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Build Out Your Script: Choosing The Right Idea To Write

By Jacob Krueger

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As many of you know this has been one of the most exciting months in the history of the Jacob Krueger studio. We have recently signed a lease on a new location in New York City with an expected opening date of January 1st. We're going to have three brand new classrooms, eight one-on-one offices for our Protrack mentorship program, and plenty of space for our students to write and to gather. 

This is the culmination of a dream that started about ten years ago for me and my staff. And in the process of finding and now building out that space, I've learned a lot of lessons, many of which apply not only to New York City real estate, but also to screenwriting.

So, in this series of podcasts I'm going to be sharing some of the lessons that I've learned and how they relate to screenwriting.

Lesson #1:

The Perfect Space & The Perfect Idea Have One Thing In Common: Neither Of Them Actually Exist.

Over the past six months I have probably looked at about five hundred spaces all throughout New York City. And I'm not even going to talk here about the spaces that were obviously not a fit for my school, I want to talk about the ones that potentially were.

Because the process of finding a space is a lot like that unenviable hunt for the perfect screenplay idea. Oftentimes during the process of searching, it feels like we're never going to find that right idea or we're never going to find that right space.

And that's because spaces, like ideas, tend to fall into two categories…

The first are the ones that look perfect when you first see them. They're in the right location, the right size, the right price. And these are few and far between. But when you look at them you get so excited, only to realize once you get involved in the negotiation, just like once you get involved in the writing, that there are problems that you never anticipated: crazy landlords, unexpected bidding wars, hidden costs, or clauses in the lease that you never would have expected when you first sat down to look at the space.

The second category of spaces are the spaces that have obvious problems and in New York you can imagine what those problems are: they're either too expensive or they're in the wrong place. And the process of looking at space after space after space trying to find the right combination of size and prices and location reminded me of a time in my own screenwriting career, shortly after I'd finished The Matthew Shepard Story.

The first draft of Matthew Shepard was without a doubt, at that point in my career, the best thing that I had ever written. And I remember setting the goal that this next project, whatever it was, had to be better, even better, than Matthew Shepard.

And I remember going through a process of rejecting idea after idea after idea. It was one of the rare times in my life during which I actually had writers' block.

No matter how good the idea was, I could always see a problem. I could always see something getting in the way. I always felt like it wasn't quite going to match up to Matthew Shepard.

And if you're a writer you've probably had this experience before as well, feeling like no idea is good enough, or embarking on an idea that feels perfect, only to realize that there are problems underneath that you didn't anticipate and that you don't quite know how to handle.

In the process of finding a space, ultimately I had to decide on what was really important to me. The things that I knew were vital: I needed a ten year lease.