I work at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and many of our Dramatic Writing Students like to write television scripts for popular shows as exercises.
Some of these are pretty darn good, especially the Seinfeld ones. Does anyone know if there is a place to submit Seinfeld scripts to?
[email] wrote:
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Don't take this the wrong way, Bill, but this, to me, is pretty funny. I mean, isn't this the kind of thing a school is supposed to teach? What happens? Are the students taught how to write and then left to fend for themselves in peddling their wares? I ask purely for information.
Actually, our Dramatic Writing department is mostly based on Film and Theatre script-writing. Television is an entirely different matter. The only faculty member that I know of that even writes for TV is DB Gillis, who has sold shows to Herman's Head and Roc, among other shows. But I don't know very much about this type of stuff, because I'm not faculty, student, or even an artist. I'm their computer support and development person for the administrative computers. I do come in contact with students every once in a while, though. :)
I think that, in general, the school does try to teach the students how to get an agent and submit scripts, but sometimes there are other ways in (other than agents, that is). For example, I know that Star Trek TNG Producers accept and produce one or two scripts per year that are just submitted to them unsolcited and without agents.
I just thought I'd ask to see if the producers of Seinfeld are approachable. Thanks for the info, everyone.
Yeah, he owns CBS. The only reason the school's named after him is because he gave us a few million over fifteen years ago and he's one of NYU's trustees. We don't have much contact with him anymore. We have a lot more contact with Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, Susan Seidelman, Tony Kushner, Bill Cosby, and Alex Baldwin.
In article , [email] writes:
In general, don't bother sending scripts for any show to the producers. They will, if at all possible return them unopened for legal reasons (if they happen to use an idea like yours you might sue them etc. etc.).
If you're serious about writing, then find a writer's agent in the television and motion picture field and send it to him/her. This is the sort of sample agents like to see since it shows how well one can write.
On the other hand shouldn't the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University be teaching this to their students in the first place?
-dh
In article [email] writes:
Interestingly enough, there is a blurb in last week's "Entertainment Weekly" about submissions to _Seinfeld_. It went something along the lines of the producers laughing that they still got so many unsolicited scripts for the show, and how they thought that people really thought they understood the characters well, and how it's no easy task to write a script.
(This was not meant as a commentary of any of your work, but rather an informational posting.)
In a previous article, [email] () says:
Tell the authors to:
a) register the script with the Writers Guild of America (I don't have the address handy, but the guild will send info on how to register scripts if you request it.)
b) submit the scripts to however many agents they persuade to read them.
...but only send the scripts to agents after the scripts are registered with the Guild, as virtually no agent will look at an unregistered script.
I doubt if it would do any good to send even a registered script directly to the Seinfeld producers, but you never know...
If an agent really likes the script, he or she will contact the production company and try to sell it for you.
Hope this helps. --Dooovall