PLAYERS

Anyone who has seen “The Player,” Robert Altman’s scathing industry fable, knows that in the jungle that is Hollywood, the screenwriter, especially the novice screenwriter, can most be likened to, well, a defenseless gazelle. (The studio executives, producers and agents would be the lions, pythons and hyenas.)

But chalk one up for a wily screenwriter turned publisher who is giving, well OK, selling, a new arsenal of information to struggling, and even not so struggling screenwriters–the “Spec Screenplay Sales Directory: Deluxe Edition 1990-1997.”

The fat resource book is an exhaustive catalog that details the vital information on the sales of more than 750 spec screenplays sold in the last seven years–the titles, genres and writers, as well as the agents, development executives and production companies involved in the deal. Oh, yes, and the amount paid for the script, usually a six-figure number.

The book is the brainchild of Howard Meibach, 41, a Santa Monica-based screenwriter who had, over the years, developed an informal network with other writers and amassed a good deal of potentially valuable information.

He spent a year and a half researching the book, and spent $500 at a local printing shop to have a few hundred copies printed and bound, and swiftly sold the whole batch at a Writers Guild-sponsored conference in April.

“Writers were coming up to me, telling me what a great idea it was,” he says. “They were clipping things from the newspapers, but here it [was], all in one place and cross-referenced.”

The money he made from the book sales went directly into the “deluxe” edition, which came out the next month, and is priced at $59.95. Meibach then approached one of his neighborhood bookstores, Dutton Books in Brentwood.

“It was hard for bookstores to place it on their shelves, because the title is not printed on the spine… . So I told them, ‘Just give me a shot, take a few of them on consignment and just see.”

“I got a call from Ed Dutton a week later; he said, ‘Yep, you’re right, I sold all your books, I want to order more.’ ” (The book is also at Larry Edmunds, Enterprise Stationers, Book Soup, Westside News, Vromans in Pasadena, the Duttons in North Hollywood, and in New York at Applause Books, Drama Bookshop and NYU, as well as a few stores in Seattle, Chicago, Toronto and Vancouver.)

So how might an aspiring writer best use his book?

First of all, it can help find an agent. “That’s very important, but it’s very difficult. This book can give writers an idea of which agents have broken which deals, so they may be able to target their screenplay to a specific agent who’s sold similar material.”

And even if you don’t have a screenplay yet, the book, he says, can help with ideas. “You just look at the hundreds of loglines, story lines, and maybe you can get an idea of what Hollywood is buying and isn’t buying. I mean, if you’re thinking of writing a costume drama, your chances are not as high for selling as if you’d wrote an action piece, or a romantic comedy. Right now comedies are doing really well, specifically romantic comedies.”

For example, one of the entries is for a script called “My Blockbuster,” a comedy. The “logline”: “Goofball toll booth attendant/filmmaker woos actress by putting her in his commercial.” Writer: Steve Adams. Purchase price: $625,000. Date of sale: March 1995. Agent: Richard Arlook. Agency: Gersh Agency. Buyer: Castle Rock Entertainment. Castle Rock execs: Liz Glotzer, Martin Shafer. Producer: Andy Cohen. Castle Rock exec who found project: Curtis Burch.

Meibach’s grass-roots publishing business, In Good Company Products, is still a one-man operation being run out of his Santa Monica townhouse, and he shares a Web site (http://www.gotmilkstuff.com/shop/specscript.html) with a guy who sells “Got Milk?” paraphernalia.

But with any luck this new book will make Meibach a player. Or at least a well-protected gazelle.