Transcript: How Much Free Work Do Writers Do to Get Paid Work?
Colby Day on the uncomfortable realities of being a Hollywood scribe today
Sonny Bunch (00:07):
Welcome back to The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood. My name is Sonny Bunch. I'm culture editor at The Bulwark, and I'm very pleased to be joined today by Colby Day. Now Colby, working screenwriter since 2017. He is the writer of Spaceman. It's a Netflix movie that's coming out here soon, and the screenwriter In the Blink of an Eye, which was a Blacklist-making, Blacklist-appearing screenplay back in 2016. That is in, I think you said just finished shooting? Just wrapped up?
Colby Day (00:36):
We finished. Yeah.
Sonny Bunch (00:36):
Awesome.
Colby Day (00:37):
Just in the nick of time.
Sonny Bunch (00:38):
Got it in under the...
Colby Day (00:39):
Yes.
Sonny Bunch (00:39):
... under the, I don't know, just in the nick of time. Which it brings me to kind of the subject of this episode. So one of the reasons I wanted to have Colby Day on today was because a former guest of The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, John Zaozirny, turned me onto a series of Medium posts he has written over the last couple years here, just highlighting the amount of work that goes into actually getting work in Hollywood if you are a screenwriter, which is a-
Colby Day (01:11):
It's a lot.
Sonny Bunch (01:12):
It is a daunting sort of process here. But thanks for being on the show, Colby. I really appreciate it.
Colby Day (01:20):
I'm so excited to be on, and I'm so happy that John recommended me as a resource. I think he's a very smart guy. We're just Twitter buddies, but he seems like a good one.
Sonny Bunch (01:30):
He is fantastic to follow if you are on Twitter and interested in screenwriting. So let's talk about life as a screenwriter when you're not actually sitting down and writing something that you've been hired to do. I don't think people really understand the process of getting work in Hollywood. I mean for actors, there are movies where you watch and people go, they go to auditions and tryouts and you can kind of understand that. But I think with writers it's different because this is all behind the scenes. I mean, writing is writing, but not all writing is for pay. Walk us through what your average kind of year looks like to get from unemployed to employed.