Sales Mode
Happy Friday!
Quick business update:
We officially attached a cool producer to my HALF-LIGHT feature spec. We’re putting together a list of directors to go out to next.
My if/come deal with the studio for a new sci-fi thriller series should be closing soon.
I turned in a concept doc for a potential OWA job on the feature side.
I have a feature pitch that we’re hoping to get on the books with a studio soon, a direct result of my interest in putting a modern spin on public domain characters.
I had a staffing meeting for a great show.
When I look back I’m proud of my output since the beginning of the year but It’s been a ton of unpaid work to (hopefully) get paid work. The idea that a lot of it may never see the light of day is discouraging. But, that is the job.
They’re just ideas.
I’ll make more of them.
The downside of the past few months is that there hasn’t been a lot of time to work on original stuff. Item #1 on that list was written in 2021, items 2-5 are based on other people’s material.
When I have a few hours to spare I work on the novel but it’s hard to get any momentum. I have just enough time to look at it and go, “Well, this is terrible,” and think about ways to make it better.
There are always ways to make it better.
Sales Mode
I just finished reading a book called Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, by Tony Fadell, one of the people responsible for creating the original iPod and iPhone. After working at Apple he went on to start Nest and revolutionize something nobody ever imagined would be made cool: the thermostat. There’s a ton of information that’s applicable to the job of writing and sections on management that would be a great read for any showrunner. Check this out:
“Remember that once you become a manager, you’ll stop doing the thing that made you successful in the first place. You’ll no longer be doing the things you do really well—instead you’ll be digging into how others do them, helping them improve. Your job will now be communication, communication, communication, recruiting, hiring and firing, setting budgets, reviews, one-on-one meetings (1:1s), meetings with your team and other teams and leadership, representing your team in those meetings, setting goals and keeping people on track, conflict resolution, helping to find creative solutions to intractable problems, blocking and tackling political BS, mentoring your team, and asking “how can I help you?” all the time.”
That line, “Your job will now be communication, communication, communication,” hit me hard. Step one is coming up with a vision worth the effort of executing. Then you have to communicate that vision to other people, all the time. You have to sell it.
When I first started working in television I heard that story areas and outlines were “sales documents” and I’ve referred to them that way ever since.
I've worked with producers who say, “We’re in sales mode.” When I hear that I know we’re down to the wire and we have to do everything possible to get the project over the finish line.
Over the past year I started to realize that I’m always in sales mode. Every document, every cut, is a sales tool. From the initial concept pages I send to my reps, to the pitch, the script, the final cut that goes to the network, to the very last podcast interview you give talking about what went right or wrong, it’s all sales.
There’s a related chapter in the book, titled “Storytelling:”
“Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer’s problems. A good story has three elements. 1) It appeals to people’s rational and emotional sides. 2) It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple. 3) It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved. It focuses on the “why.” A paragraph later he says, “The story of your product, your company, and your vision should drive everything you do.”
I read that chapter while I was working on my most recent pitches and concept documents and it helped drive home the importance of boiling my ideas down to their simplest, most compelling, communicable elements. That could be the big idea at the center, something iconic or unique about the lead character, or genre mashup. What are two or three key things the person I'm pitching to will be able to walk down the hall and easily pitch to someone else?
Some of my favorite moments of making EXTANT and REVERIE were when I would hear someone else on the team, a producer, an actor, or an executive, pitch the show to an outsider. With Reverie, they would pitch almost exactly like I pitched it to the network: “You can design and build your perfect world in virtual reality. You can go anywhere you want, you can be anyone you want, you can even bring loved ones back from the dead. The problem is, it’s so good that people don’t want to come back to the real world and our lead has to go in and rescue them.”
The engine for the show was simple, clear, and communicable. We told it so many times that it became second nature.
I was in a general meeting recently where an exec told me about an idea that they were looking for a writer to help crack and I was amazed at how easily and effortlessly they were able to communicate the essential information. Then, I realized, “Oh, they’ve pitched this dozens of times to each other and probably to a bunch of other writers.”
In the book, Tony talks about Steve Job's introduction of the iPhone in 2007. I remember exactly where I was when I saw it. I was sitting in my friend Tony Teel's house, watching it on a Mac that was set up near the basement stairs. People used to marvel at the fact that Jobs talked fluidly and in detail without using any notes. That's because, as Tony says, "He'd been telling that same story over and over through months of development." By that point it was second nature to him. Not only could he deliver the essential information, he could do it with some showmanship.
This is why one of the first things I do once there’s some meat on the bones of an idea is to come up with a logline. That little blurb becomes the foundation for the story I’m going to be telling for years, in success. If I get halfway through writing the logline and it sounds like a shaggy dog story, laced with irrelevant details and pieces that don’t quite form a unified whole, then I know I’ve got a problem. If it’s hard for me to sell it’s going to be hard for everybody else.
When I'm working on loglines I'll scroll through Deadline and see how other people are selling their shows, since those blurbs likely came from a press release. Here's one from today that I think is a good example of something clear and communicable:
"Told in real time, the seven-part Hijack is a tense, thriller series that follows the journey of a hijacked plane as it makes its way to London over a seven hour flight, and authorities on the ground scramble for answers."
That's a series called HIJACKED. That sentence tells you tone, scope, you bring your knowledge of being a passenger which A) gives you an idea of the characters, and B) lets you imagine yourself in that situation.
Here's one that's not as clear:
"The fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems in this epic story of political ambition, genius, and conflicted love."
That's Francis Ford Coppola's blurb about his new movie, MEGALOPOLIS. The movie will likely be a beautiful work of art but it doesn't tell me anything. He can sell a vision to other people with this. I can not.
Writing loglines can be a pain. There's a lot of helpful information out there but I find it so clarifying to see how other people, people at the top of their game, are selling their projects in the trades.
One of the sales techniques Steve Jobs used is something he called, “The virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt — “Maybe my experience isn’t as good as I thought, maybe it could be better” — then you prime them for your solution. You get them angry about how it works so they can get excited about a new way of doing things.”
One of the questions we get asked to think about when pitching a movie or a series is, “Why tell this story now?” I’ll be honest, I’m sick of this question. I want to be like, “Because it’s fucking cool and other people will think so, too.” It’s easy to internalize it as, “This has to speak to some current, existential issue like inequality, climate change, gun violence, etc.”
I'm rethinking how I frame the "why" for these new stories.
I think the “why” could also be a writer saying, “I love science-fiction, the weightier, the better. But right now a lot of sci-fi feels like homework. There’s a lot of ponderous, philosophical mumbo jumbo about what it means to be human and slow burning mysteries. I want to go the opposite way. I want to put the pedal to the metal and just fucking go."
It’s not exactly the “virus of doubt,” but it grounds the “why” in a feeling that a lot of people have right now. If you can make someone go, “Yeah, that is kind of a problem,” maybe you prime them to see your show as the solution.
(By the way, I’m not saying those weighty sci-fi stories shouldn’t exist. I love them. I still want to write them. I’m just giving an example where someone could point to a “why.”)
My big takeaway from that chapter of the book is that the clearer, more concise, and more necessary you make your story, the easier it will be to communicate from the first concept document to the very last podcast or press interview you give.
It becomes the shared language you use with your producing partners and your partners at the studio and the network. If you tell each other (and other people) that story over and over again there’s a lot less chance of getting five episodes in on a notes call and realizing everybody is on a different page. It goes back to that quote:
“The story of your product,” which in our case is our narrative story, “your company, and your vision should drive everything you do.”
You can zoom out from your script and apply this to who you are as a writer. Sometimes I worry that I'm going back to the same well too often, not just the genres I love but also the themes I'm interested in. Tennessee Williams said that it takes an artist ten years to fully work through themes that are important to them.
If art is at least on some level about self-expression then the fictional stories you tell are also a grand story you're telling about yourself. Maybe it's not repetition, maybe it's honing and perfecting your own story over time, so that it becomes fluid and effortless.
There is one more small anecdote from the book that I want to share. Tony tells a story about watching Steve Jobs pull out a jeweler’s loupe and inspect pixels on a display. That was the moment he learned the level of detail that would be expected of him at Apple. Down to the pixel.
It reminded me that one of my showrunner partners set up the tradition of watching the final mixed and mastered cut of every episode on a shitty television in the office because, “Our audience isn’t going to be watching this on a multi-million dollar mixing stage.” He wanted to hear it like most of them were going to hear it.
After the first few episodes I thought it was overkill. But then, late in the season, we were watching an episode and a joke sound effect that had been slipped in to lift the mood during a long playback session had been left in the mix.
That was another lesson for me in the level of detail required in this job.
Addendum: I had just finished compiling this newsletter when I came across this retweet from fellow writer, Ana Maria Montoya, quoting an article about Kendrick Lamar:
Ana Maria Montoya on Twitter: ""K-dot is a master of retelling the same story again and again, but on a larger level each time. If you listen closely, the arc of his musical output shows that refining and retelling your story, over and over, is an important aspect of growth, both as an artist and a human."… https://t.co/8QGw1YOhoG" — twitter.com “"K-dot is a master of retelling the same story again and again, but on a larger level each time. If you listen closely, the arc of his musical output shows that refining and retelling your story, over and over, is an important aspect of growth, both as an artist and a human." https://t.co/P4wEYStG9J”
The article is a deep dive into a singular artist's refinement of his story:
Kendrick's Most Important Song That No One's Talking About | KQED — www.kqed.org An early track by Kendrick Lamar provides the secret origin for his gift of revisiting familiar themes, writes Pendarvis Harshaw.
I hadn't seen this video yet. Here's my first Yoda of the Week!
Kendrick Lamar - The Heart Part 5 — www.youtube.com Kendrick Lamar “The Heart Part 5” Directed by Dave Free & Kendrick LamarProduction Company: pgLang / project3Executive Producers: Dave Free, Kendrick LamarPr...
Elizabeth Bonker is my second Yoda of the week. "Be the light."
Be the Light: Elizabeth Bonker’s 2022 Commencement Address — www.rollins.edu When Florida needed a college, we founded one. We’re entrepreneurial like that.",