Scam which produces mediochre writers

Yeh. How about this... (Town) Scriptwriting Agency will promote your work. Aims to support struggling talent. Fed-up with rejection? Unable to get your work in front of the right people? Come to us, an independent agency that has all the right connections.

You check their website and the glowing recommendations

What happens is that you eventually get to speak to a Jimmy Saville soundalike on the phone who asks you to send a 50-word logline of your script, so you do. Next time you speak to him he is obviously performing to someone in his office or the same room as him and he smugly pulls your logline to bits, throwing in bollocks about unique selling points, protagonists and antagonists, their long-term aims and fears and the resolution of those fears, and rounds it off by adding - and listen to this - 'The protagonist has to have a fight with the antagonist at the end.' I suggest that in the case I've offered it's more a mental than physical fight. He says, 'No, it's got to be physical. All films end up with a physical fight. They've got to or they won't sell.'

Two weeks later you receive an email asking you to join their next screenwriting course at a knock-down fee; a 3 week course reduced to a long weekend for just£250.

Ha ha indeed. Now here we have a clue as to just what is happening in the industry: homogenisation by the talentless. Writing to 2nd-rate formula. The world is just jam-packed with screenwriting experts who can show you how to write and sell that million buck movie. Well believe me, punter, they probably have less talent than you when it comes to writing that screenplay. But they've recognised that there are thousands of you out there with £250 to spend. Thousands of you who want to make it in the film world.

Thousands of gullible fools who haven't asked the one single question that shows these little enterprises up for what they are: why aren't they doing it? Why aren't they writing and selling those million-buck movies?