First Thing You Should Know Before Writing A Screenplay
The $5000 Mistake and The Oscar Winner.
In one of our recent Film Courage interviews, a writer admitted he made a mistake that cost him 2 years of his writing life.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard a writer make this confession.
We ourselves made the same mistake with a movie we spent 3 years writing and producing.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could save yourself months… or maybe years of regret?
But what is this mistake?
We are going to lay it out clearly for you here, so that you are fully aware of what the mistake is… And by doing so, we hope we can help you avoid the same fate that we and countless others have suffered.
The $5000 Mistake
Back to the writer we mentioned above. He’s an author who has now published between 5 and 10 books. In order to protect his identity we are going to call him Bob.
Prior to his author career, Bob wrote screenplays for over a decade. Bob is a lifelong writer who still writes screenplays, which are often inspired by the books he now writes.
We asked Bob about his first paid script job.
Bob explained that things did not happen quickly for him.
After 5 years of writing spec scripts he wasn’t gaining any traction.
Finally a script he wrote placed in a script contest. With that little bit of notoriety he was able to attract interest from a manager.
The manager began to submit Bob’s work for meetings and job opportunities.
One of these meetings was with a Director who wanted to make a Scorsese / Tarantino styled crime movie.
This peaked Bob’s interest. He was a huge fan of Scorsese, Tarantino, and that genre of movies.
The meeting was set. Bob pitched the Director his 3 best ideas and was hopeful that he could get the job.
After playing the waiting game… Bob’s manager finally called. the Director liked Bob’s ideas and wanted to hire him!
Jubilation!
Bob was going to get paid to write a screenplay!
Bob was so excited that he almost forgot to ask his manager how much the job was going to pay him?
$5000.00
Bob had 3 weeks to submit an outline. Once the Director approved, Bob would have 3 months to write the screenplay.
This was a non-union gig for Bob and he was grateful to have it. $5000.00 for 4 months of writing work was a dream come true for Bob.
Bob quickly wrote the outline and it was approved. So Bob moved onto writing the screenplay.
Bob finished the screenplay and with anticipation turned it in to the Director. And then the feedback came in.
The script wasn’t gritty enough. It needed more of an edge to it.
Bob thought to himself, “Okay no problem. I can make this screenplay grittier.”
And so Bob spent more months revising and working on the second draft. Finally he felt good about the work and submitted it to the Director.
And once again the feedback was the same. Still not gritty enough.
Now frustration was beginning to set in.
But this was Bob’s first paid screenwriting job, he was young and he wanted to get this right.
So he kept writing and rewriting. 4 months turned into 2 years.
Looking back at it, Bob admits that at some point he should have negotiated more money. But neither he nor his manager spoke up about the amount of rewrites that Bob did on the project.
The final result… Bob did receive the $5000… but he wasted 2 years writing a movie that was never made.
But negotiations aside, what really went wrong here?
What did Bob do wrong? What did he learn from this experience?
After 2 years of writing this material and doing all he could to make it “grittier,” he realized he wasn’t a writer who could write the Tarantino / Scorsese style movie.
But more importantly he learned that he didn’t have a personal connection to the material.
That’s the lesson we believe a writer should know before they write their screenplay. Let’s highlight it.
Make it personal.
Although Bob loved Scorsese and Tarantino movies he realized that he had trouble writing them. There was no personal emotional connection. There was nothing pulling Bob into the story. As a result the script never really worked. The story fell flat.
After that experience, Bob says he only takes on writing jobs where he has a personal emotional connection. He even stated that if someone offered him a $100,000 for a writing job, he wouldn’t take it unless he could find a personal connection to the material.
This is quite a lesson.
But can we explore this deeper?
What about a success story?
Is there a story where the reverse happened?
The Oscar Winner.
In 2016 Siân Heder brought her feature directorial debut Tallulah to the Sundance Film Festival.
The movie received strong critical recognition. It was nominated for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and Netflix purchased it for $5 million dollars.
This drew the attention of a couple of producers who were looking to hire a director for an American remake of a little known French movie titled, La Famille Bélier.
But Siân wasn’t the only candidate being considered. She was one of many writer/directors interviewing for the job.
And one by one, each director came in to pitch their vision of what the American version would be. And yet Siân won the job easily.
Producer Patrick Wachsberger had this to say about Siân’s interview, “There was no contest. It was obvious that Siân was the way to go.”
“There was no contest. It was obvious that Siân was the way to go.”
At this point you may be able to guess what Siân did differently but it may not be what you would expect…
You see, the movie that Siân was being asked to rewrite is the movie we all now know as CODA which won the Oscar in 2022 for Best Picture.
The movie stands out for the authentic performances of 3 lead cast members who are all deaf.
The word CODA most commonly stands for Child Of Deaf Adults.
This strikes a personal chord for me as I, myself, am a child of deaf parents. So this was a movie I had been excited to see since I first learned about it.
One area that often comes up short in movies with deaf characters is the sign language. Another is that the material doesn’t feel real or that it is forced. It often feels like a gimmick and I am left disappointed.
But CODA is as true to deaf culture as anything I have ever seen. Upon watching it and not knowing anything about Siân Heder, I figured that she must have grown up with deaf parents.
In my research, I was shocked to find out that Siân doesn’t have deaf parents.
This one felt pretty obvious and yet it was the wrong assumption.
So if Siân doesn’t have deaf parents, what did she do to make this story personal and win the job so easily?
How Siân Heder made CODA a personal story.
In La Famille Bélier, the story is centered around a family running a dairy farm. That storyline didn’t resonate with Siân. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and spent her childhood summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
You see, Siân didn’t know the world of dairy farming. But she did intimately know Gloucester and the struggles of the fishing community there.
So the first thing she did was transplant the story from a dairy farm to the fishing town of Gloucester. This immediately gives CODA a different feel while also making it personal to Siân.
She doesn’t stop there. Although Siân’s parents aren’t deaf…the parents in CODA played by Troy Kotsur and Marlee Matlin are inspired by her own parents. She gave the CODA parents personality traits of her own parents. I will spare the details here but if you have seen the movie you know how great they are.
Siân also pulled personal memories from her life and put them into the movie. This includes many details from her life as a teenager and scenes like the one with teenagers jumping off a cliff into a water filled quarry.
So you can see that Siân put as much of herself into this story as she could.
And out of all the writer/directors who interviewed for the job she was the only one who made it her story. She didn’t just write a dairy farm story like all the others.
She made the story personal.
It got her the CODA job and put her on the path to winning an Oscar.
Make it personal is the first thing we think you should know before writing a screenplay.
But we have 11 others…
We go through our entire framework in our class, 12 Things You Should Know Before You Write A Screenplay.
These are the elements we believe are most important to establishing a meaningful story. The things we wish we were fully aware of many years ago.
Not only do we go through each step, we also give you questions that can help you bring your story to life.
If you would like to go through this process with us… our next class is this Saturday June 20th.
Cheers,
David and Karen
Many screenwriters don't know that concept about screenwriting.