

If you already have industry contacts, doing well in a screenplay competition will make them more likely to read your project. Impressing a literary manager, agent, or development executive-or even one of their assistants-could be a game-changer.Ĥ. Fortunately, the best screenplay competitions are either judged by or closely aligned with industry professionals. Relationships are currency, but most people don’t have the luxury of being born into the film business, or even schmoozing with assistants at happy hours in Hollywood. Prizes can range from a few hundred dollars to $35,000.ģ. Without an agent, this may be the next best way to capitalize on hard work. Awareness of strengths and weaknesses in one project is key to improving the next.Ģ. Praise and criticism are essential for growth in this craft. It’s the most basic benefit competitions can offer screenwriters. So in the interest of saving screenwriters time and money, while simultaneously supporting competitions with proven value, MovieMaker has sorted through dozens of them.īefore we share the top 15-in alphabetical order-let’s outline why screenwriters would even want to gamble $40 to $100, per contest, just for the chance to compete with thousands of other spec scripts.ġ. Of course, there are a lot of contests out there, and they all cost precious cash to enter. But screenplay competitions can be an excellent resource for writers, offering valuable feedback, industry connections, mentorship, and even monetary prizes. We can’t promise that every one of our 15 Submission-Worthy Screenwriting Competitions of 2020 will change your life as dramatically as Script Pipeline changed Daugherty’s.

And he also sold Snow White and the Huntsman, a script he’d written as an NYU sophomore, for $3.25 million. Shrapnel became the Robert De Niro-John Travolta film Killing Season. The win helped him land a manager, an agent, and his first job-writing a draft of Warner Bros.’ Masters of the Universe film. So, when I was announced as one of the Grand Prize winners, it was a real shock.” “I was just using it as an excuse to visit some L.A. I had no expectation of winning,” he told Script Pipeline. He lived in Dallas when he funneled a fresh spec script, Shrapnel, through Script Pipeline’s 2008 screenwriting competition, and won. Evan Daugherty has adapted Snow White, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tomb Raider, and He-Man for the big screen, but he didn’t get his big break while working in Hollywood.
