A Reader Writes In About His Orientation...

Not sexual, mind you. It's just that I find my ideas for scripts, and the scripts I've written, to be not necessarily un-commercial, just a little too unusual. For instance, [snip].

I've been told that the writing is good (if too long), but that it's hard to 'market,' or sell to a producer, etc. Concepts that are unwieldy. They say originality is an asset --- but I suppose there's a balance to be struck?

Certainly. It's a truism that producers are looking for something that is just exactly like this year's hit, but slightly different. And Lord knows there are enough TV shows about a person with an ability and a cop sidekick, solving crimes.

In cable TV, and in indie features, it's less true. But all TV channels have a certain kind of thing they're looking for. For a while, HBO was all about dysfunctional families.

And there are certain kinds of stories that work in features. The medium itself has requirements. Movies generally like one central character (or in a rom com, two), and a story that would make sense to an intelligent ten-year-old. (They don't have to be a story you would necessarily want to tell a ten year old, but a ten-year-old ought to be able to understand it.)

So not everything works.

So what do you do if you find that your stories are offbeat?

Certainly you want to focus on those stories that tickle your muse that are also in the ballpark of other movies or TV shows that have got produced. If you want to make an indie movie, watch an inordinate number of indie movies. You'll get a sense of what similarities they share, even if they seem at first blush to be all different.

If you want to make blockbuster movies, watch a ridiculous number of blockbuster movies, preferably in a row. That will give you a sense of what's being bought.

A family friend of mine was a bit of a struggling book writer. His books sold, but not really enough to support him. So one day he went into his agent and said, "I want to write a bestseller. What do I do?"

Agent said: "Read every book in the New York Times fiction bestseller list." So our friend sat down and read ten bestselling novels front to back, in a row. (It's important to do it all at once, so the similarities stand out.) Then he went and wrote a novel about killer bees attacking the US.

Bestseller. Movie deal.

Maybe your concepts are off base instead of offbeat. Have you tried pitching your hook to friends? To civilian friends who might be the audience for that kind of a movie? You should. You should be telling your waitress, your postman, the kid cutting your neighbor's grass, about the hook of your movie. If you really pay attention to how they react to your story -- if you listen to yourself pitching it -- your concept will streamline pretty damn fast.

However. As always, beware the feedback you're getting. You have to interpret it.

Note that the feedback is coming back "good (if too long)". Maybe the problem isn't actually that your ideas are too offbeat. Maybe the execution is too unwieldy. Have you tried pitching your story to an intelligent ten-year-old? No? Well go and do that then.

Remember when I told you in my books to pitch, not just your hook, but your whole story to civilian friends, out loud, without notes, over and over, until you can tell the whole story without forgetting anything? You didn't do that, did you? If you did that, your story wouldn't be too long, I practically guarantee it.

Also, movies are characters times story. You might have a perfectly valid popcorn movie, but the main character is uncompelling. Or there's no relationship at the core of it. DIE HARD wasn't a hit because of its concept. It was a hit because it had a good concept and a compelling character propelled by a relationship. Yippee kai yay.

Are you writing what you know? And I don't mean write about your high school experience; I mean write about what's in your bones. I know Morgan le Fay, at least my version of her. I care about Lucifer, or my version of him. But if you're writing about characters you don't really know or care about, we're not going to care, either.

In other words, maybe the concept isn't bad, but you need to step up your writing in general.

In general, as you go forward, you get a sense of what the market wants from you. But there are still projects I write that I think are ridiculously commercial which I can't sell, and projects I wrote in spite of the market that have found a home. That's why you should only write what you love. Ask yourself, not, "would someone pay $15 to see this?" but, "is a producer going to want to spend two or three years of her life trying to get this made?" Because that's what it will take.

Hook vs. Story

Q. Can you give me an example or examples of film where there was a good hook and story but they were underdeveloped or and the theme and subplots were highly developed? Perhaps a better way of putting it is where the hook plays second to the theme and substories of the characters. I want to see if this can still work and how if feels when it does not work.

Can you clarify your question?

Q. Ok, I have heard it said that if a film is not good "if it is about what it is about". So to make it good, it has to have a strong underlying meaning and not just focus only on the hook and premise. If the script is written and there is not as much technical detail and time spent on the hook but there is much more effort applied (succesfully) to the characters and how the hook affects and changes their lives, can this work and do you know if any films that show this? It seems it may make the audience feel like it was a bait and switch.

The point of the hook is to get people in the door. It isn't necessarily what the movie is about.

A strong example is FREE ENTERPRISE. The hook is "Two Trekkies meet William Shatner and agree to help him put on a rap version of JULIUS CAESAR, with Shatner playing all the parts." (I think the movie, incidentally, is where Shatner discovered that he could have a lot of fun playing a blowhard.) The movie is actually a romantic comedy about a geek guy who meets a geek girl.

It works. I really enjoyed FREE ENTERPRISE.

At a less obvious level, many movies develop far beyond their hooks. THE FULL MONTY is about a bunch of unemployed Sheffield steelworkers putting on a strip show, but a good bit of the movie is about the guys and their relationships and their personal problems. Those problems do affect the strip show, so the scenes aren't irrelevant, but you could make the case that the filmmakers were at least as interested in telling a story about unemployed steelworkers as a story about them putting on a show.

You have to serve your hook. At the end of FREE ENTERPRISE, there's Shatner, rapping about Calpurnia. If the movie didn't satisfy the hook, the audience would feel cheated. But you are always welcome to give the audience more than they signed up for.

Hook Me Up

Emerging writer/blogger Mary Pedersen gets it about the need for a premise. Here are her twin posts about why you need a hook, and what happens when you don't have one.

Oh, and don't forget to check out my online seminar on The Hook!

Save the Cat!

I've been dipping into SAVE THE CAT. I don't usually read screenwriting books, but a dear showrunner friend of mine has been using the Save the Cat steps to plot out movies, so I thought I'd check it out.

As I do in my book, Blake Snyder believes that the hook is the sink or swim part of your screenplay. He has two nice points to make about the hook:

It should be ironic. E.g. in PRETTY WOMAN, a guy falls in love with a hooker he's hired for the weekend. In DIE HARD, a cop's bad visit with his wife gets a lot worse when terrorists take over her office.

You should be easily able to see the movie from the hook. Any pro screenwriter could write a decent movie from either of the above hooks.

I am not sure that every great hook is ironic, unless you stretch the definition of "ironic"; I'm not sure what's ironic about the hook of SPLASH or WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING. But a great hook definitely gives you a good story in a nutshell.

I'll point out more of Blake's good ideas as I continue on through the book...

The Kind of Email I Like To Get

Friend o' the Blog Kody Chamberlain writes:

I just sold my first film to Paramount without a script, or a comic.

I had pitched a high concept story idea to Ross Richie at Boom Studios (comic publisher who also sold TAG to Universal, the freelance gig I did with Keith Giffen) with the intention of doing a graphic novel or miniseries of the story. I worked my ass off to build a strong hook and rough direction for the story and dropped it in his email box.

He loved the premise and the concept and insisted we pitch it as a TV series instead, and we could still do the comic whenever. So I said sure thing and he sent it around to a few contacts and got some strong early hits. Ross had a few meetings set up with film studios about various other projects and dropped the concept for my project idea in a few of the meetings. Before I knew it, Paramount made us a pretty strong offer. Cut to a few meetings later and we closed the deal.

So there's proof of the power of a strong hook, and I thank you, sir, for offering up the advice on building a strong hook and insisting that it deserved more attention than most people give it.

See the Variety article about it.

Way to go, Kody.

My Visual Pitch

My VisualPitch gives writers the opportunity showcase their work to industry pros by creating Visual Pitches (think mini-trailers) of their screenplays. Filmmakers with completed projects looking for a home are also uploading.

When I was starting out in the biz, occasionally people would shoot trailers for their movie rather than shooting a short film. You like my trailer, fund my movie.

The problem with shooting a trailer is that the best moments from a movie come organically from the scenes that are shot. When all you're shooting is, say, a single line from scene, the moment rarely comes off the way it would if you were shooting the whole scene. You wind up with an underfunded and undershot trailer -- 'cause you have no money to shoot it with -- that detracts instead of adding to your script.

My VisualPitch is trying another way to get around the ol' "No one will read my query" fear. They throw together some trailer-esque music and a bunch of stock photographs, Ken Burns style, to create a faux trailer.

I watched one. And the music really did sound like a trailer. The problem is, the query didn't give away very much of the story. Something about two brothers divided by a bridge, and then a woman, and then a guy who's been 23 years old since 1935. So it's like some mashup of an angsty Irish family drama and a vampire story, I guess.

While I applaud the effort to think outside the box, I don't think this is the way pitches are going to go. Because all you can do in this is dress up your logline. And that means I have to sit through a sixty second trailer, and react to the music and the slideshow, instead of just reading your logline.

If I were still taking pitches (hasn't been my job in years) I would just want to know what your story is about. Just tell me what your story is about. You can do it in one sentence. Three sentences tops. I wanna know who your main character is; what his opportunity, problem or goal is; what obstacles or antagonist he faces; what he might win, and what he stands to lose.

The elements of a story, right?

If you have a good story, you don't need to hire a firm to create a trailer for you. All you have to do is tell people what your story is. They will want to read it. That's what they do for a living.

My Visual Pitch's slogan is: You've gotta be here if you're gonna be seen.

But it ain't true. Everyone wants a great hook. A great story. And if you don't have a good story, no amount of multimedia slideshows will get people to buy it.

UPDATE: Pamela Schott of MyVIsualPitch replies:

I really appreciate that you took the time to review the site and comment on it, and your feedback is absolutely invaluable to me.

What is not evident from the home page (but becomes evident once a producer is signed in), is that all the information you want (i.e., the one-sentence logline, etc.) is displayed in its entirety. Actually, an artist can upload a logline, synopsis, and treatment. They also indicate what material is available, such as completed screenplay, or, in the case of feature trailer uploads, the entire film itself.

The Visual Pitch is there to pique a producer's interest; anything else he or she would need to know is accessible. But what I think needs to happen is that there should be a "This is what the industry will see" snapshot page on the home page (or somewhere close by) so that artists and industry pros alike know that there is the substance to back the pictures.

I think I can make a case for Visual Pitches as an alternative (initially, anyway) to simply reading loglines. As an example, these days, more people in my industry pro target audience get their news from online sources. And if there is a video available about the story, more will view the video before deciding whether or not to tuck into the story.

On the other side of this is the artist. Again, in my target audience, these are young people who are increasingly turning to user-generated content to express themselves. Along these lines, the feedback from this demographic has been instantaneous and very enthusiastic. [... snip ...] What I would consider the "youtube crowd" has really embraced the site (film school kids and their profs leading the pack).

What your blog post drives home, regardless of demographic assumptions, is that we need to be clearer on what the industry pro will have available to view, assuming the Visual Pitch hooks him in.