Auction?

[C.bronco]

I'm fairly savvy about fiction markets & agents etc, but am fairly clueless regarding tv. If I have a treatment and, hypothetically, a production company I've queried makes an offer, and I have no agent (but a really awful run on sentence), should I call the other companies I've queried to give them an opportunity to counter-offer?
Can a treatment go to "auction?"

[scottVee]

Hi. Seems like, if a legitimate company does make an offer, it's time to find an agent to worry about the details. So, start looking for the agent you'd love to have, and if you bring them a deal, it should help get their interest.

I wouldn't even try to play companies off each other on my own.

[icerose]

Only agents deal with auctions, writers do not. If you want the first company to drop you faster than a hot potato, try to do an auction. If they make an offer, call an agent, they'll get the contract in the best terms possible for you.

Also auctions are generally over hot things from experienced writers and it is an agent who starts it, they get a group together and put it up for auction and they bid on it, sort of like a real auction, thus the name, but it is only agents who initiate it, this is the same for publishers.

[Jolie Blon]

In recent years, I haven't seen many "call to auction" for screenplays. It used to be more common but now packaging is the key to making the deal and so an unattached literary property is usually flying in the wind until it lands with a credited producer or director or sticks to some bankable talent.

Of late, all the auctions I've heard about have been regarding the screen rights to books, unpublished or on-their-way to being published.

Maybe other people have had different experiences, but that's mine.

But I have never heard of an auction for a treatment in the television world... In all honesty I can't imagine a treatment that would generate a sale from an unknown much less multiple interested parties. Treatments are a dime a dozen and they don't prove that a writer can write a script.

I see a lot of "viable" treatments put together by non-writers, like producers, for example, to interest actors but they always need the pilot script to move ahead. When they get financing in place, they usually hire a writer. I'm usually one of those standing around saying "Me! Me!" with my list of credits in hand.

My advice would be: if you get a deal, consider yourself lucky and don't screw over anybody by trying to use them as a stepping stone to "bigger things". It's a small community with a long memory... and a shared database of people not to do business with.