When I moved to North Hollywood in 2010, I showed up with the same delusion everyone else does: I was gonna be a screenwriter. Not “some guy with a Final Draft license”—an actual, working, Hollywood-credited, dialogue-punching, story-breaking screenwriter. And I thought I was ahead of the curve. I had something most people didn’t: a feature film under my belt. It wasn’t fancy—it was a found footage movie I made for less than $500 over two days with some friends. In Search Of… wasn’t about breaking box office records. It was about showing up to L.A. with something done. A finished film. I figured, that alone would count for something. And honestly? It kind of did. The movie didn’t blow up, it didn’t go anywhere, but it’s still up online, and somehow—fifteen years later—it’s still getting views. A few weeks ago, Kevin Smith shared it on his Instagram Stories. He’s got 2.5 million followers. The post only netted me, like, 80 extra views, but you know what? That’s fine. I didn’t care about the numbers. I was just happy for the shoutout. Because that weird little movie still exists. It’s mine. It’s real.
Now compare that to what young writers are facing today. A recent piece in The L.A. Times laid it out in brutal detail: graduates from USC, Chapman, Stanford—big-name film schools—are getting ghosted by Hollywood after sending out hundreds of job applications. No callbacks. No feedback. No traction. Even the staff writer jobs that used to be stepping stones are now fleeting 20-week gigs, with zero guarantee of continuation. Writers’ rooms are shrinking. Entry-level gigs are disappearing. It’s like Hollywood pulled up the ladder, burned it, and then asked you to levitate your way to the roof.
And yet… the dream never dies. It just adapts. I recently talked to a guy who used to chase that same dream—he moved to L.A. in the ’80s to be a screenwriter, same way I did. These days, he works at REI, long out of the game. But he told me something he heard from an agent back in the day that’s stuck with me: “If you want your movie made, turn it into a book first.” And the crazy part is, that advice might be more relevant now than ever.
Because now we’ve got more tools. You don’t have to write a novel and try to get it shelved at Borders (RIP). You can serialize your story on Substack. Turn it into a podcast. Read the script out loud on TikTok. Write it as a novella and upload it to Amazon. Post it on Reddit. You’re not bound by format anymore. The key isn’t what you write. It’s how you share it.
People love to talk about E.L. James and Fifty Shades of Grey like it was a fluke. But it wasn’t. She didn’t wait for permission. She built a following on fanfiction.net, turned that into IP, and Hollywood came running with a checkbook and a blindfold. It was bad writing—but it was a known quantity. That’s all the industry cares about. They don’t want original. They want proven. They want audiences. They want numbers.
And the easiest way to show that your story works? Let people hear it.
Blake Snyder, in Save the Cat, wrote about how he used to record audio of movies onto cassettes—half the movie on side A, half on side B—and he’d listen to them during his drives into town for meetings. This was pre-podcasting, but it was the same idea: stories hit differently when you hear them. We’re 51% auditory as a species. That means more than half of how we feel a story comes through sound. Writers get so locked into what a script looks like on the page, but forget how it sounds when performed. A script is visual, sure. But it’s also rhythmic. Tonal. Musical. If it sounds like garbage, it probably is garbage—and podcasting is the best way to test that.
If you want to break in now, it’s not about begging someone to read your screenplay. It’s about building something people can actually consume. Give them a reason to care. Let them experience your story, not just flip through it. Because here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud: Hollywood doesn’t discover people anymore. It acquires them. If your thing has a fanbase, they’ll call you. Until then? You’re just background noise. Doesn’t matter how brilliant your script is if no one ever opens the damn PDF.
So stop waiting for someone to pick you. Pick yourself. Make your thing. Share it out loud. Put it on tape. Let people hear it. Whether it’s a podcast, a voiceover animatic, a YouTube table read, or just you recording dialogue on your phone and posting it—get it out. Give your story oxygen. Even if you only get 100 views. Even if it’s rough. Even if it goes nowhere.
Because sometimes, 15 years later, Kevin Smith might share it. And honestly? That’s enough.
If you want to see In Search Of… you can watch it for free here.
Hollywood After Dark 