The Query

​Most of us have written them, that Industry Hail Mary pass, tossing our idea all willy-nilly like into the fiery maelstrom we all call the movie business. Sometimes our total effort can number into the hundreds, the results being wadded up and tossed into admin trash cans, clogging fax machines, and filling up spam and junk email folders from Encino to Manhattan Beach. Yep, I’m talking query letters, the system of pitching our screenplays to people who don’t really care. Most are never seen; precious few ever get a response. If we’re lucky we may get an “unable to accept unsolicited material,” response or the even rarer sincere brief word of encouragement. Today I am not going to show you how to write one. There are a million websites, screenplay books and costly seminars that will teach you how to do that. Today, I offer something completely different. I call it, the revenge of the query letter.

Da-da-da! (Dramatic music)

And it goes a little something like this:

​Earl J, Waggedorn
818-221-1212
[email protected]
372 E Olive #4
Burbank, CA   91502  

​June 19, 2021
 
Re: 
 
Dear Waste-Paper Basket, Spam/Junk Folder or reluctantly possessed by some low paid Assistant:
 
(They say in the first paragraph you really need to sell yourself.)
 
I have spent the last fifty-five years in jungles of Borneo, fending off rival tribes while patiently teaching the collective works of Ayn Rand to the natives. My time here as made me proficient at head-hunting and low-level cannibalism, and I have many thrilling and humorous anecdotes of the occasional missionary or wild hog that slipped from my grasp. Obviously, this has left me many a solitary night to create stories, first shared around a campfire and later painted on the wall of a cave in the classic Syd Field three-act structure. 
 
(The logline. Two sentences or less that will trap the reader into an even longer paragraph just below)
 
A happy-go-lucky anti-vaxxer is conked on the head and wakes up surrounded by angry natives in the jungles of Borneo. With only the clothes on his back and a tattered copy of The Fountainhead, Merle, must battle adversaries, learn to smoke, and eat missionaries without a Traeger and find a way to get back to his home in a red state.
 
(Now your audience is hooked and it’s time to follow this up with what is sometimes referred to as the elevator pitch. Some say it’s because it should take the time required for an elevator to travel from one floor to the next. Wrong!  I believe It is the time required to identify who farted on a crowded elevator.)
 
Merle Wiggleworm loves Trump. He loves him so much that he is willing to sacrifice democracy in favor of a dictator ruled theocracy. Having had enough of such hijinks, his long-suffering wife, conks him over with a microwave and places him into an Zhen Hua Logistics shipping container. When I, I mean he, wakes up, he is alone in the jungles of Borneo, with only his copy of Ayn Rand, his political dogma and his worn MAGA hat to comfort him. Soon, the head-hunting natives are made aware of the island’s newest inhabitant, and it becomes a race against time subjugate an inferior race to win his freedom. 
 
(Wow, I think we can all agree that this story practically writes itself. So, we’ve hooked that industry like a big-mouth bass and now it is time to reel that sucker in with a closing line that will all but guarantee a response.)
 
I was thinking of Jon Voight to play me. What do you think?
 
Most Sincerely,
 
Earl