Daniel Kunka

It really is crazy how my feed on BlueSky is all breaking news about the Minneapolis shooting and my Twitter feed isn’t.

The Pitt is great as always but Joy is killing me with 3 lines an episode.

This dude is intense and correct

From “On it!” to “Rest in peace” is a wild ride

Welcome to Minnesota, fuckers. Also this is super disturbing because the ICE agent's assault rifle appears to fire as he falls down.

This was filmed by a friend near Chicago and Lake last night.

Now do Los Angeles.

Perhaps the vice president should have considered utilizing the services of the vast law-enforcement apparatus at his disposal, rather than googling conspiracy theories on the Internet.

Thank you for the warm memory of when Screenwriting Twitter was good

Also the beauty of a spec is my script isn’t dead. Specs live on. I have two scripts from over 5 years ago that have things happening…

So this one wasn’t right now. But hopefully it will be right some other time.

Or you know — if you’re a director who wants to read LMK!

OH.

There were like 600 tv shows 4 years ago and now there’s 300. That was 600 shows worth of writers on staff with experience with now like half the jobs.

That’s a hard market. The first job in this industry is tough. The second is sometimes tougher.

I don’t know I wish I had some other nugget to end this thread but I guess tweeting is sometimes hard too.

As always — #writeyourspec and have a Happy Thanksgiving.

If you’re at the point where the industry is telling you no maybe it’s time to try something else.

Or maybe it’s time to keep writing if you want to keep writing

And to everyone saying “the industry is too hard” or “it’s not just writing your spec” I’m sorry but the industry has always been hard.

This hard? Probably not. But statistically being a professional screenwriter is like trying to play in the NFL. It’s not for everyone.

The idea that if you “write your spec” you will find success is a fallacy. There’s a lot of luck involved. There’s a lot of skill involved. Screenwriting is easy to do but almost impossible to master.

But if you want to do it, the only way is to actually do it.

But do you know what I’m doing today? I’m writing my spec.

Failure is 98% of this business. And it can break you. I was pretty disappointed after having such a strong first day of the spec but this one just didn’t work out.

Boom. A quick, painful death.

There were a lot of factors and I learned a shit ton about the market but that’s for another day.

The reason I’m sharing this is — I wrote my spec and it didn’t work out.

And within 72 hours every studio and buyer had passed and the script didn’t sell.

Not only did we have producers for every studio, but we had more producers than we needed!

There was a legit fight for territories. And we went in to every buyer on Day 2 with super strong producer attachments (sometimes 2 producers).

The push was fucking on.

And it’s always always nerve-wrecking. You get very little info as a writer as it’s happening. Will people like it? Will producers want to take it in?

And within 12 hours we knew — people liked it!

No producers so the script went out naked. Meaning it went to a bunch of producers on the same day with the idea that a producer (or hopefully producers) would like the script to bring it in to a studio or buyer and try to get a sale.

It was — to put it kindly — a bitch to write. Mostly one contained location, a lot of constraints, and I needed to make it exciting and tense.

Long story short — I had a spec I was happy with and we were ready to send it out two weeks ago.

And the idea was —

“It’s a murder mystery on Air Force One.”

I thought it was a big idea. Clean. You knew what it was. And I had three or four great twists that I liked.

But I digress.

I had the best year of my screenwriting career and it was time to write another spec. So that’s what I did.

It took longer than usual cause I had a few other things I was doing concurrently but I had a big fucking idea and I was psyched.

And just to clarify there are no fakers on the A List. The true A List is for professionals who can do things most of us can’t.

And if you don’t think that tier exists you’re not even ready for the B or C list.

Screenwriting is very hard. Except for the 90% of it that’s easy.

Except not.

This idea that there’s any “easy street” for screenwriters is straight fallacy. I mean — if you can somehow make that rarified jump onto the A list maybe you don’t have to worry but that tier is strictly for the best of the best, the top .5% of writers.

After 16 years as a professional writer, after writing the second most-watched movie on Netflix of 2024, it was finally time for Screenwriter Easy Street.

I had written my spec and made it! It was time to kick back and wait for the calls to come rolling in…

So I’ve seen some backlash against “write your spec” on this device lately. And as a big proprietor of the movement (I mean — it’s my hashtag) I thought I would share a story with you all.

And I promise you it’s not going where you think it’s going.

So apologies but I’m gonna repost some tweets from the Bad Place here cause I’ve seen some shit going around…

2nd photo here, also by Vondruska

2/2

It’s a low-key cost of living increase. Shit will go up so they don’t have to make penny change.

Watch sales tax round up to the nearest 5/10 even when paying electronically.