Archive for PITCHING
The screenplay version of cold calling: sometimes it works!
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The Dedham Transcript carried this account of how Matt O’Neill’s screenplay, “Bait and Switch” got noticed:
O’Neill had just seen “Blades of Glory,” the 2007 film starring Will Ferrell.
“I came out of the theater and I thought, ‘Wow, I want to work with the guys who made this movie,”‘ recalls the Hopkinton native. “They had a ridiculous sense of humor so I put together a query letter about ‘Bait and Switch’ and faxed it to the production company that made ‘Blades of Glory.”‘
That company would be Smart Entertainment. An executive there, Zac Unterman, picked up the fax and promptly threw it in the trash. “But then he thought about it some more, picked it out of the trash and called me,” says O’Neill. “He said, ‘I think this might be a movie. Can you email me the script?’ So I did. He read it that night, he called me that night and I was in his office the next morning. It was like a whirlwind.”
John Jacobs, the president of Smart Entertainment sent out the script and a couple of high-powered agents liked it and sent it to Mark Wahlberg, who also liked it and signed on to produce and possibly star. It’s not a done deal yet but it’s in the works.
The moral of the story? Lots of people would tell you to forget about getting an idea to a production company without going through an agent. Like many so-called rules, it applies much of the time—but not all, as O’Neill’s experience proves.
From the NYTimes: a scene from “Horrible Bosses”
Posted by: | CommentsThe New York Times has an interesting feature called “Anatomy of a Scene,” in which directors and sometimes writers or actors tell what’s going on in a scene from their film. The one below is from “Horrible Bosses,” which hasn’t opened over here yet but which I’m looking forward to seeing (from what I know of the story it could have been pitched as “Strangers on a Train” meet “Nine to Five”). In this video you’ll hear Seth Gordon, the director of the film:
How to write a good screenplay log line
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I had an email from Roger B. asking for more information about log lines. These are short descriptions of the story and they may be the first thing you say when someone (e.g., an agent or producer) asks what your screenplay is about.
That is your opening to arouse their curiosity. If you say, “Well, it’s about this guy, and, uh, the people around him and how they all get together—I mean, they were friends when they were kids and now they have this reunion’ ….excuse me while my eyes glaze over. That kind of logline, in addition to being too long, leaves out a lot I’d want to know, such as what genre we’re talking about—Comedy? Drama? Thriller? It also doesn’t tell me the dramatic core. They have a reunion, so what? If your answer is, “I was getting to that,” my answer is, too late!
That’s a case of not telling enough quickly enough. The other common problem is telling too much: “It’s a slapstick comedy about five guys who were pals in high school. Now, ten years later, one is a plumber, another is a stand-up comedian, another manages a Target store or actually just the sporting goods department, another is still trying to make it as an actor, and the last one is a cop. Three are married, one is divorced, and one is gay and in a relationship. They—“ Too much information! All I wanted to know is what’s the basic idea, not their life stories.
Another wrong answer: “It’s a thriller, but I can’t really explain it in a minute or two, you have to read the script.” Hold it. If you can’t explain it in a minute or two, how am I going to create a poster and a 30-second TV ad that is going to drive people to see it?
The logline should contain the genre, the tone, the identity (not the name) of your main character(s), and the basic dramatic premise. It should be one or two sentences long. Something like this:
“It’s a comedy about a man who returns to college and runs a cut-throat campaign in competition against his son for the election for Student Body President.”
OK, it’s not Casablanca, but then even Casablanca isn’t Casablanca when it’s just a log line. It IS, however, interesting enough that a producer might immediately think about an intriguing casting combination—maybe Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler.
The words “comedy” and “cut-throat” immediately tell us the genre and the tone. If you’d said. “in a battle of wits with his son in a campaign…” the tone would have come across as much more intelligent (and possibly harder to sell).
This clue to tone often is missing from loglines. Even within horror, for instance, there’s slasher and there’s psychological, two very different approaches and it’s useful to know from the start which one you’re talking about.
The point of a logline is not to tell the entire story, it’s a first step to allowing the other person to decide whether or not they want to know more. If you screw up the logline—making it too vague or too detailed—most likely they won’t.
