A great story into today’s NY Times about screenwriter Michael C. Martin, another total outsider to Hollywood who wrote a spec script and, well, read on:

As strange a scene as it was that day in a neighborhood more accustomed to real-life drama, even more extraordinary is the story of how Mr. Martin, a 28-year-old former subway worker from East New York, Brooklyn, came to write “Brooklyn’s Finest,” a gritty thriller starring Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, and Mr. [Richard] Gere as police officers in a housing project. Mr. Martin, who in his dusty white FUBU sneakers, denim shorts and a short-sleeve, button-up shirt looked that day more like a college senior than a Hollywood writer, is a onetime film student who remains a few credits shy of his degree from Brooklyn College. His most recent job was subway flagger with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority; he waved flags and set up warning lights in subway tunnels to warn approaching trains that construction crews were working on the tracks.

And how did Mr. Martin become inspired to write “Brooklyn’s Finest?”

In 2005 a car accident left him injured and his 1991 Lincoln Mark VII totaled. While he would need three months of physical therapy to deal with a bulging disc in his back, his obsession focused less on mending than on making some extra cash to buy a new car. Surfing the Web one day he came across a call for submissions in a screenwriting competition. The grand prize was $10,000. So he began to write the first scenes of what he called “kind of an epic”: the intertweaving stories of three police officers who have misplaced their moral compasses and grown to hate themselves a little along the way.

About a year after the contest Mr. Martin’s agent submitted the script to Warner Bros. on spec for a job writing the sequel to the urban cult film “New Jack City.” It landed in a pile of scripts on the desk of the producer Mary Viola. She liked it so much that she not only wanted Mr. Martin to do the “New Jack City” project but proposed that the “Brooklyn’s Finest” script be made into a feature-length movie.

Within weeks the project got the go-ahead. Mr. Martin was paid $200,000 for the script with handsome box-office incentives. After Mr. Fuqua came on board, the big-name cast (Wesley Snipes also stars as a drug dealer recently released from prison) quickly signed on, many taking large pay cuts to work on the film, budgeted at about $25 million.

There are so many great aspects to Martin’s tale, but the biggest takeaway for any screenwriter, aspiring or professional, is that all it takes is to get material in front of the right set of eyeballs, as Martin’s script did with producer Mary Viola. Anything can happen when you write a spec script. Anything.