When Martin Scorsese stepped up to the podium to accept the Academy Award he feared was never coming, he looked out to scruffy writer William Monahan and thanked him for the screenplay for The Departed, which got him ‘into all this trouble in the first place.’

It all begins with the script. Scorsese knows it. Spielberg knows it – which is why he opted out of Indiana Jones 4 for so many years. And Lucas – well, Lucas is Lucas.

Quebec will make 15 or so features this year, and I expect around five will top $1 million at the box office. Arcand is back, and we’ll probably hear from Ken Scott next year, but is Canada doing enough to build our overall roster of screenwriting stars? And why haven’t we produced a breakout hit in this country that translates across the world? Oscar-winner Capote – shot in Winnipeg and backed by Vancouver’s Infinity Features – shows us that we are able to make high-level films with middling budgets. And we can certainly make a Sex, Lies and Videotape.

But good scripts aren’t written over a weekend. They need to be nurtured and developed. It took Dennis Heaton, who came up with the story for Fido – and who shares screenwriter credit with Robert Chomiak and director Andrew Currie – 13 years to get his internationally sold zombie satire made.

‘I don’t even know if I could find a copy of [the first draft],’ says Heaton from the Maple Ridge, BC set of vampire TV series Blood Ties. ‘There have been Bankers Boxes full of scripts. Over the years it’s been like ‘I’m dumping out the Fido scripts today. There go four boxes that I don’t have to move.”

Yet while we sit here pinning all of English-Canadian cinema’s commercial hopes on Fido, which opens March 16, we can’t afford to wait a dozen years in between successes.

Heaton was self-taught, and advocates a sit-down-and-hit-the-keyboard type of approach. But if writers make that kind of commitment in isolation, there have to be mechanisms in place to find those great stories out there in the ether.

Telefilm Canada executive director Wayne Clarkson has spoken for the past year about a proposed Sundance-type lab for screenwriters, but given the time required for development, it needs to happen yesterday. Maybe, as Maple Pictures’ co-president Brad Pelman has suggested, the lab should be folded into the National Screen Institute under the Telefilm banner to expedite the process.

Another promising development is Fujifilm Canada’s recently announced partnership with The Harold Greenberg Fund on Reel Support, a manufacturer-driven feature film fund which will be up and running this fall, and might put an additional dozen projects into early development.

However, there’s one staggering statistic that indicates we’re working with an arm tied behind our backs. According to the Writers Guild of Canada, 25% of Canada’s professional screenwriters don’t even work here, opting instead for the greener pastures of the U.S.

Why? Because there isn’t enough work here. But while Hollywood is seductive, surely we could keep more talent at home if we produced more movies. And television. Thesp Wendy Crewson – who has straddled film and TV, both here and down south – certainly thinks so.

‘Out of our television industry grows our film industry,’ she says. ‘This is where people are trained – in television to make movies… It’s fertile ground. They talk to the propman, who has a script. And that’s how it happens. It doesn’t happen in this barren wasteland of reality or cooking shows.’

And the reality is that you can’t work steadily as a screenwriter in Canada without writing half-hours, one-hours and MOWs. Heaton thinks the same logic should be applied to our features.

‘If we want more recognition for movies we make, we have to make more movies,’ he says. ‘It’s a bit of a shotgun approach. The more films you make a year, the better shot you’re going to have finding something that hits with audience appeal.’

There’s new money out there for development. Let’s get producers excited about finding great stories. If we all agree it starts with the script, then let’s sit down and face that blank page together.