Venting

I've decided to truly document what it is like for me as a screenwriter trying to make it in the crazy world of Hollywood.

I will never burn anyone by name. That is not in my nature and I graduated high school many years ago, thank you. I will keep anonymity for all others and remove the guilty and innocent alike.

The set up for this.
One of my writing partners... yes, I have multiple, ultimately three with varying degrees of "success"... and I wrote a horror script because we had a lead on someone looking to film one on the cheap. We turned a script around from a 36 page germ I had in a little over a week.

Above all, I consider myself a comedy writer. While I love horror and writing horror, I feel like a total novice hack at it. I was starting to feel increasingly more confident with this script. This is the response we got:

[12:13] WritingPartner: been e-mailing back and forth with the director's assistant.
[12:14] WritingPartner: based on our log line we are too expensive.
[12:14] WritingPartner: he hasn't responded to whether or not we should submit if we make changes.
[12:14] WritingPartner: his complaints
[12:14] WritingPartner: 1) guns are expensive
[12:14] WritingPartner: 2) blood is expensive
[12:14] WritingPartner: 3) a hospital is too expensive
[12:15] WritingPartner: not sure what their budget was or what kind of horror film they were expecting to make

Okay. I can understand "guns are expensive" because, well, guns are expensive depending on the budget you're looking at. If you're going to kill "monsters", however, guns are a nice, effective way of doing it. If that had been the one thing said, I would've understood where they were at and considered changes. However, skipping ahead...

"A hospital is too expensive" -- This could honestly go either way. To have a script limited to one location is generally considered a cost-saving measure. The reason I had the germ of an idea initially was because I was told by a reliable source that you can get hospital locations on the cheap.

"Blood is expensive" -- Shenanigans! Malarky! I use the word so rarely I don't even know how to spell it. Blood is cheap. Blood is good. If a director can afford to have an assistant but not to have blood in their horror film, their priorities are horribly out of whack.

My Tweets on this --
Low budget director rejected horror script - "blood too expensive" - want face-to-face so I can slap them upside the head...
Although I am perversely proud that I could co-write something wherein the blood usage was cost prohibitive.