The Screenwriter's Guide to 'Selling Out' in 2026 (and Why It Might Be OK)
Some thoughts on an article by Black List founder Franklin Leonard about the resurrected commercial spec market and breaking into Hollywood today
When I got to Hollywood in 2005, I had big dreams of becoming the next Steven. Not Spielberg, though he had been my idol for as long as I can remember. No, Soderbergh. I wanted to make small, interesting films some might call “art house cinema”. After all, my entire young adult life had been steeped in these kinds of films, as I had come of age in the 90s.
But by the middle of the aughts, the American film industry had begun to rapidly change. Almost all of those disruptive indie production companies and distributors had sold themselves off to a Hollywood studio…that then promptly began to shutter them.
Long story short: I arrived in town too late to be the feature screenwriter I hoped to be – or at least that’s what it felt like to me at the time – so I accepted some friends’ advice and wrote a big commercial action spec in the vein of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It didn’t feel like selling out at the time because I loved these films anyway. Besides, Raiders’ screenwriter, Lawrence Kasdan, went on to write The Big Chill — a drama I also loved — so maybe I could do the same after I got my foot in the door.
Well, that action spec did the trick!
I quickly found reps and, within a year, sold my first feature to Warner Bros. – another action film — which you can read more about here and here. It was followed by another action script sale. And another. And another. And another. All of these based on or inspired by popular Victorian adventure and horror fiction, by the way. I’d been put in a box at this point, or rather I had allowed myself to be put in a box. It wasn’t until I left the United States in 2017 that I was able to finally climb out of it.
Ten years after deciding to walk away from Hollywood, though, I find myself once again confronted by a changed film/TV industry – and I mean globally this time, not just in America – and reconsidering my decision to largely abandon writing commercial films that prioritize box office in favor of smaller, more intimate, and deeply personal character dramas and writing novels that the publishing industry would refer to as literary fiction.
This brings me to something my friend Franklin Leonard – the founder of The Black List and someone you should absolutely be subscribed to here at Substack – wrote called “The Moral Case for ‘Selling Out’”. In it, he makes the case that everything I’ve done with my life for the past decade was a waste of time.
No, not really.
But also, kind of? From a certain point of view, at least.
See, I’m a screenwriter. My job is to write screenplays. So, why did I run away from writing commercial screenplays that everyone around me – and certainly my reps, who were selling them right and left – thought I was great at? Because I didn’t just seek to diversify by moving abroad to work in markets that were more welcoming to my idea of myself as an artist. Rather, I checked out of Hollywood to such a degree that my reps there didn’t understand why I didn’t even send them projects anymore. When one of these relationships ended, one very dear to me, I didn’t even think it fair of me to argue with them about it.
In hindsight, what happened was a break-up that had to happen for my mental health and so I could grow as an artist. Distance provided perspective about how I had allowed the industry to corrupt my voice over time. It also provided me the creative space to begin exploring other kinds of storytelling I didn’t feel I could in Hollywood – such as writing plays, returning to short fiction as a creative outlet, having my first novel Psalms for the End of the World published, and, of course, the essays I write here at 5AM StoryTalk and the 5AM StoryTalk Podcast I now produce and host. All these things have helped me develop my craft in unexpected, exciting ways and, in the case of Psalms, provide me the creative and professional satisfaction I didn’t remotely experience when “Dracula”, an NBC/Sky TV series that I created and will never stop apologizing for, got produced back in 2013.
But lately, as I’ve suggested, I’ve begun to wonder if my break-up with Hollywood might be more of a break.
My creative life now works in such a way that I can’t help but feel it would be richer — no pun intended — if I also got to occasionally play around in much bigger sandboxes (which is how I’ve often described the Hollywood blockbuster). You can write a wider variety of narratives when budgets are relatively unlimited compared to what the typical film or TV series cost outside of America.
I’m still working my way through how I feel about all this. If it’s something I’d like to explore in any serious way. But lo and behold, while having this ongoing conversation with myself and with my wife (who is also a screenwriter), along comes Franklin’s article arguing that given the state of the world, the state of the Hollywood film/TV industry, and the precarious state of the theatrical experience demands that aspiring screenwriters set aside their ambition of writing that smaller, interesting film that’s going to make people think and instead embrace the idea of writing a big commercial feature spec – which also happen to be selling in Hollywood right now.
At this point, I’d encourage you to read Franklin’s article (click on the link below), which implores aspiring screenwriters to consider writing “something big and impossible to put down”. Here’s how he describes the commercial feature spec:
A script with a clear premise, one you can pitch in a single sentence. A script with a genre engine that creates momentum. A script with escalating stakes and a protagonist who has something to lose. A script that will make a large audience want to pay their money to see it in a movie theater.
A script that when it lands on a desk at 11:48 pm makes the reader finish it, not because they’re particularly diligent or virtuous, but because they’re a human being and they absolutely have to find out what happens next, and how it ends, even though their kids are going to wake them up in a few hours and they have a long day tomorrow.
That’s what commercial actually means.
Don’t think the guy is arguing that art and changing the world doesn’t matter either. Consider something he and I discussed during a conversation we had here at 5AM StoryTalk a while back. Commercial doesn’t necessarily mean bad or even selling out, whatever that means. Big budget doesn’t either. He cited Billy Madison and Tommy Boy as two great examples of crowd-pleasers that are also brutal takedowns of capitalism. Star Wars: A New Hope is an obvious example of a blockbuster with a lot to say about the world…though, of course, few people seemed to notice at the time that it was all about the evils of American imperialism since so many of its fans grew up to become fascists and even real-world stormtroopers themselves. In other words, commercial films can still try to change the world. They might also help save the theatrical experience from Netflix’s serial killer-like determination to murder ever movie theater still left around the globe.
Okay, what do you make of Franklin’s arguments?
My only quibble with his argument is this section:
In other words, earn the industry’s trust on its terms, and you buy yourself the freedom to make whatever you think your best work actually is. The audience works the same way: If you build that entrance low and wide and make them want to pay to cross the threshold, you can lead them almost anywhere.
I took this advice from my agents and managers over the years, always encouraged to believe that eventually someone somewhere would let you write the super-quirky family drama or romantic epic or period bodice-ripper I really wanted to write. But every time I sold another big action script, I was told the same thing, “It’s not time yet.” Nearly a decade passed without the right time arriving. Even after I had a TV series produced, with an A-list star out front, I was still told to focus on big worlds that were all starting to sound the same to me. In some cases, they actually were because during my final weeks living in Los Angeles, two different execs asked me to consider pitching them new versions of IP I had already been paid to writer scripts about in the past.
Consequently, I’m not entirely convinced that you’ll ever achieve the freedom in success Franklin describes – outside of your big commercial spec somehow making a billion dollars at the box office – but maybe you’ll have better luck than I did in Hollywood with that. I had to head overseas to be allowed that kind of creative freedom, which is probably why a return of sorts to Hollywood and the kinds of scripts I used to write there doesn’t scare me the way it might’ve half a decade ago. I have so many creative outlets now, there’s no chance I could ever find myself feeling creatively claustrophobic like I did in the first part of my career.
So, what do you think, StoryTalkers? Are you off to write your own big commercial spec right now? Should I “sell out”? What does “selling out” even mean?!
Cole, I was born in Hollywood on Sunset blvd at Cedars of Lebanon (now the Church of Scientology) - forty years before you arrived. I didn’t dream of Hollywood, it was just where I lived, where I grew up. I left Hollywood, left LA for college and tech in San Francisco, Seattle. Now I’m just back from a seminal trip down there to clear out my dad’s storage locker and it’s sticking with me. Maybe my last trip to LA? Probably not.
I know last week’s visit is heavy with the emotion of closing out my parent’s lives, but I got hit with a wave of nostalgia and it did make me think of you - the Hollywood exile (and if I’m reading your stuff right - critic).
Our house was a block off sunset; a block off Hollywood. Michael Jackson went to my Elementary School. My friends sold maps-to-stars-homes on the corner. My sister went to Hollywood High. I went to Fairfax growing up on Melrose. She worked at the Paramount (now Disney’s El Capitan); I worked across the street at the Chinese. We ran into movie stars in restaurants, no biggie. I worked in a coffee shop on sunset filled with actors and wannabe actors from the soap studios off fountain. I saw Star Wars in 6th grade at the Chinese; later Raiders; ET at the Cinerama Dome; the first Alien omfg. I went to Universal Studios every chance I got. The Jaws ride, Earthquake, Water World.
I got so many feels going to LA. I don’t want to live there but the grungy vibe of the big city from the storage locker dwellers to the movie billboards everywhere to the palm trees and the romanticism of the Academy Museum - it just makes me want to go to the movies. I took some pictures and I’ll post them and tag you.
I know it’s complicated if you’re in the industry and enshittification bleeds over everywhere but Hollywood still feels a bit magical to me.
I'm with you on this one, Cole, and it's the same with books. When my wife wrote her first novel, she was interested in exploring the interiority and ambiguity of the story, but her premise could easily have been an action thriller and her agent kept pressuring her to rewrite it that way. In fact, mea culpa, *I* told her she should rewrite it that way, using exactly Leonard's argument. She dug her heels in because she said that if she wrote an action thriller that's all that publishers would ever want from her. A decade on, I can see she was right.