No we don't want to read your script, and yes, that makes you the asshole.
Almost 100% of the time when anyone ever learns what me or any of my peers do for a living we are almost instantly pitched. Why? Because people are desperate and don't actually want to do the work it takes to actually get the idea in the place where it might get made. It's really a kinda of shitty thing to do, and if I did that to someone in there job they would have me escorted out of the building. The thing is, I totally get it. I was actually there myself. In some ways still am, it's a constant fight to maintain professionalism in the face of amazing opportunities. What does that mean? I will give you an example.
Our company gets opportunities that are unique and have a huge range of possibilities probably 3-4 times a year. These are the Omega tier opportunities. Like literally a winning lottery ticket, except that the mindset of having the winning lottery ticket is the exact thing that will kill that opportunity.
We had confidential information about the sale of a professional football team, that was going to move from one city to another, years before it actually happened. That said we only had only a few weeks to find millions(or billions) of dollars and put together a group of investors to buy a chuck of this team. My company, our CEO and affiliates don't work in sports team franchise acquisition so it was a ask in an ideal situation. Almost impossible in a situation where we had other goals an clients actively needing out attention. This deal even at a 1% kickback would have been a lot of money for us. The entire time we had to not be calm and cool as thought deals like this came across our desk every week. Excited enough to get the investors excited but calm enough to not come across as desperate. Desperation is the number one biggest red-flag or make-the-money-run-from-you signal an investor can get. The number two is arrogance. Nobody wants to work with an arrogant jerk, unless there are really really good, or are a proven model. Even then it's not going to work with every investor, especially in film. To finish the story, we held our cool pitched every group we had with the capital to do something about it. By the time we heard back from everyone, the deal was over. It was a long shot to begin with but we increased our value by calmly bringing a big opportunity to the groups we knew could handle it. The next time we reached out to them, the turnaround was much much faster. Had we been desperate and treated the investors like a lottery ticket they would not only have taken longer to respond to our next opportunity, they probably wouldn't have responded at all.
Very specifically when someone tells me they have a script what they in part are telling me is, "I don't know what I am doing", the other part is "I have not put in the work to figure out what to do". This is why they are the asshole, I didn't make that decision. Neither did the people I work with. We are putting in the work right now, to try and figure out how to do just that with our OWN ideas. Now, you(the person with the script) arrogantly assume that because we work in film that we are "always looking for a good idea" not giving us the credit of having our own good ideas. Now this person with the script expects all of this exciting stuff to happen. And what do us film idiots do, we take the thing, maybe we even read the corner-stapled pile of diner napkins written in gibberish with a picture of Brad Pitt taped to the front. Just in case you have a golden goose of an idea. Which for me, in 13 years in film has never ever happened. No idea that I have read from a lottery ticket chaser has been better than ideas from myself or my colleagues.
The hard work. David Mamet quotes Ernest Hemingway as famously saying "Writing is easy, all you have to do is sit down at the page and bleed.", and that is literally step one in creating a film. Just step one. There is Chain of Title [Which is always step two, OMG mailing the script to yourself is not going to work if I file the same script with the US Copyright office. No the writers guild does not beat the US Copyright office in court. DO BOTH, on the same day! That is the US Copyright office first, then the WGA registration.] Now that is just step two, you still have to create a log line, tag line, one sheet, character breakdowns, story boards, mood boards, and possibly a pitch deck. This, is just to get it ready for any other professional to even look at. Unless you have a "Relationship". This often takes teams of people weeks to do correctly and even then often does not work. We are not even to the point where anyone outside of the writers and there friends are looking at the script, it's probably on the third or fourth draft. It might have 20+ more revisions to go through before it gets purchased, as an option. So no, I am not going to drag my team, and my company through the hell of pitching and building out a script because your cousins-sisters-roommate ate bath salts once and saw an alternate ending to Forrest Gump. This is part of the reason why companies do not take unsolicited scripts, because most of the time they do not have the time put into them to be worth the time it takes to read the first ten pages. Good luck, happy sets!
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