Write Your Screenplay Podcast

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By, Jacob Krueger

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Colossal: Externalizing the Internal

Podcast Transcript:

If you haven’t seen Colossal yet, this is definitely a movie that you need to check out. Because whether you love genre-bending monster movies or not, Colossal is a film that shows you just how much you can get away with if you are willing to trust yourself.

 

This is an example of a movie that simply should not work, so let me give you the premise really quickly. And for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, it’s important to understand that this is not some experimental art film. This is a mostly naturalistic character-driven drama about alcoholism.

 

Except instead of exploring alcoholism in a traditional dramatic format, it explores it by mashing up B-Movie, sci-fi elements, with a mostly naturalistic script that seems like it’s going in a romantic-comedy-with-some-dramatic-elements, direction.

 

In the simplest terms. it’s the story of Gloria, who is a raging alcoholic, total mess of a character, who seems to have some strange connection to a Godzilla monster that keeps on attacking Seoul, Korea every time she gets drunk.

 

As if that weren’t hard enough, this movie seems to break pretty much every other rule as well.

 

For example, the common wisdom is that you’re supposed to have a likeable main character in your movie, but this main character is far from likeable. Her alcoholism is so out of control that we find ourselves actually sympathizing with her nasty ex-boyfriend.

 

This is a character who uses people, who is irresponsible, who is out of control. At the beginning of the movie, gets kicked out of her boyfriend’s apartment and is forced to return home to the abandoned house of her parents.

 

Arriving there, she meets Oscar, played by Jason Sudeikis, a guy who has always been in love with her since they grew up as kids, who keeps showering her with gifts, who gives her a job at his bar, who tries to do anything he can to be nice to her… (Even if there is something that feels just a little bit stalkery about him, just maybe a little bit too nice, maybe just a little bit controlling).

 

We feel like we’re going in a Romantic Comedy direction-- like the film is making a promise to us. And again, the common wisdom is that once you start to to set the rules of a Romantic Comedy genre, that’s what where we’re supposed to go! We’re supposed to watch the story of two troubled souls coming together. We’re supposed to watch this story of the guy who always loved the girl, finally finding a way to connect. Of two broken souls healing each other. We’re supposed to have a happy ending, right?

 

Mild spoilers ahead...

 

Instead Gloria responds mostly by playing mind games with Oscar. By taking advantage of what at least at the time seems like is generosity.

 

She does this by attempting to seduce his best friend Joel, even knowing how Oscar feels about her. And she does it again much later in the film when she shows up at his bar with her ex-boyfriend, Tim, even knowing what that’s likely to mean for Oscar.

 

But of course, Oscar’s not really such a nice guy either. He’s not gonna play the likeable, romantic, comedy role that we expect him to play. Instead, he turns out to be the real villain of the piece. Whereas Gloria turns out to be the real hero.

 

And though we start off on a Romantic Comedy trajectory, we soon find ourselves going in a much darker direction.

 

On the playground of their childhoods a battle is playing out, a battle not for love, but for control-- a battle between sobriety and alcoholism, a battle between two children and two adults, a battle between a giant robot controlled by Oscar, and a giant monster controlled by Gloria, a battle between past present, between childhood and adulthood, between the psychological programs and patterns that were built in the past, and the people that these main characters want to become.

 

So I think it’s safe to say that all these things are about as far as you can go from a traditional Romantic Comedy structure.

 

In fact, this might be just about as weird a premise that you could come up with for a movie. Which is why it is so beautiful to see how well it actually works.

 

So often, as screenwriters, we think our idea isn’t good enough, or commercial enough, or no one will understand it. We think that no one will find the real story that we want to tell. We think that the crazy flights of our imagination will not make it on the screen.

 

And I’m not saying that everybody has to be Charlie Kaufman or Nacho Vigilando, but learning that you can push on any premise and make it work is one of the most valuable lessons you can have as a screenwriter. Learning that your own instincts, even when they take you to totally crazy places, are actually the only thing you can depend on as a writer is one of the most valuable lessons you can learn in screenwriting.

 

Now, does this mean that all of a sudden every crazy idea you’ve ever had should make it into your movie? Absolutely not. If you’re writing a traditional Romantic Comedy and a monster shows up, you have to ask yourself: is this really the film, or is this the metaphor?

 

But in this case, Colossal is actually a movie about monsters.

 

It’s a movie about the monsters that live inside of us. It’s a movie about the monsters that we can become. It’s a movie about the monsters who appear like monsters, and the monsters that appear like friends. It’s a movie about the monsters from our childhood that we internalize. It’s a movie about the monster of addiction. And it’s a movie about the monster that is rampaging in Gloria’s soul. And wreaking havoc on every life that she touches.

 

Our job as screenwriters is actually very simple. Our job as screenwriters are to look inside of ourselves and find the emotions, the characters, the questions that live there. To look inside of ourselves, find the things that are true.

 

In other words, our job is to externalize the internal. To take the things that live under the surface for us, and put them up on the screen where everyone can see them.

 

Sometimes that means our job is to look at our own monsters. And sometimes that means our job is to claw past the monsters that we believe ourselves to be to find the beauty that lives under the surface. Sometimes our job is to dramatize the parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of. And sometimes our job is to dramatize the parts of ourselves that we find most beautiful.

 

In a similar way, our job as screenwriters is to dive into the psyches of our characters. To dive into the characters that exist within them.

 

The reason that Colossal works despite its crazy premise is not because it’s a perfect movie -- it isn’t, and there are certain moments, especially, towards the beginning and towards the end where you can feel a certain bumpiness, where the writer still is trying to figure out what the structure means to the real world.

 

The reason that Colossal works-- the reason that all these disparate elements that feel like they shouldn't go together still do-- the reason that this film works is because of the way that all of these characters grow from inside of Gloria.

 

Carl Jung wrote about the idea of the Collective Unconscious.  When Jung’s spoke about the collective unconscious, he was not speaking as a screenwriter; he was one of the fathers of modern psychology. When he talked about the collective unconscious, what he talked about was the idea that there is a fabric that weaves us all together-- A fabric that he believed that we could tap into in our dreams.

 

And when we tapped into the Collective Unconscious, that fabric that unites all of us, we could tap into the metaphors that meant the same thing to every person, the metaphors that we all shared.

 

So if you imagine the world-- if you imagine every character in the world, and every situation in the world, and every metaphor, and every emotion, as a giant, giant, giant circle, you could imagine that your known world, the little bit of you that you know, is like the tiniest little dot in that circle. It’s tinier than a pin.

 

And the process of writing is about looking inside to find the parts of ourselves that we don’t actually know.

 

Looking inside to expand the amount of the Collective Unconscious that we can tap into as screenwriters. In other words, looking inside to find the outside.

 

Similarly, when they begin their journeys, our characters are like a little dot in a giant circle of the universe -- a little tiny dot that’s only aware of a tiny piece of who they can actually be.

 

And our job as screenwriters is to take the journey with them.

 

That journey isn’t always a logical journey. Sometimes it’s a metaphorical journey or an emotional journey. But to take a journey with them, looking inside of them in order to look inside of ourselves. Tapping into the Collective Unconscious in them to unmask and reveal the pieces of them that they’re not even aware of.

 

When we begin Colossal, there’s a part of Gloria that thinks she is the monster. Just like there is the part of every alcoholic that thinks of themselves as the monster.

 

And, similarly, there’s a part of Gloria that thinks of others as the monster. Who thinks of alcohol as the monster. Who thinks of her boyfriend Tim as the monster. A part of her that feels victimized and a part of her that truly hates herself.

 

And,...

As Colossal illustrates so powerfully, our job as screenwriters is actually very simple: to look inside of ourselves and find the emotions, the characters, the questions that live there. To look inside of ourselves, find the things that are true, and then externalize the internal. To take the things that live under the surface for us, and put them up on the screen where everyone can see them. Sometimes that means our job is to look at our own monsters. And sometimes that means our job is to claw past the monsters that we believe ourselves to be to find the beauty that lives under the surface…”

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By, Jacob Krueger

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How do you know when your screenplay is done?

Podcast Transcript:

Recently we’ve been getting a lot of questions from our listeners, so I’m going to use today’s podcast to answer one of the most frequently asked questions. If you have a question for me that you would like answered, feel free to reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter and I’ll try to answer as many of them as I can on this podcast.

 

The question that we’re going to be discussing today is one that comes up all the time, “How do you know when your screenplay is done?”

 

I felt this is a particularly interesting question to look at, especially in light of the concepts we discussed last week about pitching.

 

Obviously you don’t want to be going out trying to sell your script, trying to pitch your script, if it’s not done. And at the same time, as screenwriters we find ourselves in this endless cycle of not done, not done, not done, not done, not done, not done. Rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. Starting over, starting over, starting over.

 

So how do you know when that cycle needs to end? How do you know when your script is actually done?

 

One of the things you have to understand if you’re going to answer this question is that there's a big difference between two words that we often use interchangeably. There’s a big difference between finished and done.

 

I believe it was Oscar Wilde who first said, great scripts “aren’t finished, they’re merely abandoned.”

 

As much as we would like to believe that someday this darn thing is truly going to be done, the truth is there is almost always more that we can do to a script. There’s almost always something we could ask, something that we could deepen, something that we could layer or nuance.

 

That means our criteria for actually completing our goals when it comes to screenwriting are actually different from almost any non-artistic field that we could be working in. I think this is true for any art, whether it’s painting, novels, poetry, or music. In the arts, we don’t get the same feeling of completion that an accountant gets. Or that a salesperson gets. Or that a burger flipper gets. There’s no clear place where it is truly done where all the criteria have been met.

 

So if we’re going to feel successful, if we’re going to be successful, and if we’re even going to know we're successful, we need a different way of evaluating ourselves. We need a different type of criteria.

 

We can’t just use a checklist because there’s always going to be something else added to that checklist. We can’t just use a bunch of coverage notes because no matter how brilliant your coverage reader may be-- and the truth is, a lot of them are not brilliant -- they’re going to be full of conflicting feedback. And as soon as you start making changes, half of those written notes are going to change and are no longer going to be valid.

 

We can’t merely rely on the advice of others, because our work is subjective and some people are going to love it, and some people are going to hate it.

 

So what are we supposed to rely on?

 

What we actually need to rely on are two separate things that end up working together. We need to first rely on our feelings as the writer. Then we need to rely on the feedback that we’re receiving from the outside. And this is where that distinction between finished and done becomes so important.

Every time you reach the end of a draft, there are two very important questions you need to ask yourself. Question number 1 is “Am I done?” And question number 2 is “Is it finished?”

 

These questions are very different because one is about your personal experience as the writer of this project, and the other is about the audience’s experience of your script.

 

So, before we get to finished let's start with done.

 

Let’s talk about what it means to be done.

 

Because here’s the weird thing about screenwriting. You are going to write some really good scripts, and you’re going to write some really bad scripts. And oftentimes you’re going to have absolutely no control over whether they come out beautiful, or whether they come out terrible.

 

The truth is that any script can become good if you’re willing to push on it hard enough. But sometimes as writers, we do take wrong turns. We do get seduced by scripts that are actually not really serving our voice as writers, or are not serving the questions that are burning for us right now.

 

Similarly, sometimes an idea that feels like it’s going to be terrible, or external, or “off” in some way, actually turns out really brilliant when you start to write.

 

No matter how great your idea, or how terrible your idea, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have the same experience: about halfway through the script you’re going to think your idea sucks.

 

No matter how brilliant your idea was in the beginning, no matter how wonderful it was, somewhere along the line you’re gonna think it sucks. So, what a lot of writers end up doing is, they get about halfway through script, after script, after script-- or maybe not even halfway through, maybe 30 pages in, or 10 pages in-- script, after script, after script, after script, and then they abandon the idea. They tell themselves, “you know what, this is bad, this is never gonna come out.”

 

Other writers get stuck in a different cycle where they finish draft, after draft, after draft, after draft. And each draft seems to make no improvement over the one before! The script becomes different, but actually no closer to finished. It simply becomes a different kind of screenplay.

 

If we're gonna succeed, if we're gonna ever be finished, or done, we need to avoid both of these traps.

 

The avoidance of these traps actually begins at the goal-setting process. So the first thing you need to know is what are you going for right now as a writer: what is your goal?

If you don’t know your goal you will never know if you’re done. And if you don’t know when you’re done, you will never feel successful.

To go back to the examples that I just gave you. If your goal is to finish a script, you might feel really terrible after starting 10 scripts and abandoning all of them. On the other hand, if your goal is to explore for a while, and see what the next thing that grabs you is, starting 10 scripts and abandoning them might be a really brilliant thing to do. It might be a great step in the right direction.

 

If your goal is to experiment and broaden a skill in yourself, playing around with a bunch of scenes that don’t go anywhere might be wonderful, whereas if your goal is to finish this draft by May 23rd, then that kind of process would be very bad. You wouldn’t be done.

 

Done depends on the goal. And that means you need to become an expert at goal-setting for yourself so that you could know when you actually achieved done.

 

Which means, at the beginning of your writing process, when you start a new project, the very first thing you should do is set a goal.

 

Set a goal, not based on anybody else’s desire, not based on anything anybody else told you to do, not based on what you should do-- in the history of time no one has ever actually done what they should do. Don’t base it on anything except what you want right now for yourself as a writer.

 

Remember that this goal does not have to be about the project, because everything you write is actually serving two different parts of you. It’s serving the growing writer-- it’s serving your skills, your craft, your art, your voice, the tools that you want to develop as a writer, your writer muscles. And it’s also serving the project.

 

You’re always serving these two things at the same time.

 

So the first question you want to ask yourself is: what is my project goal?

 

Then you may want to ask yourself: what is my artistic goal?

 

You don’t want to set 12 goals. You want to set one. And this is one of the mistakes people make as they write, and especially the mistake they make as they rewrite.

 

Oftentimes our rewrites turn into endless checklists of endless things that we have to do endlessly.

 

We go in and do all the things in our checklist, and our script doesn’t actually get any better. And we don’t feel any closer to finished. Oftentimes we go into a rewrite and don’t even know what we’re improving! We don’t even know what we’re taking to the next level. We don’t even know what our goal is. We just know vaguely that we want to make it better.

 

If you’re going to be done you need a specific goal. And a specific goal can be something like this:

 

I want to play around and just explore different characters who speak differently.

 

I want to start a bunch of different stuff and see if there’s one that grabs my attention.

 

I want to play around with theme.

 

I want to write something about the theme of love.

 

I want to explore a question that haunts me.

 

I want to get stronger at using images. I want to write a script or a scene where 80% is image and only 20% is dialogue.

 

I want to become more comfortable with dialogue; I want to really learn how to let my characters’ voices sing, and I’m going to just write scenes where characters talk to each other a lot.

 

These are all really specific goals. They allow us to focus on one thing instead of 20 things.

We’re going to set an end date for that goal so we know when we’re done....

Learn how to know if your screenplay rewrite is finished and how to deal with conflicting feedback and coverage notes about your script with Jacob Krueger.

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By, Jacob Krueger

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FIX YOUR PITCH!

This is perhaps the most dangerous screenwriting lecture you will ever hear.

 

That’s because today I’m going to be talking about one of the most dangerous concepts for screenwriters: the concept of pitch.

 

The reason that pitch is so dangerous for screenwriters is that when all we’re thinking about is “can I sell it, can I sell it, can I sell it?”  it takes us away from the kind of writing that we can actually sell.

 

Similarly, when all we’re thinking about is “what do they want, what do they want, what do they want,” it cuts us off from our own voice.

 

If you’ve listened to this podcast you know that without your voice you don’t have a shot. That in fact, your voice is the only thing that a producer can buy.

 

The truth is if a producer wants to buy a well executed, well-crafted script with a good hook, there are thousands of working screenwriters from whom they can buy those scripts.

 

In order to take a chance on you, in order to take a chance on a new screenwriter, you need to be giving them something they can’t get from somebody else. That thing that you can give that they can’t get from somebody else is your voice.

 

The biggest danger of pitch is it’s potential to distract you from the questions that actually lead to great writing. What do you want the script to be? Who is the character that’s fascinating to you? What is the question that you don’t know the answer to, that you wish you did? What’s the event that moved you and changed your life? What’s the dream you had last night that kept you up? What’s the terror that haunts you? Or the dream that keeps tickling you?

 

Instead of starting there with the personal, we start outside of ourselves. We put our focus on what they want. And all kinds of problems emerge.

 

The first is that you don’t know who they are. And because you don’t know who they are, instead of dealing with the real they, usually they just become a projection of the most insecure part of yourself.

 

So, the first problem is that when we start to think about they, the they that we think about is not like some cool producer who’s going to dig our work.

 

The they that we think about is the part of us that thinks we’re not good enough.

 

It’s the part of us that thinks that our idea is never going to sell. The part of us that feels like we have nothing to offer. The part of us that feels like our craft isn’t good enough, or our voice isn’t good enough, or our art isn’t good enough. The part of us that wonders if we have enough talent.

 

As writers, we are all desperately insecure. We’re desperately insecure because, as writers, we’re introspective people. Our job is to look inside of ourselves, look at those little niches that most people don’t look at, those little doubts, those little questions.

 

And so, because of this, if you allow yourself to get into thinking of the they that is going to judge you, it’s going to cut you off from your real instincts. It’s going to cut you off from your freedom to improvise as an artist. It’s going to cut you off from your voice.

 

You may end up with a really clear, clean idea, but it’s likely that the execution is going to be lacking something. It’s going to be paper thin. It’s going to feel like there is something missing, like there is a glass ceiling that you can’t quite get through in your writing.

 

The second problem occurs when we start our process by thinking about Can I sell it? Can I sell it? Can I sell it? is that you probably don’t have a clue if you can sell it or not. And, most likely, neither does anybody else in your life.

 

Now if you’re lucky enough to have a really powerful agent or a really powerful manager, that person’s job is to be on the phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, finding out what is hip, what is popular, what is in style, what is in vogue right now.

 

But if you’re a normal human being who walks the earth, particularly if you’re a normal human being who probably has a full-time job, and on top of that is probably doing a second full-time job writing, the truth is you have no time to play the social networking game of finding out what’s coming in and out of fashion.

 

By the time you actually see a movie in the theatre, you’re already 2 years behind the trend.

 

So the next problem when you start thinking Can I sell it? Can I sell it? Can I sell it? is that not only are you most likely censoring your true voice, but you’re also probably full of doubt about the stuff that actually makes it on the page.

 

The truth is you probably have no idea what “commercial” is. Because the truth is the industry has no idea what “commercial” is. What “commercial” is changes every day.

 

Back when I was coming up in the 90s, what people were talking about was hook, and money. Hook and money, hook and money, hook and money. You had to talk pure business to the business people because they weren't even seeing film as art, they were seeing film as just an extension of the MBA training they’d had before they headed out to Los Angeles to make more money in a very lucrative profession.

 

But when we were speaking to managers and agents and producers at the iTVfest Retreat, we were hearing something very different. We were hearing managers say things like “yeah, we’re making art.” “Yeah, we’re looking for artists.”

 

That’s a really exciting change. And where did that change come from? Did managers suddenly become philanthropists? Absolutely not.

 

What happened was we’ve had a little renaissance happen in television. And that renaissance is trickling up from television to features. And what agents and managers and producers have finally realized is oh my god there is “money in them hills.” There is money in art.

 

So, this is a very exciting time to be a filmmaker. But if you’re thinking about “What can I sell?” If you’re thinking about “What is hot right now?” If you’re out there chasing the trends, not only are you once again cutting yourself off from your own vision, you’re also most likely chasing a trend that is already over.

 

The truth of the matter is to sell something you’ve got to get a little lucky.

 

Because even if I were to whisper into your ear exactly what is hot right now, by the time you write the darn script, you’re now a year behind. Especially if you put the time in to actually get that script to a place where it fully captures your voice, what you’re trying to do as a writer.

 

I started my career writing with professional screenwriters. I had a really unique job in the industry. Basically, my boss would knock on my door and he’d say “I want to make a movie about Sacajawea,” or whatever, name the topic of the day.

 

And I would go out and I would write the story. And oftentimes writing the story meant writing the script, because I was never a guy who could just arrive at a story without really getting to know my characters. I couldn’t arrive at the kind of story that was going to sell.

 

So, in the process of writing the treatment, or the story, or the outline, I would often have written about 70% of the script. Not in the final version, but in a rough version.

 

Then we would go out and sell it, and we would find a professional writer who had more credits than I did to finish the script. And what would usually happen would be that that writer would screw it up.

 

Don’t get me wrong. There are some really brilliant writers we worked with that were able to take these concepts and do extraordinary things with them. Sometimes things that I could never have even imagined.

 

But most of the writers that we hired screwed it up. And if you’re a development executive, you know that’s pretty much par for the course. Sometimes 7 or 8 or 9 different writers have to be hired before the project either goes into the turnaround graveyard or finally gets the green light.

 

So my job was then to sit down with those struggling writers and to somehow save the script. Because it was a hell of a lot cheaper for my production company to pay me to fix that script than it was for them to fire that writer and hire a new one.

 

And that’s actually how I learned to teach. I learned to teach working with professional writers. And I was a really young kid. I was 22 years old.

 

So you can imagine, you’re 22 years old, and you’re staring across the room from an Emmy Award winner or Academy Award winner. Somebody who is extraordinarily talented, but is lost in the script. And you learn really quickly if you try to impose your idea on that script, you’re going nowhere. Because you’re 22 years old and that person is not going to listen to you.

 

So, I learned very quickly that the way that you get a great script is not by trying to impose your own ideas, and it's not even by going back to what I originally wrote in the treatment, or what I originally wrote in my rough draft script.

 

The way I got great scripts out of these people was by identifying the little pieces of them that had somehow made their way into that bad draft.

 

And this is something interesting to think about. Why were these great writers writing bad scripts? Well, quite frankly, they were doing it for the same reason you’re likely to do it if you think about the pitch.

 

We were a smaller production company, so many of these writers were writers who’d had had tremendous careers but were kind of on the downside of their careers.

Lear how to pitch your screenplay or TV show and advanced pitching techniques for Screenwriters, TV Writers, Web Series Writers, Novelists and Playwrights.

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By, Jacob Krueger

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BEAUTY AND THE BEAST: Is Your Idea Commercial?

This week, we’re going to be looking at Beauty and the Beast.

It could be argued that a virtually shot-for-shot live action remake of an animated film that premiered in 1991 is an odd choice for a screenwriting podcast. Why not just talk about the original, brilliant script by Linda Woolverton that made this movie worth watching in the first place 26 years ago?

But with a record breaking 170 million dollar opening weekend, make no mistake, Beauty and the Beast is going to shape the future of big budget Hollywood movies. And that means it has  a lot to teach us.

On the one hand, there’s some cause for concern. The Hollywood trend over the last few years of remaking old movies, rather than investing in new ones, has been troubling, not only for studio writers, but also for many producers, who have watched a great migration of top Hollywood writers into Independent Film, Self Production, and of course TV, where they have more opportunities to be challenged artistically, work creatively and develop original material.

But recently, we’re starting to see a shift with original movies like Get Out, La La Land, Manchester By The Sea, Moonlight and Arrival not only winning awards, but also hugely exceeding box office expectations. We’re also starting to see a trickle up effect, as companies like Amazon and Netflix have started entering the feature film market-- reinvigorating both writers and producers for the potential of a renaissance in feature films that can mirror the one in TV.

Which is why Beauty and the Beast’s success scared the crap out of so many big budget writers and producers, especially on the cusp of what seemed like a potential tipping point in the Hollywood model.

But though this may mean we’ll have to endure live action remakes of everything from Bambi to The Lion King over the next few years, I actually think the tremendous success of film musicals like Beauty and the Beast and La La Land suggests another step in the exciting disruption we’ve been seeing of the traditional Hollywood business model. And that’s exciting news if you’re a screenwriter.

Back when I was coming up in the industry, selling a musical was darn near impossible. I developed one with Robbie Fox, writer of So I Married An Axe Murderer, but even the powerful production company I was working for couldn’t get any investment. I wrote another with Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, writers of Broadway’s Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, which at one point had some even more famous directing and producing attachments. It seemed an inch from production before it all fell apart. I even wrote one with four-time Academy Award Winner Michel Legrand. Yup, same story.

These projects didn’t fall apart because they weren’t great stories, or because they didn’t have great writers behind them. Everybody loved these projects.

They fell apart because it was common knowledge in the industry that film musicals just “don’t make money.” Because “adult audiences just aren’t into film musicals anymore.”

You see where I’m going with this. It starts with 170 million dollars over one weekend.

Does that mean you should run out and write a film musical right now? Not necessarily.

Film musicals like La La Land and Beauty and the Beast succeed because of the love these writers have for the material. Not because they’re out there chasing the next Hollywood trend.

What it does mean is that if anyone ever tells you what’s commercial or not commercial, or if anyone ever tells you that your idea is commercial or not commercial, there’s one thing you know for sure. That person is lying to you. And they’re also lying to themselves.

Hollywood is a lot like high school. Trends come in, and trends go out. But it’s actually the rule breakers who set these trends-- the scripts that blazed their own trail, and proved that they could be successful doing something new.

Unless you’re literally on the phone every day finding out what’s fashionable today (which is what producers, agents and managers do professionally), you can be pretty sure you have no idea what’s actually commercial or not today. And even if you did, by the time you finished writing the script that chased the trend, that fashion would have already changed.

Anyone remember Z Cavaricci pants?

If you’re my age, you do. They were the hottest thing ever for about 2 weeks back in the early 80s. Ridiculous things with flaps and buttons that made no sense at all. But if you were an 8 year old, and could get your hands on a pair, it meant you were going to be the hottest thing in elementary school.

I remember begging my mom for a pair of Z Cavaricci’s-- saving up my pennies for months until finally I had enough (with a little help from her) to buy a pair. And then I finally showed up at school, feeling like the hottest thing on the planet, and pretty much convinced that this was going to be the day those other kids finally realized that I was super cool and that they should accept me as a cool kid like them.  

Yeah, you guessed it. By the time that happened, those stupid pants were already out of style.

Unless you’re a huge agent or manager, by the time you get word of what’s happening in Hollywood, you’re usually already two years behind what’s actually happening today. Even producers who read the trades every day know they’re getting information that’s already many month’s old-- deals that have been in the works forever that are only just now being announced. Information is currency in Hollywood, just like it is in elementary school, and people tend to sit on the real stuff for as long as they can, to make sure nobody can get the scoop on them!

So often as writers, we feel out of breath, chasing these trends, and always feeling like we’re just a few steps behind, a few moments too late to have the career we actually dream of.

But the truth is, what kind of script are you going to write under that much pressure? Most likely a crappy one. And you’re not going to have much fun writing it either. Because instead of writing the thing you are desperate to write, you’re going to be writing the thing you think you should write. Instead of going on an unforgettable journey with yourself and your characters, you’re going to be retreading the same ground other writers have tread. And since that journey didn’t evolve naturally from you, it’s likely it’s going to be filled with cliches.

So it’s time for a little tough love, that may scare you a bit, but also hopefully will set you free from this breathless trend chasing, and allow you to put your focus back on what really matters in your writing.

Even if you spent every day at the studio lot, following famous producers around and listening in on exactly what everyone wants in Hollywood right now, by the time you came up with the idea, wrote the first draft, and revised it to a place where it was actually ready for professional eyes, those producers are already going to have moved on to the next hot idea.

That may sound depressing, but I think it’s freeing. Because once you realize that you can’t time the market, it frees you up from all that pressure, all that feeling that you’re behind where you’re supposed to be, or not writing what you should be writing. It allows you to put your focus back on what really matters to you: not writing the script that “everybody wants” but rather, the one that only you can write.

At a recent First Fridays event here at the studio, we had a wonderful guest speaker, Alex Fumero, the VP of Programming for HBO. Alex had something profound to say about what he’s looking for when a writer comes in for a pitch meeting. For him to be interested, he doesn’t just have to feel like it’s a great idea with great execution. As VP of Programming for one of the most sought after networks in the world, he sees great ideas and great scripts every day. For Alex to be interested, he needs more than a great script. He needs to know why you are the only writer in the world who could have written this project in exactly this way.

In other words, Alex isn’t just looking for great scripts. He’s looking for something much more important-- great voices. And voice is not something you discover writing the thing you “should” be writing. It’s something you discover writing the thing that you want to write, even if it doesn’t yet make sense to anyone but you.

(For an example of a hugely successful professional writer who did exactly that, listen to my Podcast on Arrival).

The truth is, trends come and go, and then cycle back around again. Some scripts (remember Juno) get picked up overnight and propel their writers to instant stardom, and others (remember Dallas Buyers Club) kick around for 20 years until finally the astrological conditions change, and “impossible” becomes “in demand.”

That means your success as a screenwriter is going to take some luck.

So as much as you’d like to feel like you’re in control. And as much as a million different gurus would all like you to think they have the formula for success. The truth is that formula does not exist.

The truth is, for success to happen, you’ve got to get a little lucky. You’ve got to have the right script, and get it to the right person at the right time.

And though you can’t control the events that will make that happen, you can make that luck a lot more likely to happen, by developing yourself as a writer, and writing the scripts that only you can write,

...Recently, we’re starting to see a shift with original movies like Get Out, La La Land, Manchester By The Sea, Moonlight and Arrival not only winning awards, but also hugely exceeding box office expectations. We’re also starting to see a trickle up effect, as companies like Amazon and Netflix have started entering the feature film market-- reinvigorating both writers and producers for the potential of a renaissance in feature films that can mirror the one in TV.

Which is why Beauty and the Beast’s success scared the crap out of so many big budget writers and producers, especially on the cusp of what seemed like a potential tipping point in the Hollywood model.

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By, Jacob Krueger

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GET OUT

This week we’ll be talking about Get Out, written and directed by Jordan Peele.

Over the past couple of podcasts, we’ve been talking a lot about the idea of using Hollywood genre movies as a catalyst for change— not by fighting against the “popcorn” elements that mass audiences love, but by building those elements around socio-political themes, that affect the expectations and belief systems of our audiences.

 

You can see this principle at play from the very first scene of Get Out.  It’s a classic horror opening— an attractive young person alone in a scary place that’s just a little too quiet— and a creepy score that warns us from the very first chord that things are going to get real ugly, real fast.

Except rather than using the traditional “horror movie” location— the kind of creepy place where we all feel a little scared: a secluded beach, a dark forest, a creaky old house— we’re in a perfectly manicured, upper class, liberal suburban neighborhood.

And what makes the scene terrifying (aside from the terrific score and top notch directing) is the fact that the attractive young man we’re watching is an African American in a white neighborhood.

Jordan Peele has spoken about the conception of this scene as a way to pull a mainstream American audience first hand into the experience of an African American man-- to put them in the shoes of anyone  who has ever been pulled over for “driving while black”, stopped and frisked, watched nervous eyes regarding them as a threat, or seen a young family cross to the other side of the street as they approached.

It captures the feeling that this place that feels so safe for so many people, for a young black man can feel incredibly dangerous and unwelcoming.

And then, as any good writer would do, Jordan Peele lets his character’s very worst internal fears manifest externally in the universe.

A white sports car starts following him. He turns and walks the opposite direction, trying to get away from trouble… and the next thing you know, he’s being beaten by a white guy in a mask and stuffed into the trunk.

 

The safe place that suddenly becomes dangerous idea is nothing new. We’ve seen it in Jaws, Friday the 13th, Tucker and Dale vs Evil and countless other horror movies of every possible genre.

The suburbs as an ironically terrifying location is nothing new-- we’ve seen it in movies ranging from Scream! to The Stepford Wives.

And the idea of the “wrong guy” in the “wrong place” isn’t new-- we’ve seen the reverse version of it in a million movies--  every time a white guy or gal finds himself or herself on the crime-ridden “wrong side of the tracks” only to be instantly mugged, attacked or harassed by people who look different from them.

But the idea of taking the everyday anxieties of an African American man about to meet his white girlfriend’s potentially racist parents for the first time-- and blowing those fears up into a horror movie that looks on the outside like that character feels on the inside-- that’s new. And that’s exciting.

Horror movies are obviously about fear. But the best horror movies are not just about scaring the audience. They’re about scaring yourself. About scaring your characters.

 

They’re about reaching into those unexplored corners of yourself left over from childhood traumas, bad life experiences, emotional and physical wounds, paranoias and nightmares that you know you should be over emotionally-- but somehow just aren’t.

They’re about taking the childlike fears -- the nonsensical monsters under the bed-- we “know” we should dismiss -- the fears just too bizarre, too unlikely to be real-- and asking ourselves “what if they were?”

Allowing our worst nightmares to come to life on the page, and in that way to come to peace-- not with the reality which we depict these stories-- but with the real life experiences-- the metaphors-- that spawned them.

You can see this is the journey of the main character, Chris, in Get Out.

Chris is naturally a bit scared to meet his girlfriend, Rose’s, parents for the first time. After all, meeting the “perfect” parents of your “perfect” girlfriend would make anyone a little nervous..

Not to mention the fact that he’s a struggling photographer, while they’re filthy rich.

Not to mention the fact that he’s got a secret little nicotine addiction that he feels a lot of shame about. And considering how unpleased his picture-perfect girlfriend is with his failure to quit smoking, it’s only natural that he fears her parents would judge him even more strongly if they found out.

Then, there’s the fact that they’re white. And he’s black.

Oh, and Rose hasn’t quite mentioned that to her parents in advance of their arrival.

Sure, Rose assures him that her parents aren’t racist. Sure, Rose promises that they are going to love him. Sure, Rose insists that the worst thing he’s going to endure is her father, Dean, telling him “I’d have voted for Obama three times” (which Dean does, pretty much immediately, when Rose and Chris arrive…).

 

 

Every experience Chris has ever had as a black man in America tells him that this is a bad idea. But that’s not what he wants to believe. He wants to believe that Rose is right. That he’s the one being paranoid.

As Jordan Peele has pointed out in interviews, the inception of Get Out actually came with the election of Barack Obama. It was a reaction to the hopeful, but unlikely belief it created in so many people that maybe this racism thing was finally over.

Chris wants to believe, as so many people did at that time, that race no longer matters. That people -- at least wealthy white Obama voters-- no longer judge a person by the color of their skin. That if a black man can now be President, maybe one can date a rich white woman, and be accepted by her family…

He wants to believe, if Rose is not racist, that maybe her parents really aren’t either. That maybe the problem exists in him-- that all these fears are just reverse racism-- a false assumption that all white people must be racist.

He wants to believe-- as anyone who longs for a better world wants to believe-- that maybe today, the concept that the color of a person’s skin would dictate who they could be, might suddenly vanish back to into the dark imagination from which it came, like the unlikely monster under the bed it should be, like the absurd notion that it is-- rather than remain the lurking demon that it has become, defining the limits of so many people’s lives.

So, Chris puts his fears aside. Just as so many people have had to put their fears aside, hoping for a better world. Hoping that his relationship can be the exception.

But still there’s that lurking fear. Maybe these nice people aren’t really who they seem. Maybe everything isn’t really okay. Maybe there’s a hidden malice here, just waiting to come out… Maybe even his girlfriend isn’t who he believes her to be. Maybe all this hope is just a facade. Maybe there’s something he doesn’t know.

Sounds like some pretty serious stuff.

But what’s brilliant about Jordan Peele is that he doesn’t deal with it seriously. He deals with it playfully, exploring the serious notion of hate as the absurdity that it is, in a big, silly, popcorn movie horror format-- and in doing so harnesses its full power, not just for the African American audience who already “gets it”, but also for the wider audience who would like to think we understand, but probably don’t.

Although every paranoid fear that Chris could ever have will turn out to be true by the end of the movie, at the beginning Jordan Peele doesn’t give those thoughts to the most  “serious” character-- he gives them to the most ridiculous one, Chris’s best friend, comic relief and TSA Agent extraordinaire, Rod-- a man whose paranoia and conspiracy theories get laughed off not only by audience, but also by every black character in the movie.

While we’re laughing at Rod’s “ridiculous” theories about “what white people do,” the main character, Chris, is doing everything he can to think like we do. To open his mind. To get over his suspicions. To believe in a better kind of world.

Sure, Rose’s parents’ African American gardener and housekeeper seem to have been ripped right out of the zombie version of Gone With The Wind… but it’s only natural for rich people to have servants, isn’t it? And would it really be better if they refused to hire black people for these jobs?

Sure, Rose’s parents’ friends’ attempts to “connect” with Rose’s new black boyfriend are painfully awkward. But isn’t it a little wrong to judge people for trying to be “accepting.”

What Jordan Peele is creating in this sequence is not just horror, and it’s not just social satire. It’s a stripping down, not of the overt racism that we normally see depicted in movies, but of the subtle, unintentional racial charge that can permeate the behavior even of well meaning people who truly consider themselves allies.

And though these characters may represent an exaggerated version of this phenomenon, it’s pretty hard not to look at this sequence and wonder: “at some point, have I done this to somebody?”

He’s giving us a chance to see ourselves from Chris’s point of view. And to understand, right or wrong, how he feels in this situation. What it’s like to feel the only way he can fit in is to become a version of himself that he doesn’t recognize-- like the “whitewashed” young African American man Chris tries to reach out to at the party, and who later,

One of the truly interesting things about Inception is that its structure is actually based upon the principles of hypnosis. In fact, the organizing principles of the dream within a dream within a dream structure of the film almost perfectly mirror the classical hypnosis training you’d receive during a basic hypnosis certification class.

Why is this important to you as a writer? Because as writers we all need organizing principles around which to structure our character’s journey…