In the spring of 2004, producer/director Daniel Snyder had just wrapped up a documentary about show business flops for Trio, the digital arts channel. He’d been making documentaries for cable and public television for four years and was casting about for his next project.

Living in the Los Angeles area, Dan knew scores of friends, acquaintances, and co-workers who’d written screenplays and were pitching them to anyone who would listen. When he was in high school and college, he had worked with aspiring writer/directors Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary at Video Archives, the famous video store in Manhattan Beach, just south of Los Angeles.

Though he’d never felt compelled to write a feature screenplay himself, Dan clearly knew the passion that people have for their screenplays – and how much work it requires to get them made into films. He saw Tarantino, for example, doggedly pitch his screenplays for “True Romance,” “Natural Born Killers,” and “Reservoir Dogs” for four years before hitting pay dirt.

Dan decided he would explore this subject in his next documentary: With tens of thousands of scripts written every year and fewer than 400 produced, why do so many people spend so much time working on something that has so little chance of ever being realized? He thought it could be a compelling story of thoughtful people pursuing their dreams in Hollywood.

THE PRE-PRODUCTION SCRAMBLE

In the late spring, Dan began looking for emerging screenwriters to profile in the film. He posted notices on websites and in e-newsletters that up-and-coming
writers visited, including Screenwritersutopia.com, the WritersStore.com,
and Moviebytes.com among others.

After receiving dozens of messages from people interested in being profiled, Dan whittled down the number to two great candidates: 33-year-old David Stieve, who worked as an assistant to a talent agent, and 43-year-old Joe Aaron, who was married and split his time between caring for his autistic daughter, writing screenplays, and trading stocks over the Internet. He decided to select a woman to profile later. He wanted gender balance in the documentary but simply didn’t have time to follow three writers simultaneously.

Dan then asked a very good director of photography and friend, Harry Frith, if he would shoot the documentary. An Australian by birth, Harry had shot documentaries in the United States for nearly a decade, including many of the interviews for “Brilliant but Cancelled” and other documentaries that Dan had directed.

Harry wanted to shoot the documentary on the Panasonic DVX100a camera using the camera’s anamorphic lens. The camera was small enough that it could go just about anywhere the writers could – and its internal anamorphic lens meant the entire doc would be shot in a 16x9 aspect ratio. Harry and Dan struck a deal and began production in late July.

ROLLING TAPE

They started with a day-in-the-life of Joe Aaron and an interview with David Stieve two days later. Both were very articulate and full of fascinating stories. David was an assistant to a talent agent who had never had a screenplay produced, but he had three scripts in various stages of development and hoped to be able to leave his job as soon as one of them sold.

Joe, meanwhile, had been working on the same script, “Rattled,” for two and a half years. Several years before, he had mortgaged his house to produce one of his previous scripts, “Crazy Jones.” In 2002, the film won several awards at film festivals, but it had never made money at the box office and had never been released on video or DVD. So Joe was hard at work on a screenplay he hoped would become a hit. If it failed, he thought he might stop writing because it was such hard work and he had never made money at it in the decade he’d been working at it.

Over the next four months, Dan and Harry followed the two writers’ lives. With David, they put the camera into a splash bag and went surfing with him, they went with him to work at the talent agency, to meet with the producer/director of one of his scripts that was in development, to meet his manager, and then, as one of his screenplays got the official greenlight, they went with him to a casting session and onto the set.

Joe’s journey was more internal. He was struggling to make the screenplay reflect what he felt, but, at the same time, he wanted it to be commercially appealing. They followed him as he met with friends to get feedback on the script, to visit a script consultant who offered him insights on ways to improve the story, and as he wrote and re-wrote his script for days, weeks, and months.

Meanwhile, they watched as Joe took care of his autistic daughter and made difficult decisions about whether screenwriting was more important than his family life. They followed Joe as he walked his daughter to school and took her to singing lessons and made lunch for her and played with her at the park. Then, as Joe finished his script, they followed him to a table read.

In December, Dan began looking for a female screenwriter. In the initial search, he hadn’t received many applications from women. After all, women make up just a small fraction of writers in Hollywood. So he began anew, posting notices on websites, newsletters, and the like specifically looking for female writers. He called UCLA and USC and asked them to send emails to their film school alumni. The WGA also sent out an email to their group of emerging writers – those that weren’t technically in the Guild because they didn’t have enough produced films to their credit but that seemed talented enough that they soon would.

After all this work, Dan received applications from several dozen female screenwriters interested in the project. He met with five to eight of them and chose one with a great story: Deborah Goodwin. She had worked as a creative executive at a production company, developing other people’s scripts. One day, she decided she should be spending her time developing her own scripts.

Deborah now spends her days writing and re-writing scripts, novels, and other kinds of writing, while working to get one of her scripts made into a movie that she could direct. If she succeeds, she would become one of only a handful of female African-American writer-directors in Hollywood. Production on Deborah’s story began in February 2005 with an interview and b-roll around her apartment in West Los Angeles.

NIPPING AND TUCKING

Editing began on Joe's and David's stories in the late winter of 2005. Dan had worked with an excellent editor named Gary Edgren on several documentaries over the previous few years. Gary was buying his own Avid Express Pro editing system for his home-office and Dan asked him if he could Gary’s first client. He agreed.

There was a lot of work for Gary to do. The crew had already shot some 60 hours of material spread across more than one hundred tapes. Working at night and on weekends over the next five months, Gary and Dan took all that tape and turned it into a compelling 88-minute film.

BOOKING THE BIG NAMES

Dan asked a friend and co-worker named Loren Roberts for help booking big-name Hollywood screenwriters who would offer their wisdom in the film, something akin to a Greek Chorus that would accompany the personal stories of these struggling writers. Dan had already gotten writers like Steven de Souza (“Die Hard”), Ed Solomon (“Men in Black”), Larry Karazsewski and Scott Alexander (“The People vs. Larry Flynt”), and Paul Guay (“Liar Liar”) to agree to interviews.

Loren had worked in Hollywood, both at public relations firms and in production, for more than fifteen years and had extremely good contacts throughout town. He started going after more famous writers and, over the next few months, scored some of the biggest names in the film: Nora Ephron (“Sleepless in Seattle”), James L. Brooks (“Terms of Endearment”), Gary Ross (“Seabiscuit”), and Carrie Fisher (script doctor extraordinaire).

ADD MUSIC AND GRAPHICS

By August, Dan and Gary had a fine cut they showed to friends and mentors who offered their feedback. After tweaking the film, Dan hired a great young composer named Deane Ogden to provide his haunting musical score, which is a central character in the film.

Deane had scored network television series (like “The Wire” and “Medical Investigation”) and independent feature films (like “Lave Lounge” and “Matthew 26:17”). For the score to “Dreams on Spec,” Deane hired 13 string players, 6 woodwinds and three soloists – an oboe, a clarinet, and a flute – to create the quirky but poignant score of the film.

Dan then hired a visual effects artist named Bill Georgiou who had worked on both feature films (“Friday Night Lights”) and documentaries (“Inside Deep Throat”). By late 2006, with the musical score, opening title sequence, and sound mix completed, “Dreams on Spec” was ready.

For the latest developments on the film, check out the “What’s the Latest?” link.