One of the toughest things for low-budget filmmakers is to find good scripts that they haven’t written themselves. And, for thousands of screenwriters without agents, getting their scripts able to be read by filmmakers of all stripes is a bear (or perhaps, a gorilla??) of a challenge.
Enter Ron Moon, a scriptwriter from LA who was sick and tired of the lack of access for outsiders to the avenues of creative expression currently afforded those inside the Hollywood network. So, since there was no way that screenwriters could safely get connected to filmmakers, producers, and agents without running the risk of having their intellectual property stolen, Ron decided to make it happen himself, with some help from a team of dedicated volunteers.
Essentially, GuerillaScript.com is a free site that allows scriptwriters, directors, producers, and agents to sign up in a creative community. Scriptwriters can post loglines and synopses of their scripts so that filmmakers and agents can check them out, all placed in categories that are easy to search by the filmmaker. Then once the filmmaker in question finds a script they’re interested in, they can directly contact the scriptwriter with a secure (and recorded) email conversation. The scriptwriter can approve or reject the request to read the entire script. If they wish to let the script be read, GuerillaScript uses a special encoded reader that can’t be printed or copied from, so there’s no danger of most forms of direct piracy. Additionally, if you need to cull through scripts to find the one you’re most interested in, you can save scripts you like in you’re ‘My Saved and Approved Screenplays’ section. (Sort of like eBay’s “Items Being Watched” section.)
While the site is still new and has some areas where it could improve (like specifically describing if scripts are short, episodic, or feature length and having page lengths), it’s already growing rapidly as more and more writers and filmmakers are discovering it.
