How This Screenwriter Used Contest Feedback to Find His Future Representation

Takeo Hori shares how important it is to utilize feedback from the screenwriting contest.

by Alyssa Miller on August 16, 2024

Every screenwriter dreams of placing in a screenwriting competition and landing representation. But what happens when you don’t win? It is an unfortunate reality that every writer faces, but Takeo Hori, a screenwriter “born in Tokyo, raised in Portland, and made in New York City,” found a way to make contest feedback work for him.

After graduating from New York University’s film program, Hori worked on Japanese productions in the US. While writing and producing over 200 episodes for a comedy show in four years, Hori was still working on his dreams of creating noteworthy projects for the American film industry. One way he did this was by writing a film every year and religiously submitting it to the most noteworthy contest he could find.

Hori sat down with screenwriting career coach Lee Jessup to share how screenwriting competitions helped him build his screenwriting portfolio and find his future representation.

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Use Contests as a Screenwriting Tool

Not all contests are created equal, which means screenwriters need to focus on which contests are worth their time and money.

Each year, Hori would target half a dozen screenwriting contests that finalists and winners had used to advance their careers. This meant sitting down and researching contests that aligned with his screenwriting goals.

The next step was to have a feature screenplay that was ready to submit.

"Once a year, on average, I would have a feature script. I looked at all the deadlines, usually the final deadlines, and plotted out when I would have a draft ready,” Hori said. “That was one of the things about the contest that was very beneficial for me at the beginning. Having a deadline is important—you can work on something forever or procrastinate on writing a script indefinitely. So, having that deadline was really helpful."

Each year, Hori would work on rewrites for scripts he submitted the year before while working on another original script. When competition deadlines rolled around, he would submit all of his scripts to see what the industry thought about his work.

“That was my strategy: to focus on the most prestigious contest that I knew would help get my scripts into the hands of industry producers or reps,” Hori noted.

The Great Reward of Contests

Eventually, Hori’s strategy started to pay off. Several of his screenplays became finalists in those prestigious contests he submitted to, and one even caught the attention of his future manager at Bellevue Productions.

“It was a little unusual in that it was the first script I officially wrote entirely on my own, finished, and felt good about. It didn’t do well in the contest—my other scripts are performing much better—but after a rewrite based on feedback, it became a finalist,” Hori said.

Surprisingly, it was this screenplay that had taken time to become a finalist that caught the attention of one of the judges reading through all the finalists’ screenplays.

“[My rep] was one of the finalist judges. Although it didn’t win, he contacted me shortly after the announcement and said he loved the script and wanted to talk.” That conversation eventually led to the agent asking to represent Hori. “I really hit it off with him because I felt he understood what I was doing and was someone I could hang out with.”

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Opening doors that help you elevate your screenwriting career takes time, money, and a lot of rewrites. But it's that feedback that can help shape your current screenplay (and the other dozen you’ve written over the years) to be the best version it needs to be before it lands in the hands of the judges. You never know when one of those judges could be inspired by your work and ready to help you launch your writing career.