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Debunking Screenwriting Myths, Part 4: Concepts
by Geno Scala
We’ve all heard the expression, “Concept is King!” It’s short, catchy, and the alliteration of the hard “cah” sound makes it work. But what does it really mean?
A screenplay “concept” is your basic story idea- the sinking of the Titanic, a man-eating shark that stalks victims at a summer tourist spot. That is the basic premise of your story. When discussing screenplays and screenwriting, we’re often talking about “high concepts”; an idea that would attract a wide demographic and is unique, fresh and original, and can be easily understood.
People often mistake “high concept” with high production value and costs. This is not necessarily the case. It is also NOT great characters, NOT big action scenes, and NOT a story with twists and turns. A high concept idea is one that is easily understood by the most people in the fewest terms. If I had to describe a screenplay that involves “a post-apocalyptic government on a planet that was about to run out of energy because the seas turned to desert, and because of a conspiracy to eradicate the beings, and because”…because…because…you get my drift.
This is extremely important when writing spec scripts. Too often I read spec scripts from new, fresh-faced, anxious and motivated (while also unknown and unproduced) screenwriters that make “Battlefield Earth” look like a half-hour situation comedy. Elaborate set-ups, vast settings, hundreds of characters, CGI, stunt-laden, FX galore, etc. The basic premise or theme of the story, if there IS a story beneath it all, is lost and crushed by the weight of the potential production.
Often times, screenwriters will spend days and weeks perfecting their loglines and synopses, and months or years completing and perfecting their screenplays. They’ll spend more time and money developing a comprehensive marketing plan and a thorough networking “strategery”. What they forget is that NO amount of networking, no business marketing plan and no logline or synopsis paid-for assistance is going to get their screenplay read, and/or purchased, if the concept is ill-conceived.
It is often said that there are only a few GOOD ideas; just a million new ways to present them. Discover a new twist on an old idea, and you will have a winning concept. For example, we’ve all seen the old, tired, played out rom-com formula “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl”. I’m not a big rom-com guy, but even I have seen enough of these. So, along comes “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” who deals with the post-break-up heartache, from the male perspective, then has him run into his old flame, while she’s vacationing with her new boyfriend! Another current movie, “The Five Year Engagement”, deals with an oft-talked-about rom-com topic that is quite prevalent in society, but hasn’t been (successfully) translated onto screen: the ultra-long engagement period (the fact that the two movies star the same cast and have the same director is purely coincidental). The premise is still “boy meets girl”, but the twist in the concept gives it a fresh, unique and original appeal to the story.
When writing a spec script, and if your goal is to SELL the script, it’s best to write a story with a high concept, easily understood, with a minimum number of characters and in a limited setting. Let the CONCEPT get the producers interested in it enough to request a read, and then let your writing- the wonderful characters that A-listers want to play, the fantastic dialogue with memorable lines, and the intriguing and/or hilarious storyline- sell it.
Then, rinse and repeat…several times. Once you’ve established a name for yourself as a writer, you’ll get your “Abyss” made.
Before typing another word, review the concept on that script that you’re spending every waking moment on. Ask your family and friends, your fellow writers in your writing group, or your script mentor, if the concept is a good one. If it doesn’t fit the general criteria of having a wide enough audience appeal, being original, fresh and unique, and easily understandable, then consider switching gears to a more marketable script idea.
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Geno Scala has been writing for over twenty years, and was one of the Executive Directors for the 1999-2000 Academy Awards presentation. He is an optioned screenwriter with nine screenplays to his credit, and is an alumnus of ScreenwritingU. He maintains a business in Hollywood, and resides in beautiful Huntsville, Alabama with his rocket-scientist wife, a daughter in grad school, another daughter in college in CA, and two teen-aged sons.
Catch up with Geno || twitter: @Sharkeatingman & @thescriptmentor || facebook: Shark-Eating Man Productions & The Script Mentor
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Accounting, for Screenwriters
by Dan Ronyak
Here’s the balance sheet: You have a Day Job doing accounting. Baby number one is two years old, and baby number two is on deck. That guy at church has that bumper sticker that says “Don’t Quit Yer Day Job”. A sign, right? You belong in that cubicle.
But you know what you love. It’s why you got the English degree twenty years ago. It’s why you write movie reviews online. You rightly wore out your hushpuppies doing the hem/haw in that software aisle, and you bought the script software; boom, you’re a formatting genius. You’re a Screenwriter by Night, a Weekend Scriptographer. Write-o El Script-o Moonlight-o, in German.
Yes, I too am a screenwriter by night and accountant by day. Here are the Top Ten Do’s and Doh!’s I’ve learned over five years of trying to write my… Chubby Rain*
1) Do: Budget first, just like a good accountant. Write for a low budget wherever you can. Writing a no-budget scene really makes you focus on the genre and elements you seriously want to put on film. Finish a no-budget scene = 10 points
2) Doh!: Studios are walled off like the Pentagon. To quote Harrison Ford in Six Days, Seven Nights: “That plane? It’s five miles high going six hundred miles an hour. They wouldn’t see a nuclear explosion if they were looking for it!” The best way to gain the attention of studios is to write an adaptation of a bestseller and get a known star or known director for your film. Otherwise, time is not well-spent on studios. Embracing Indie Film over studios = 25 points.
3) Do: Find a low-budget, local way to shoot. You’ll fast track your way to production credits on your résumé.10 points for contacting a high school or college film class to find a wannabe director to read your script.
4) Doh! The professionals all say rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, but I don’t have time to rewrite. Divide marketing time and writing time in two. Pick your favorite script/genre for marketing time, and focus your rewrite skills there. Everything else will admittedly be a first draft, but you’ll polish it when/if you get to pitch it. On that note, do be aware of box office mojo: which genres are selling, how many sci-fi movies versus dramatic films are actually getting funded, etc. Be trend savvy. If you happen to be at a decision point on genre, maybe hedge your bets in the direction the trend is tracking. This will give your pitch poignancy and if it films it will have more weight at film festivals. It doesn’t hurt to pitch the genre the market is buying… 10 points for keeping both marketing and writing going.
5) Doh!: The reader wanted “characters described in more detail”. Good advice, but not for us. We write for Producers, Actors, Directors who look forward to developing the material further. Sometimes the best read leaves the characters in archetypes. Politely dismiss comments that demand heavy development at this stage.
6) Do: Market your script every way you can locally. Even if a known director wants a studio to produce his script, he has to jump the hoops of Agent, Readers, Producers. We’re the relative unknowns; statistically speaking, we are most efficient low-budget local, with the possibility of finding dynamite here.
7) Doh! I write script after script and they sit on my shelf. I don’t have time to market them! You have value as your scripts pile up. Make a name for yourself and producers are sure to want the rest of the scripts. You’ve earned 10 points for not quitting your day job.
8) Do: Post an ad on Craigslist to find a director = 25 points
9) Doh!: The advice books aren’t geared for us hobby writers. When it comes to advice books, you’re on your own. But you know that. You can learn by developing your own style through your writing, which is your goal; find your voice. I wouldn’t expect a paycheck in five years or even ten, but who’s counting? We’re writers, not accountants.
10) Luck = 5 points …“Afram, you wrote a great script! Your accounting days are over!”~ Steve Martin in Bowfinger.
I’m five years into this very venture. I’ve joined writing groups. Left writing groups. Started a screenwriting group that spun into a film festival. I sold one screenplay and have collaboration contracts with five others. I’ve adapted novels and real life stories. You can do all that in five years as a Screenwriter by Night. Net earnings in five years? Approx. $5000. Putting on the accounting hat… carry the one… that’s one thousand dollars a year. Hmm. But. Writer’s Guild minimums on collaboration contracts are worth approximately $34k for a low budget film. (How that works is, if the movie gets funding, and said funding is under $5mil the Screenwriter by Night is paid $34k.). All totaled we’re talking somewhere north of $200k of contracts already in hand. This is the kind of accounting that can make the agents call.
*The name of Afram’s script in Bowfinger is Chubby Rain.
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Dan Ronyak Screenwriter by Night can be found on Twitter || @QDuddly ||
His lovely wife Cori works at Makeup Artist Magazine in Vancouver, WA.
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Writing Pictures- The Classic Screenwriters: Carl Mayer
by Robin Bailes
When The Artist was nominated for the Academy Award for best screenplay there were people (and I know some of them) who said it was ridiculous because the film had no dialogue, an attitude which shows a complete lack of understanding of how cinematic storytelling works. Cinema is a visual medium and the most essential ability for any screenwriter is to be able to tell a story with pictures. We all know however that large chunks of stage direction can be daunting to readers. So how do you make your visual storytelling come to life on the page? Well, you could do worse than to check out the work of one of the great screenwriters of the silent era; Carl Mayer.
Mayer is best remembered for his first film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and for his many collaborations with F. W. Murnau, and although Mayer did not write Murnau’s most famous work (Nosferatu), their films together include some of the best of the late silent era. Mayer wrote 7 of Murnau’s 21 films including Sunrise, voted by Cahier du Cinema as the single greatest masterwork in the history of cinema, and The Last Laugh, which has no dialogue titles at all so the visuals carry the entire narrative.
In Murnau, Mayer certainly found an ideal interpreter for his ideas, prior to The Last Laugh he had written other title-free films (notably Scherben and Sylvester for director Lupu Pick) but they did not work as well. The great achievement of The Last Laugh is not so much that you can follow it despite the absence of the titles, but that you barely notice the absence. Mayer’s work needed a great director to visualise it but it is taking nothing away from Murnau to say that Mayer was a huge factor in the success of their films. Indeed you can see how much Mayer influenced the director in the fact that Murnau made notes on the scripts of other writers in the distinctive Mayer style.
That style is the secret to Mayer’s success. He does not describe a scene per se, he tells you what you will see as a string of single images, which is of course what cinema is. To an extent he is in fact directing the scene. He wrote in brief staccato phrases, using punctuation descriptively rather than grammatically, making his scripts read like expressionist poetry, and yet their meaning is always clear. Take this excerpt from his script for the film Tartuffe;
Night. Dark.
But! Coming down the first stair:
like a shadow: almost indistinguishable.
Tartuffe?
Yes. There he stands.
Just a black shape.
Describing this in complete sentences would not only take more space but would lose much of the atmosphere. By using a question mark after ‘Tartuffe’, Mayer lets the reader know that the audience should not immediately recognise the character. The alternative would be to say ‘At first it’s just a shadowy figure but then we recognise Tartuffe’, an unwieldy and lengthy way of saying something Mayer coveys in one word. And it was not just visuals he painted, he used his unique style to express emotions in his characters as well, such as here in Schloss Vogelod;
She stays for a few more seconds. Then: She goes.
Silent. Calm. Heavy. Like lead. Now: The
Door: Then: the chatelaine. Alone.
The colons dictate the pace and thus the mood of the scene, while the description of the character’s movements says so much more than ‘sad’, ever could.
Though he wrote Murnau’s first two US films, Mayer did not move to the US with Murnau. After Murnau’s untimely death in 1931 Mayer made a successful transition into the sound era with a pair of films for director Paul Czinner. In 1932 the rise of the Nazi party forced him, as a Jew, to flee to England. He did mostly uncredited work on the scripts of others but seems never to have completed another script. He died of cancer in 1944 at the age of just 49, his contribution to film largely forgotten.
Mayer conveyed complex emotion and situations by use of image alone. I wouldn’t recommend emulating his style exactly, but there’s certainly a lesson in his ability to convey visual storytelling verbally. To my knowledge only two of Mayer’s scripts have been published, but they are worth tracking down for anyone with a serious interest in screenwriting.
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Robin Bailes is a freelance writer with various credits on stage, page, screen and radio. He has 4 published stage shows, has written for 6 BBC radio shows, was a winner in the BBC’s Last Laugh sitcom writing competition and has a feature film in development with Andris Films. He is writer and presenter of the web-series ‘Dark Corners (of this sick world)’ and has written short stories for various publications both print and online. Robin is a passionate devotee of silent cinema has written a book on the subject called ‘Just As Good But Quieter’, for which he is currently seeking a publisher. Robin is currently available for paid writing work.
Follow Robin on Twitter @robinbailes
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