If a screenplay never gets filmed, is it still a movie?
It’s the tree in the forest, right? If a story gets told, but nobody hears it… Debaters, start your search engines.
Or not. But let’s think for a minute about all those unproduced screenplays. And I do mean all those unproduced screenplays. Do you have any idea how many there are?
Hundreds of thousands. Really.
No one knows with any precision, of course. But let this one statistic be your guide: Since its inception in 1986, the Academy (as in the Oscars) Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, the most prestigious and selective of dozens of annual screenwriting competitions, has received over 130,000 entries.
Most of that’s a load of pulp, of course, but there has to be some polished stuff in the pile if you just burrow deep enough. And good news there: the folks at the Nicholl contest have already done that. They only award five fellowships every year (it used to be 3), but in the winnowing process they single out annual quarter- and semifinalists, about 5% and 2% respectively.
It’s an industry consensus that a Nicholl semifinalist script is a very good script. Of course it is: it’s in the 98th percentile.
So that’s 2,500 very good scripts. Surely many of them been made into movies, right?
Nope. Not even close.
No one really knows, actually, (a meme in Hollywood) but the titles and writers of all those semifinalist scripts have been publicly announced every year. Movie people track that stuff the way competitive high schools note how many of each other’s graduates end up going to Stanford and Harvard. It’s a very competitive business. If even a decent fraction of those best-of-the-best screenplays had become movies, we’d all have heard of it. In fact, only 17 of the 90 Nicholl winners have been produced.
So there you have it. Those aren’t a few silent trees falling in the forest, that’s a blow-down cyclone. A clear-cut of unheard stories.
And it’s getting louder every year.