determine if your work goes forward from that point or not. Three crucial pages of evaluation--know in the industry as coverage--generated in a matter of hours by someone whom you'd never dream would be reading your script:
Me.
Me, or someone much like me. Someone known as a reader. A reader reads and evaluates 20, 30 or more scripts each month. The scripts come from big agencies, small agencies, managers, production companies, even just writers themselves. Each is given to a reader for coverage. Some readers are on staff, many work freelance for one or more bosses. If a producer says "I'll read your script," chances are it means s/he will have your work covered. And when they say, "I'll read it personally," that means they'll go the extra mile and select one of their favorite readers.
If the reader's coverage is favorable, the producer or next person up the chain of command reads the work and the project goes forward from there.
If the coverage is not favorable, well, that's the end of the line for your script, at least as far as that production company, studio, contest or given entity is concerned. That's why it is so important, indeed vital, to wow the reader.
Next week, we'll examine each component of coverage. Until then, write well.
|
