Dreams on Spec is a 2007 American documentary film that profiles the struggles and triumphs of emerging Hollywood screenwriters. It was written and directed by Daniel J. Snyder, who learned first-hand about the screenwriter's travails in the late 1980s when he was a teenager working alongside aspiring writer/directors Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary in the famed Video Archives video store in Manhattan Beach, California. Synopsis The film follows three aspiring screenwriters as they struggle to turn their scripts into movies. David is a hip talent agent's assistant with three scripts circulating around town. He's plugged into "young Hollywood" - and when he's not working or writing, he's usually hanging out at the beach. Joe is a middle-aged family man who has split time over the last three years between caring for his autistic daughter and writing what he believes could be the great American screenplay. And Deborah is trying to become one of the few African-American women to ever write and direct a feature film, though she's struggling just to pay her bills while she searches for money to produce her script. Between these stories, the film intercuts critical insight from such Hollywood screenwriters as James L. Brooks, Nora Ephron, Carrie Fisher, Gary Ross, Steven E. de Souza, Ed Solomon, Paul Guay, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Selected quotations The established filmmakers interviewed for the documentary offer anecdotes about working in Hollywood. Writer-director Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally... and You've Got Mail) describes why she believes there are so few women making films: "It's a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it—the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943, in that the ethics of it are boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that—so that means that—that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it." James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment) relates his love for screenwriting: "I never knew anybody who ever got a Writers Guild card who didn’t have a hard time when somebody said, 'What do you do for a living?' saying, 'I'm a writer.' Your—your voice always catches on 'a writer.' I think it takes about 14 years to not have the catch in your voice if you’re very aggressive.