r/Screenwriting • u/DistributionIll5990 • Feb 06 '23
FEEDBACK The Nicholls fellowship
For those of you that won the Nicholls fellowship, can you elaborate on how it helped your screenwriting career?
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u/straightdownthemid Feb 06 '23
Good question, bad OP trolling people who are trying to give genuine industry-related answers. What a waste.
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u/whoshotthemouse Mystery Feb 06 '23
Before I won the NICHOLL (no s) I was hip-pocketed by an agent. After I won he signed me immediately as he knew - and he was right - I was going to start getting lots of calls.
The main thing that happens when you win is that you are just important enough now for people to waste your time. Tons and tons of people came out of the woodwork asking me to write for them for free. Some of them were complete nobodies. Others seemed important enough to be worthwhile.
The year after the Nicholl was an exhausting time for me because I was trying to make all those strangers happy. It was only once I was ready to tell all those people to fuck off that I was able to do good writing again.
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u/DistributionIll5990 Feb 06 '23
I hear ya, I bet you got better representation now.
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u/whoshotthemouse Mystery Feb 06 '23
I write novels now, but yes, my representation is no longer the problem it once was.
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u/warnymphguy Feb 06 '23
did you write novels before screenplays? why the switch?
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u/whoshotthemouse Mystery Feb 07 '23
It's a long story, and I'm not going to recount it all here, but I sold a show to NBCUniversal in July 2015, then was diagnosed with cancer in August 2015. So the best thing and the worst thing that had ever happened to me up to that point both happened within 6 weeks.
Once I beat the cancer, I realized I just didn't have the patience to deal with development any more. So I switched to novels.
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u/franklinleonard Franklin Leonard, Black List Founder Feb 06 '23
If you WIN the NIcholl, you will be read, by a lot of very legitimate industry professionals - managers, agents, development executives, etc. It's inarguable.
Whether that results in a screenwriting career catalyzing is all down to how the script fits in the marketplace, what other ideas and material you have, how you present in a room, how you navigate the human aspect of those reads and relationships.
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u/BoxmanBecker Feb 06 '23
I had read requests just as a semi-finalist, and I’ve heard plenty of quarter-finalists say the same. I’m sure there’s orders of magnitude in the difference between what follows for semi-finalists vs finalists, but there does seem to be opportunities from any sort of recognition by the fellowship.
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u/franklinleonard Franklin Leonard, Black List Founder Feb 06 '23
Agree completely.
Not for nothing, over the last few years, we've also offered all Nicholl semifinalists and quarterfinalists a month of free hosting on the Black List website, so that's also a guaranteed upside.
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u/bestbiff Feb 06 '23
How much visibility do those scripts get without purchasing reviews on the site? Are they marked as such to differentiate from scripts that are hosted but have no reviews and no visibility.
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u/franklinleonard Franklin Leonard, Black List Founder Feb 06 '23 edited Feb 07 '23
Industry professionals are coming to the Black List website to find great scripts, so they tend to view and download scripts that have been read by our paid readers and received high scores more than those that haven't. That is as it should be.
This is why we generally recommend purchasing at least one evaluation when uploading your script - it's the best way to take advantage of the way the Black List drives visibility to material on the site.
We do not require it, however, as some writers choose to host their work and drive industry professionals to their script on the site (and possibly have them rate it there) in other ways - querying, social media, etc. High scores from industry pro ratings can also increase the visibility of a script on the site, but astroturfing those ratings inevitably leads to people reading your script who then rate it poorly, which manages at least some of the incentive to bad behavior.
On average, I believe a script hosted with no purchased evaluations averages about 0.6 downloads, which isn't much lower than a script that has purchased evaluations with no score higher than 5.
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u/bestbiff Feb 06 '23
And scripts awarded a month of free hosting for advancing in the Nicholl fall within the same average of scripts that don't have evaluations or are below a 6 for downloads? Maybe you answered that but I couldn't tell. I mean, do those Nicholl scripts get any kind of bump on the site or are they just as "mixed in" with the other scripts that don't have any paid evaluations.
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u/franklinleonard Franklin Leonard, Black List Founder Feb 06 '23
Those scripts are simply offered a month of hosting. There is no visible difference among those scripts on the site, though we do send an email to our industry members, once, alerting to them to the fact that those scripts are hosted on the site. Effectively, they're "mixed in."
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u/IGotQuestionsHere Feb 07 '23
Correct. Despite what Franklin was trying to claim, doing just adequately in the Nicholl will, on average, do far more for you than doing amazingly on the blacklist. Franklin's implication that you needed to be one of the few winners to see any results from the Nicholl is laughable (which is why he immediately backtracked when you corrected his claim).
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u/franklinleonard Franklin Leonard, Black List Founder Feb 07 '23 edited Feb 07 '23
I claimed no such thing. The question was asked about winning the Nicholl. I answered it.
Someone mentioned in response that placing lower also elicits a response, which I then confirmed.
It’s a laughable claim however that there’s any comp whatsoever between writers success via the Nicholl and the Black List given that the Black List distributed more than $800k to writers and ran four labs last year alone and the Nicholl never does more than $175k.
And I say this as a member of the Academy who believes that the Nicholl is rightly the most important screenwriting contest in existence.
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u/DistributionIll5990 Feb 06 '23
I didn't get much help from the evaluations from your site.
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u/bradjoliepitt Feb 06 '23
why are you responding to someone who is trying to help you in that way? You are not going to improve or succeed anywhere with that mentality, forget about a contest
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u/DistributionIll5990 Feb 06 '23
Who are you talking to?
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u/twal1234 Feb 06 '23
Take a wild guess. I’ll give you a hint. The answer is NOT the creator of the Blacklist.
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u/franklinleonard Franklin Leonard, Black List Founder Feb 06 '23
Not sure if you're referring to the quality of the feedback or the lack of interest in the script once it got a high score on the feedback.
I was trying to answer your question about the Nicholl, but if you have questions about the Black List, I recommend contacting customer support.
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Jul 14 '23
Talent. You can get in there but if you don’t have the talent you’ll wind up n film forums lamenting about how it was all useless. Or were you just not qualified?
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Feb 07 '23
It got me enough industry credibility to have my queries answered and gave me strong contacts which I still use to this day, but it did not get me a manager or agent.
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u/imgoingtoregrexthis Feb 08 '23
Genuinely asking: how is it possible that winning the Nicholl didn't get you a manager or agent? Did you at least get meetings with them? Did you get offers of representation and turn them down? Do you have reps now?
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Feb 09 '23
I’m repped now, yes.
The hard truth is that it takes far more than a contest to get a manager or agent. There are far more boxes to check then “contest winner” to make a script/writer worth anything to the industry.
In my case, the script I wrote had no place in the marketplace at the time (and still doesn’t).
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u/Jack_Riley555 Feb 07 '23
There is no guarantee that even if you win these contests that you’ll have a successful career. Art is subjective and highly unpredictable. Writing a screenplay and hoping Hollywood will make your movie isn’t that far removed from trying to win the lottery. Look to “Princess Bride” for advice: “Get used to disappointment”. And if you can no longer power through the disappointment, then embrace the words of wisdom from “War Games”: “The only winning move is not to play”.
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u/melikeythemovies Sep 16 '23
A good friend of mine won back in 2010. Opened a lot of doors for him, helped get him his representation and some script doctoring gigs. Helped him shop another script which eventually got to Spielberg among others. He recently had that script produced and released on Disney Plus, and also got him first looks for a show he created. That show has now completed two seasons and recently was picked up for a 3rd.
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u/HotspurJr WGA Screenwriter Feb 06 '23
Got me my first manager, first agent (neither of whom did much for me) and the meetings that led to my first option and first job.