THE MOVIE BUSINESS / Figures in a landscape: Catriona O'Shaughnessy at the third lecture in a series on low-budget film-making

'I didn't have enough money to make a movie and I figured the film industry likes to buy scripts of books,' explains Q, a 24-year-old Londoner, 'so I wrote the book and published it myself. But it's going to be a film, there is no doubt. All I'm waiting for now is to see how and when I break the big deal.'

Q is one of 100 or so students at the third seminar on 'How To Succeed in the Movie Industry' run by the London Film Workshop. The Workshop was set up last Christmas by Elliot Grove, a Canadian who was fed up with friends saying they wanted to make movies but only making excuses instead. By bringing speakers over from America, where making an independent film can be a viable proposition, he hoped to inspire some PMA - Positive Mental Attitude.

Apart from an agent and his 'autobiography' Deadmeat, PMA is Q's only asset. He is convinced he can become a British Spike Lee or John Singleton, and he's come along today to see if Mark Litwak, an entertainment attorney, can give him any tips.

In his opening address, Litwak offers his master list of the five factors any actor, producer, director or screenwriter needs to get in on the movie-making game. Simply by being there, his audience of aspiring players have demonstrated that they possess the first factor - tenacity. They have scraped together the enrolment fee of pounds 110; travelled from as far afield as Aberdeen, Dublin and Geneva to Regent's College, London, on a miserable Saturday morning; and - an additional hurdle - negotiated their way past the Mother Earth types in caftans who are herding people into the Healing Energy Medicine conference upstairs.

Although Litwak offers a few words of wisdom on luck, charm and talent, it's Factor Four - savvy - that he imparts through his lectures and his book, Reel Power.

Over an LA lunch - salad and a dry roll, followed by fruit, washed down with hot water and honey - in the incongruous setting of the damp Regent's Park cafeteria, Litwak explains his approach. 'Film schools teach you all about the craft, but they give you no preparation whatsoever about how to get an agent, how to get your screenplay read, what sort of deal you should expect. All I'm doing is giving them tools and information to save them some time. Instead of spending five years floundering around learning the system, now they'll only spend two years.'

Back in the draughty lecture hall the sharp-talking lawyer identifies the Hollywood power-brokers (agents and studio executives), and gives detailed instructions on how to play them at their own game: how to stop them stealing your ideas, how to recognise the sucker contract before you sign it, and who it's worth talking to at parties. For those who want to follow the low-budget independent route of Steven Soderbergh, Hal Hartley and the Coen brothers, there are rules on how to break the rules.

Like any other business, the film industry is run on jargon, and Litwak insists that picking it up is vital. You need to know that an 'eat-in clause' concerns profits, not sandwiches, that an offer of a 'negative pick-up deal' is for distribution, not a hand of poker, and that a cinema's 'house-nut' is not a pecan or a peanut but the weekly operating expenses. If you step straight off the plane and into a pitch meeting thinking 'high concept' means high art, you'll soon find yourself back at Heathrow.

At times, the transatlantic talk of 'high concept negative pick-up deals' sounds as unreal as the Guild of Vibrational Medicine across the hall, who want to raise your karma to a higher level for the New Age. But Litwak doesn't expect his audience to put the LA lore into practice immediately. 'Ironically, the easiest way to break into the movie industry today is to stay in your own country, make an excellent low-budget film, something like My Beautiful Laundrette or My Left Foot, and enter it in festivals. It's a real mistake for British film-makers to try and make American movies because that particular British perspective is what you have that's unique. If you become successful here, Hollywood will bribe you away, offer you big bucks and the chance to hang out on Sunset Boulevard. Otherwise they're not interested.'

Q plans to take Litwak's advice: 'In America there's tons of young black guys like me, people like John Singleton and Matty Rich, I've got the whole field to myself in England right now. There's only me doing Deadmeat that's out there, so why should I go to Hollywood? It's true what he says, you have to make yourself a success first, then you can earn money. Spike Lee, the guys who made sex, lies and videotape, they had to make the films first, then they got respect. That's what I'm gonna do.'

If he's extremely lucky, Q could use something he learned this weekend to break his big deal before Christmas: one student from the first LFW seminar, Dov Simens' talk on raising a budget, was inspired to go to Cannes, where he secured pounds 2.5 million to make his first feature. More likely, Litwak's lecture will provide him with renewed motivation and some useful contacts. Overnight successes are the exception at the LFW: the rule is people like Niraj Kapur who attended Michael Hague's screenwriting course in July. After taking the advice of a script evaluator he met at the seminar, Niraj is now waiting to hear whether an agent in New York is interested in his all-black drama, On the Edge. In the meantime, he's spending 12 hours a day learning his craft at the Arts Educational Drama School and working on a new script, a romantic thriller, at weekends. The big deal may be a long way off, but Niraj is still only 20 and running strong on pure PMA.

Another London Film Workshop lecture series is planned for next year: phone 071-351 7748 for details.