Sarah had always been
fascinated by the cinema. As a little girl going to see a film was her
favourite treat and she was also interested in how movies got to be
made. Her own favourites were the films with really good stories, like
Titantic and Avatar, but she also liked the ones which
were based on books, like Lord of the Rings and
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Secretly Sarah longed to
become part of the magic of movies by writing a screenplay, but her
practical nature and career ambitions meant that she did a law degree,
trained as a lawyer and ended up making a successful career for herself
working in the Frankfurt office of a London firm. But she still yearned
for the bright lights of the movie world and eventually she used some of
her precious weekends to start working away at a screenplay. She had a
good idea for a film about the relationship between a troubled girl and
the difficult dog her family adopts, against the background of her
parents’ divorce – old-fashioned perhaps but a good story. Gradually,
with encouragement from her boyfriend David, she put the screenplay
together, helped by various excellent books such as Robert Kee’s
Story.
But once Sarah felt
she’d done all she could with it, she realised that she had absolutely
no idea whether it was any good or not, and whether it would be worth
trying to get some interest in it in what she knew was a highly
competitive field. And no-one in Frankfurt seemed to know anything about
writing screenplays. Then her friend Susie, who worked as a librarian
and was still in Manchester, where they’d grown up together, emailed her
to suggest that she could get a screenwriting expert to critique her
work. Sarah was delighted with the idea and got in touch with
WritersServices about their Scriptwriting Assessment service.
Back came some really constructive advice, which Sarah used to give the
screenplay a final reworking, tightening it up and making sure it was
professionally presented. And that was when the submissions started.
Sarah knew it was still going to be difficult to find someone who would
want to make her screenplay into a film, but at least now her work was
in good shape and she was in with a chance.
