The access audit · Screenwriters
Every screenwriter is told to write a great script and the rest follows. The rest does not follow from the script. It follows from whether anyone was already oriented toward you when it arrived.
Two questions · free · nothing you enter about your routes leaves your browser
Every route that brings attention to your work is one of three things, and two questions asked in order tell you which.
When someone shows up here, had they already chosen you?
If no, stop. The route is contested and question two does not apply. Coordinates you hold for people who never chose you are not a direct route.
Could you reach them again without this intermediary choosing you again?
Yes is direct. No is rented. Ordinary infrastructure you can replace does not count as a landlord.
Sorted by the two questions. Yours will differ — this is the shape of the reasoning, not a verdict on your career.
Nobody asked for it. It arrives alongside everything else that arrived that week.
The platform conferred a floor and its standing carried you. The platform controls whether it happens again.
Their trust transferred to you, which is exactly what conferral is. You cannot re-issue it yourself.
You were chosen, and the route to the buyer runs entirely through your representation.
They chose you, and you can start the next conversation yourself.
A relationship you hold, not one an intermediary is administering.
You hold the address. Nobody on the other end was waiting for it.
Real access, wholly dependent on the agency continuing to spend its standing on you.
The referral is the whole mechanism, and it is the clearest case in the framework: somebody else's accumulated trust is being spent on you. It works because it is theirs, which is also why you cannot spend it again yourself.
The audit places a route. It does not price one. For anything that came out rented — in this field that is usually your representation, or the platform that ranked you — the next questions are:
Post-strike, buyers are reported to want scripts ready to go rather than projects to develop, which raises what a rented route is worth and does not change who controls it.
It places your routes. It does not measure your career. It cannot see the quality of your work, your income, your craft, your credits or your reputation — and rented routes build all of those, even when they build no way back to anyone.
The underlying idea — that attention arrives contested, rented or direct — is free to use, adapt and teach. If this is wrong about your situation, that is worth more to me than if it is right: the contact is on the about page.