going postal

For. the. love. of. all. that. is. holy:
STOP sending me unsolicited crap!!!!!

please.

This is a desperate plea directed to all the misinformed freaks and psychopaths out there that think that blindly sending off movie ideas to random companies is a good idea. Might get lucky! Make a million billion dollars on the next Armageddon! Couldn't hurt?

But it does hurt. It hurts me. Personally. Very very personally. Becuase for every single person from New Mexico, or Montreal, or small German towns I can't pronounce, I am the one who gets the distinctive pleasure of mailing back all of the material and informing these aspiring whomevers that we cannot even so much as look at it.

Sometimes, some of these brilliant people decide that me responding to their query is an opening for more correspondence! A phone call, perhaps? No! That is INcorrect! My letter is to inform you that your correspondence is not requested, desired, or sanctioned AT ALL! If you send me another piece of mail, I will still be the one sending it back to you. I will still be the one committing hari kari because you fedexed a bubble-wrapped box containing some random manuscript that I now have to figure out how to send back to you.

I am not even getting into the ideas or loglines behind the gems that find their way to my inbox each day. But here's my one piece of advice. You think you have the next $100 million blockbuster movie? Get an agent. Preferably one anyone working in the industry will return phone calls to. That's all. I'm not going to tell you how to go about finding one, or how to submit your material. That's your job. And there is this glorious learning resource called 'the internet'. Use it before you call me and ask for any and all knowledge I have on the matter of getting your screenplay looked at.

In the meantime, please don't send me any more unsolicited mail. I beg of you.

Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. There's never a letup, It's relentless. Every day it piles up more and more, but the more you get out, the more it keeps coming. And then the bar code reader breaks. And then it's Publisher's Clearinghouse day.

- Newman, Seinfeld, 1990s.