Last week, we had two posts so GITS readers could submit questions to Jason Scoggins:

Jason Scoggins is a manager and partner at Protocol, a Beverly Hills-adjacent literary management and production company. He represents writers, directors and producers of film and TV alongside Protocol’s founding partners Brian Inerfeld and John Ufland. After getting his start in the entertainment business as an assistant at ICM, Scoggins became a TV Literary Agent at The Gersh Agency, followed by a stint at Writers & Artists Agency and then several years in the wilderness. He returned to the business in 2007, just in time to be impacted by the run-up to the WGA strike.

Jason also has a great website called Life On The Bubble, which tracks movie box office and the spec script market.

GITS readers asked some good questions and Jason has responded with some valuable insight into screenwriting, the spec script market, and working in Hollywood. In Part 1 yesterday, Jason provided his take on the current state of the movie business. Today he gives his opinion on the status of the spec script market.

Do you think the spec market will rebound this fall? Or do you think pre-sold material will continue to be favored by studios? Is it even harder for an aspiring writer to break in now than in the past? — Alex F.

Yes, yes and yes.

I think the spec market could and probably will rebound this fall, and almost certainly will by next February. Yet I think pre-sold material will continue to be favored by the studios for a long time to come. In other words, I think we’ll see a trend upwards in the number of specs that get set up in the next several selling seasons, but the studios will still prefer projects based on underlying material. And I’m no historian of the business, but yes, my gut feeling is that it’s harder to break in than it used to be, if only because there are fewer opportunities right now. But look on the bright side: You could be trying to become a TV writer.

The spec market’s been pretty miserable this year. People say that it’s due to the economic downturn and that starting next year things should be better. What do you think next year will look like for spec sales? — Sam

I think an expanding economy will have as direct an impact on feature development as the tightening economy did over the past two years. I think we’ll almost certainly see an improvement over the past couple of years (it’s hard to imagine it getting worse), though how much of an improvement is hard to predict. And I don’t think we’re going to see the market return to the vibrancy of the 80’s and 90’s any time soon. The business had shifted in a number of ways since then.

I attempt to track scripts sales on a monthly basis on my blog using Done Deal Pro as my source. Month after month I always register more spec sales than you post. Here’s my dilemma: when the writer is also the director and the script is not identified as an adaptation, pitch, true story, remake, rewrite, etc. I assume – rightly or wrongly — the script is an original and therefore, a spec. Am I way off base here? — Mike

Good question, and I’m drafting a post for my blog to address how I gather my data and what I include in my numbers. You’re not off base at all, but I do approach this differently. My goal is not to capture every script sale per se, nor every project set up around town, but to maintain a sense of the market for spec scripts specifically, including what kinds of scripts are selling and how they’re getting sold. Bottom line, I don’t include projects in my grids unless I know they’re specs, and the source material for Done Deal Pro (the trades, for the most part) often doesn’t go into great detail on whether the script has been written yet, when it originally got set up, what stage it was at before the director and producers came on board, etc. Given those factors plus the lag time between projects getting set up and the info hitting the trades, I’ve chosen to err by being potentially too conservative rather than too inclusive.

Check back tomorrow for Jason’s advice on how a writer should approach writing spec scripts.