DesertJo;

First off, I commend you for trying to track these down. I'd LOVE to read them, and I agree with you that someone, somewhere, out there must know SOMETHING.

I believe the vast majority of these scripts would be worth reading and not mere "fan fiction". I back up my hypothesis with these tidbits of knowledge garnered from my own submission of scripts, unsolicited and semi-unsolicited, to a few series back in the 1980s (not Miami Vice, although looking back now with a more mature eye I see I should've at least TRIED!! I'm sure I would've come up with something at least as good as "Cows of October" or "Missing Hours". Ugh!!)

Anyway, from what I recall about registering scripts, you COULD in fact register something that you didn't have rights to. LoC was just a registration place, for copyright and proof of ownership. However, you are correct in that they did have standards, and it would've had to be done in proper screenplay format, so that would've eliminated quite a few of the people sending in stuff in scribblers.

Secondly -and I'm not trying to insult anyone here- but it has been my personal experience that the majority of the rabid "fan fiction writers" -by these I mean the extreme cases, no or little personal life, dream of meeting the characters, live and breathe the show 24/7 and fancy themselves as writers as a way to achieve their desires -tended at that time to be fans of the science fiction genres. Police/detective shows just didn't seem to have those types of fans/writer wannabes. To some I extent I believe this is still the case today.

What this means for your search is that I think most of these unproduced scripts would have been done by:

A Writers of the show -you're correct in your assumption that a few extra scripts are always produced just in case

B Other professional television writers who've written for other shows and wanted to do something for Miami Vice

C Scripts from professional or starting professional writers sent in by their agents (Unsolicited for the most part)

D Unsolicited and sent in directly by the writer, who would've had some other experience, done the necessary homework for approaching a series and at least have known format, scriptwriting, etc.


Yes, true, some (SOME!) "fan fiction writers" are determined enough type up and study proper format, but again, most wouldn't have had the patience and resources to go through all the trouble to produce the final required professional-standard product.

You said you found 50-60 registered scripts? I'd guess 10% of those would be the fan fiction submissions (and not ALL fan fiction is bad!!) and the rest would be for the most part, professional. Well worth reading.

So is the search worth it? YES!!!!!!! KEEP IT UP!!

Do you still have this list? Were they listed by title? Could you at least post the TITLES here for us? Might be fun to guess what the scripts were like by their title!

Creative Type