Okay. So this is re: my blog post from a few weeks ago “Let’s talk Trees” about hard copy submissions and why I think they are a huge problem in the submitting world — So, today I got my StageSource reminder telling me to submit to Fire House Center For The Arts and I thought to myself, ever year I see this posting, and for some reason every year I don’t submit… and I couldn’t remember why, but when I downloaded the application rules I remembered.
I’ll bold the stuff that really bugs me: · Electronic submissions will NOT be accepted. · You must submit (4) copies of each script. Please include the title somewhere on the first page of each copy, but no author name. Please only staple the top left of each short play copy. One acts and full lengths may include clips or binders. · Please include a character breakdown: gender, ages, genre and description with each script. · Do not include your name on the (4) copies. Make sure not to identify the author in headers, footers, etc. · Please submit a single separate information page for each play you enter. Include the following information: 1. TITLE OF PLAY 3. ADDRESS AND EMAIL 2. AUTHOR’S NAME 4. PHONE NUMBER(S) · Scripts will be recycled and not returned. Copyright licenses always remain with the author(s). Submissions must be postmarked by Friday,…. Okay, Class, these are the problems: No electronic submissions, and you must not only mail (that includes shipping and postage money, people), but you have to send not 1, not 2, but 4 copies of your script!! If you get your scripts printed outside the home (and don’t work in an office where you can sneakily use their laser jet printer, that can be up to $50 in printing…and you still have to ship it! How is this NOT a submission fee? How can we “boycott” submission fees and not boycott this? You’re answer to me is probably, “Jewbana, then you don’t have to submit.” And I will say, “I won’t.” Followed by, “Suck it!” Look. I’m not gonna lie to you good people of the internet, I want to be liked, and I want to be successful as a playwright, but why should I go broke and kill trees in the process? The theatre, especially the bigger ones like Fire House have budgets and printers and copy machines, I know it takes 600 theatre folks to get a copy machine to work — but seriously. I don’t understand how we can say that it’s unfair to ask for a submission fee and not consider printing 4 copies and postage as a submission fee? Gary Garrison of the Dramatist Guild said: As of today, the Guild will no longer publicize calls for submissions that have a fee attached unless that fee is transparent (where does the money go and to whom) in the description to the reader. The subtext: it is not okay to charge a dramatist a fee to supplement a theatre or producer’s production opportunity. YOUR ART IS FEE ENOUGH! So, that being said, if I am being charged a $10-30 submission fee, but they let me know it covers the cost of printing that they are going to do on their end, so that I don’t have to print and mail my script, then maybe it is okay? Still that’s a lot of money to print my scripts and then recycle them and print someone’s script on the back. That’s a lot of money (period). But Gary continues, and this is where I really feel he should be on my side about electronic submissions only: If a theatre or producer tacks on an additional $10, $15 or $30 fee, one submission now costs anywhere from $20-50, with no guarantees that anything will come of it. And yes, I know: there are no guarantees for anyone in the theatre. But all too often this feels like, “we’re not going to guarantee you anything, AND we’re going to charge you for the privilege of that, AND you’ll probably never hear from us, AND don’t expect any kind of critical reaction to your material, AND don’t expect notification of who, in fact, was chosen.” And if it’s not a money issue then it’s a spirit issue: it’s demeaning enough to submit your work to theatres and producers that you never hear from. To pay someone for their silence is too much to ask anyone…… we will no longer list an opportunity that requires you pay a fee to be considered for inclusion. Enough is enough. Theatre’s will not guarantee acknowledgement that they have even received your script, let alone, as Gary says, there is no guarantee that your script will get chosen — so you are paying for someone else’s play to get produced. If I print 4 copies of a script and mail it to you, I want to know you received it, and I want to feel like the money it takes me to print and mail my scripts is being acknowledged. To sum this all up, I would almost rather pay a $10 submission fee than spend $50 printing script, killing trees, and wasting ink — where in many cases the company will receive a script read the character breakdown, decide it’s not what they are looking for and toss the script into a recycling bin or feed it to their pet shredder. I say, Enough is enough! No more hard copy scripts!
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I was on the Amtrak the other day and writing a paper for grad school, and needed to clear my head for the moment to talk about points.
No. These are not Weight Watcher points. These are the points given to playwrights/productions at theatre festivals nationwide. (Maybe even world wide) This past week I had the pleasure and privilege to have one of my plays featured in a play festival/competition in NYC. It was a wonderful experience and I am in no way ungrateful— I’m actually super grateful and honored— but I’ll get to that. And this festival, like may others, is divided over the course of a couples of weeks, in which 31 plays compete for 4 spots in the finals, in which they have a chance to win $1000! Pretty sweet! But unlike some festivals, where the finalists are chosen by a team of “expert” judges, the shows moving on to the finals will be determined by how many votes they get from audience members (1 being the lowest, 5 being the highest). For many nights this becomes a popularity contest (yes, you thought you got rid of those in High School, after you went 4 years without a prom king/queen nomination). Basically, if you have more people coming to the show specifically to see your play, you will have the highest score. Friends and Family are GREAT voters because they are incredibly unbiased… I kid. But to be honest, if my friends came to see my play and didn’t score me a 5, I’d be pretty bummed. Then again I would never ask them to give the other 2 plays I competed against a 1 — I’m competitive but not bitchy. I told my family/friends to vote for the other plays based on merit. Whether or not my play was the best, I do believe it was, but what playwright doesn’t? It’s not wrong to believe that you wrote and your director and actors performed a kick ass play. But it’s always sort of a bummer to feel like you won’t move forward because you didn’t have 50+ family members and friends who could make it. The reason I’m even saying any of this is because I overheard an audience member turn to her friend and say something like this, in regards to scoring my play, “I think this one was really good, so I’m gonna give it a 1, so (insert name of playwright she came to support her) wins.” What that means is that some people do come to these festivals and don’t vote based on merit but vote to move their friends forward and that alone… look I can’t judge, but can feel a little sad about it. It was nice to hear her say it was “really good.” So now here is my question, is there a way to make the festivals where the audience scores the plays fairer? I don’t know. I think there will always be that person who just gives his friend the highest score, because. I’ve also experienced play competitions where the audience was told “You can vote between 1-10, but don’t really vote any lower than 7, and feel free to use decimal points,” and then anyone who gave a score lover than 8.2 was booed, and scores above 9.5 were cheered! This particular festival also asks for unbiased audience members to do the voting… now, come on, how many people come to see 10 minute play festivals who don’t know someone involved in the productions? Here is one solution a friend (a director in Boston) once pondered to me… I don’t know if it would work, but it’s worth a try! Let’s say you are scoring a play between 1-10 points. You’re given a score card, that looks like this: (click the link to see the card). Rather than giving a play a random number, you are at least given the criteria in which a play can be judged. Especially, since lots of your family and friends might not be theatre people, they might not know how to look at a play critically and even though they’ll probably still give you the highest score, because they love you, this might give the other plays you are competing against a fair chance. Now, I know this might make you think, “Oh shit! Now someone else might win even though I’ve got the biggest crowd!” But, you won’t always have the biggest crowd, and wouldn’t you want to be treated fairly when you represent the minority of the audience? I think so. So yes, this rubric might not solve the worlds problems, but I think if more play festivals used something like this, rather than some arbitrary scoring system, the results might be less about popularity and more about talent and skill — especially when there is money on the line for one lucky production! So that’s my rant for today… I think… But just an FYI, I did mention that my play was just in a competition this past week, and I want to make it clear that this isn’t a response to me not making it to the final round, because I haven’t found out yet and wont really know for another couple of days. But it’s something I have been feeling and thinking about for a long time, as I continue to enter competitions. Also, I promised lots of gratefulness! Here it is! I am so grateful and honored to have had not 1 but 3 performances of my “little play that could” on 42nd and 8th in NYC! We were right across the street from all the sparkly lights and marquees! My cast and director were fan-fucking-tastic and I am so honored and delighted to have worked with them. Also, I am so thankful of the theatre company that accepted my play into the festival and I am so glad and grateful to have had a production produced with that company! I look forward to working with them again soon! There are 2 chances left to see The Muse at Manhattan Rep's Spring One Act Competition -- and yes, it's a competition! So that means the more of my fans that come and vote for me, the greater the possibility of me winning and making lots of money! Mwhahahahahah!
Performance times: 9pm on Fri May 11 and Sat May 12th. Location: 303 West 42nd St. Corner of 8th, on the 6th floor! For tickets you can buy at the door or email [email protected]. Tix are $20 --- but I can always supplement that with drinks afterwards! Hi Blog-o-sphere,
It’s been a while. Grad school keeps me crazy busy with writing and recently I joined AEA so I’ve been pretty busy with stage managing too. But enough about me. I want to talk about a serious issue (part one of a series, let’s say), I want to talk about killing trees and submissions. As a playwright who submits many of my plays (or just the same play to hundreds of companies nationwide), I offend come across submission postings that say “No email,” or “Please send all materials to this address __insert mailing address here___.” And it’s been making me a bit frustrated. First of all, I’m broke, let’s face it, who isn’t, and printing a 120 page script 7 times last month turned out to be $72. That’s crazy, but when you think about it — it’s a lot of paper and ink…. and it shouldn’t cost THAT much, but I get it, copier companies, even the local not corporate ones, need to make money too. That being said, every time I see “All submissions must be sent via mail (sorry, no email),” I see it as a submission fee. As we all know, there is a boycott on submission fee companies. I can’t say that I am entirely ready to boycott certain festivals I would like to be in because of submission fees, and this is a topic for another post (part 2 perhaps), but when I see a company ask me to send them in paper my full length play, that they “will not return,” I think… sheesh that’s a lot of wasted paper. That’s a lot of trees and ink. Let alone money. It not only costs to print 90-120 pages but it also costs to ship it, and if you want to make sure it gets there you might put a SASE or SASP which costs money, and a maybe even delivery confirmation. $$$$. My question is, isn’t asking a writer to submit a hard copy (sometimes bound) of your script the same thing as asking for a submission fee? AND some companies/festivals ask for both! Where do we, the poor writers, get money to print and ship? There really aren’t enough fellowships and grants for all of us. (Is there, government?) My brother pointed out that perhaps snail mail and submission fees are ways to weed out the “crap,” his words, because just like schools that ask for GRE scores (a test that means nothing), it’s a way for a company to receive less submissions. If Joe Playwright doesn’t want to print or pay a fee to submit his play, then that is one less play a festival or company will have to read. It weeds out the people that aren’t committed enough to to print or pay. I told my brother that this is not the case, that if anything we are just as committed, just poor and tired of sneakily standing at the copier at the place we work to put food on the table, pretending to make copies of the weekly report or press release, or menu, and instead printing our scripts. And what about the environment? What about saving this planet? Aren’t we asked to write plays all the time about current events and social issues… here is one. So yes, some folks are boycotting submissions that ask for a submission fee, but I wonder why are we not boycotting submissions that require hard copies? Isn’t that a submission fee? |
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