Great Ideas (10 minute read)
A couple of weeks ago I went to see Counting Crows at the Beachlife Festival in Redondo with my cousin Garrett and his wife who flew in from Atlanta for the show. He's not in the entertainment industry but he reads the newsletter (hello, sousing) and he asked if people reach out to me about it. I told him that every week I get a few really nice messages and some people retweeting the link and how cool it is to know that it's been helpful to other people.
A few minutes later I took a walk across the festival grounds to get a $14 margarita that was literally a shot of tequila with some mix poured overtop, and on my way there a young guy leaned out of the donut truck line and asked if I was Mickey Fisher. He told me he's a writer who is working on a very cool show that I will not mention here. Then he told me that he really enjoyed the newsletter and thanked me for putting it out.
My friend, if you're reading this I just want you to know how much I appreciated that. It was every bit as cool as seeing the Crows play the entirety of Butter Miracle Suite front to back. Wishing you and your room the best!
If you're new here, this isn't a how-to. It's more of a "how I'm currently" doing things and what I'm thinking about as I try to make cool stuff and continue to navigate a career. (At least I think I still have a career)
Have a great weekend!
GREAT IDEAS
My girlfriend was listening to a podcast about acting recently and they were talking about what happens when you go from being non-union to getting your card from Actor’s Equity. One of the commenters said that once you join the union it means your competition now includes Broadway stars so you better be sure you’re ready when you do.
It's similar to how I felt when I got to the level of pitching to studios and networks. It’s not like there’s an infinite amount of money for any one of these places to throw around, even places like Amazon and Apple. Even they cancel shows that aren’t performing well so they can allocate those resources to things that are.
When you go in to pitch a show or a movie you’re competing for the same money that J.J. Abrams and Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy and Tina Fey and all the other marquee names are trying to get. If your idea isn’t compelling enough you’re dead in the water.
Sometimes I feel like writers spend way too much time worrying about whether or not to bold their sluglines or use “we see” and far too little time making sure their ideas will stand out in the marketplace.
If you have a notebook full of twenty ideas there’s zero per cent chance that all 20 of those ideas are great. And even if they are there’s a much smaller number of them that truly have a shot at getting made. Yesterday, I saw this tweet from Guillermo Del Toro in reply to the question, “How many screenplays have you written that never got made?”
Guillermo del Toro on Twitter: "By my count I have written or co-written around 33 screenplay features. 2-3 made by others, 11 made by me (Pinocchio in progress) so- about 20 screenplays not filmed. Each takes 6-10 months of work, so, roughly 16 years gone. Just experience and skill improvement.… https://t.co/hcRonOrNFY" — twitter.com “@KorgerKor @screamerclauz @SethKearsley @stillnewtwallen @creetureshow @TheJoeLynch @Adam_Fn_Green @Massawyrm @mang0ld @scottderrickson @ManMadeMoon @edgarwright @JamesGunn @rianjohnson By my count I have written or co-written around 33 screenplay features. 2-3 made by others, 11 made by me (Pinocchio in progress) so- about 20 screenplays not filmed. Each takes 6-10 months of work, so, roughly 16 years gone. Just experience and skill improvement.”
Even Guillermo is batting less than .500.
I've mentioned before that I started this newsletter because I wanted to pull apart my own process and examine it in the hopes of breaking through to some better ideas, maybe even a few great ones. But that raises the obvious question, “What makes a great idea for a movie or a television series?”
I’ve talked about my version of David Goyer’s “Story Darwinism” in a previous newsletter, but that’s mostly about my process for zeroing in on what I want to write next. Very often I’ll get into writing a new script or fleshing out a new idea and realize that, even though it met my criteria for where to invest my time, once I got into it I realized that it just wasn’t good enough to compete against A-listers and people on mega-overall deals. When that happens I cut my losses or I pull it apart like an engine and start to rebuild.
I’ve been doing a lot of that this week and it got me thinking about how much time I spend coming up with new ideas, testing and refining them and working to elevate them, versus how much time I actually spend writing the script and worrying about formatting.
Right now I’d say 75% of my writing time is spent on development, on brainstorming new ideas, fleshing out characters, digging into their emotional arcs, and thinking about what makes this story, world, or character compelling or unique.
I probably spend 24.5% of my time writing the actual scripts, which is to say thinking about how I’m communicating these ideas to a reader, making sure I keep their interest and giving them an effective emotional road map.
I probably spend .5% worrying about spellcheck and formatting issues, and things like whether or not I’m using too many exclamation points, or going off the rails with bolding and underlining.
In that 75% period of time, I’m constantly asking myself questions like:
“Is this relevant now?”
“Will it still be relevant a year from now when I’m finished?”
“Is this a unique world? Have I seen this before? If so, how can I subvert that recognizable idea and turn it into something new?”
(That last question just made me think about YELLOW JACKETS. We’ve all heard stories about planes crashing and people being stranded and turning into warring clans and cannibals. Many of us read LORD OF THE FLIES when we were in high school. The thing that makes YELLOW JACKETS different is that the creators asked, “What if they were eventually rescued? What would their lives look like twenty years later?”)
“Is this a compelling, unique character? What is it that makes them different? Would a great actor want to play this role?”
I think a lot of us picture actors in the roles that we’re writing but we don’t ask ourselves, “Would Denzel WANT to play this role? What is it that would get him on the hook? What are the top five scenes he'll instantly start imagining himself playing?”
“If this is TV, does it have a clear, communicable engine?”
“Why will the audience care? Can I hook them emotionally on the logline? If I’m relying on the concept or mystery to hook them, how fast can I get them hooked emotionally once they start the script?”
A good example of all of this is the upcoming movie FINCH (directed by Miguel Sapochnik, who directed all your favorite GAME OF THRONES episodes and the season one finale of EXTANT).
This was the description of the story when it was first announced:
“On October 26, 2017, it was announced that Tom Hanks would star in BIOS, a post-apocalyptic film about a robot who is built by Hanks' ailing character Finch to protect the life of his beloved dog when he dies.”
We’ve all seen post-apocalyptic stories before, we’ve all seen Tom Hanks in survival mode, we’ve all seen movies about robots. But when I heard, “Tom Hanks is a genius inventor who’s dying and the last thing he wants to do is build a robot that will take care of his dog,” I was hooked. I got that core emotional story immediately and it elevated all the other components.
You may notice that I didn’t put any questions about structure in here, that’s because those questions belong in the 24.5% period of time when I'm actually writing the script. The longer I’m in the business the more I realize how malleable structure is and how it’s often the first thing that gets pulled apart once you start working with producers and studio execs.
To get to that point you first have to hook them on some core component of the idea itself. They have to want to read the script in the first place. It makes sense to me that I can maximize my chances for success if I spend the bulk of my time cycling through ideas and constantly pushing myself to raise the bar.
By the way, you can take all of this too far and I do.
After eight years in the business it's easy for me to spin out thinking NONE of my ideas are good enough and what's the point because it's all been done before. On those days I just go with what's fun and try to leave the rest of that baggage by the side of the road.
And lately I remind myself that one of the big hits out of Cannes this year was about a serial killer who gets pregnant after having sex with a car.
Yellowjackets (2021) Official Trailer | SHOWTIME — www.youtube.com Equal parts survival epic, psychological horror story and coming-of-age drama, YELLOWJACKETS is the saga of a team of wildly talented high school girls socce...
Finch — Official Trailer | Apple TV+ — www.youtube.com An epic adventure like no other. Stream Finch November 5 on Apple TV+ https://apple.co/_Finch Tom Hanks is Finch, a man who embarks on a moving and powerful ...
Yoda of the Week
I started reading Monica Byrne's THE ACTUAL STAR and it's masterful. It boggles my mind how someone can create such a rich and densely layered world. I'll leave the description to folks like Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, and Kim Stanley Robinson on her website, linked below.
Monica, if you're reading this by some chance, congratulations and thank you for being the Yoda this week!
The Actual Star | monicabyrne — www.monicabyrne.org "Wildly ambitious, wildly successful."--Cory Doctorow, author of Radicalized and Walkaway