What I Do

Silvestri Storyworks advises writers, producers, directors, and other filmmakers on how to conceive, develop, and execute screenplays with a serious emphasis on positioning them in the theatrical feature and television film marketplace.

I assist professional and nonprofessional filmmakers in creating artistically and commercially notable screenplays, tailored to the interests and needs of today’s film industry producers, directors, actors, movie studios, and story development executives.

I work in all genres and styles for both independent and mainstream filmmakers. And drawing on an extensive knowledge of the history of world cinema, I’m equally at home with action movies made in the U.S. or Hong Kong, surrealist films from Europe or South America, classic Italian neorealism or the recent Iranian variety.  

I offer more than twenty-five years of experience at almost forty motion picture and TV companies and my commitment to ensure that every screenplay achieves its highest potential within the writer or filmmaker’s overall vision. And my consulting capacity lends itself to larger business ventures as well, whether it's developing a diverse slate of promising movie, TV, and new media projects or designing and supervising a production company’s story department.

Getting the Right Screenplay for the Right Market

We’ve all seen people lined up for blocks and blocks, waiting to buy tickets to see a new movie. And those of us who make or want to make movies ourselves have often wondered: How do you get people so curious, so interested, so excited about a movie that they’ll stand for hour after hour, sometimes in the rain or snow, just to see it?

People often say to me “You must have read a lot of bad screenplays in your career” and yes, I’ve read many scripts that didn’t work on one level or another, for whatever reasons. But much more often, the problem isn’t that the scripts are simply “bad,” it’s that they haven’t been designed to appeal to any particular sector of the motion picture marketplace, which today spans the entire world.
 
Sometimes screenwriters don’t recognize what’s best in their own work. In that case, all I have to do is encourage them to emphasize certain aspects of their script and downplay or eliminate others. But if filmmakers don’t get the maximum help from their support group – whether that group is composed of friends, instructors, business partners, or whoever – they run the risk of reducing the artistic and commercial potential of their own projects.  Many times I’ve listened to a writer describe a proposed screenplay and said to myself, “Yeah, that should work pretty well” – only to read the completed script later or, even worse, see the finished film and say, “Oh no, they left out everything that was good about the movie!”
 
Everyone wants their screenplay to be “good,” but it must also be good for the right audience. And so it’s never too early for a writer, producer, or director to start thinking about just who is the ideal audience for his movie. Having worked in story development for dozens of motion picture and TV companies over the years, my goal is to help you determine the best market for your movie and then write your screenplay so as to win over your target audience as completely and successfully as possible. If you and I do our jobs well, people will line up to see your movie…even in the rain and snow.

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