It’s in the stars…
Back to it… Whether you agree or not, high concept pretty much rules the industry and, whether we like it or not, I think we can all pretty much agree on that.
So you’ve busted your ass and wrote a top-notch spec worthy of production… Everyone you give it to agrees…
You’re on your way…
But nothing happens.
Why?
Because there are no actors that want to play any of your characters.
There, I said it.
Let me take you back a couple of years ago to a New Mexico Film Commission seminar held in Albuquerque… I happened to be in Santa Fe at the time and caught a blurb on the NMFilm.com web site. The director of the upcoming film, FIRST SNOW was going to be on stage talking about making the film in New Mexico, working with the New Mexico Film Commission, working with New Mexico film crews, etc.
Hmmm. What the fuck? “Sounds like it could be interesting,†I thought.
It was.
First of all, I had never even heard of FIRST SNOW. I had never heard of the director (also one of the screenwriters). I didn’t even know who was in the damn thing but since I knew I was going to be working with the New Mexico Film Commission, I thought this could be interesting.
Did I say that already?
It was.
First of all, they had plenty of fresh hot coffee. Outstanding. I’m in. They even had huge chocolate chip cookies but I hadn’t eaten dinner yet so I declined.
I ALWAYS like to sit in the very back of the class… Been doing it all my life so why stop now? Besides, the fresh hot coffee was sitting right next to me.
Think RAPID REFILLS.
Ah… The show begins… A very nice lady who then worked at the film commission who no longer works for the film commission handed out New Mexico Film Directories to everyone… Very cool.
They had some local actor acting as the host, asking the director and half of the screenwriting team about the filmmaking adventures of First Snow… I watched. I listened. It was okay but I was a little disappointed because it seemed to be more focused as entertainment than information but what the hell… The coffee was FREE and HOT.
So there I am… Sitting in the back, listening to the show… Two rows ahead of me is some guy with fairly long hair… Not a big guy… Kinda small. No big deal. I’m sitting there and then this guy leans back in his chair with his hands behind his head – interlocking fingers.
What caught my eye here was this guy’s fingernails…
They were green. Not a flaming, grassy, or leafy green… A dark, gothic, almost black green. His nails were short – not bitten. Neatly cut but almost black. Gothic Green? Is that a color?
Those fucking fingernails wouldn’t let me concentrate on the Q & A that was going on… Something about those fucking nails stabbed at my conscious…
Then I remembered.
Ahhh. Several months earlier, I had seen Guy Pearce in an interview on television and he seemed perfectly normal until he waved his hand and I immediately noticed what looked like black fingernail polish.
Not to say that a guy wearing very dark fingernail polish is NOT normal… I guess a better choice of words would be to say, OUT OF THE ORDINARY.
Because I like Guy Pearce… I love his work – think he’s an outstanding actor.
But back to the fingernails…
Could it be? I was sitting two rows behind this guy… I kept trying to get a glimpse of his profile but wasn’t successful… All I could tell was that this guy was wearing glasses.
Shit… I didn’t hear anything for the next half hour… I just kept watching this guy… I kept wondering if anyone was watching ME watch this guy but I don’t think anyone caught on.
More coffee. More scrutinizing. Nothing.
The show ends. People stand. Some of the audience obviously knew each other and immediately gathered into several small groups…
I stand… I stealthily move into the aisle so once and for all I can see this guy.
Is it?
Is it?
He stands. He turns toward me and sure enough… Guy Pearce in the flesh.
I stand there about ten seconds… Reasonably sure that Guy’s going to be surrounded by everyone in a hurry.
Nope. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared.
I slide up – extend my hand and say, “Really love your work.â€
He smiled, shook my hand, and very humbly replied, “Thank you very much.â€
Now what the fuck is the importance of this?
I’m gonna tell ya…
So I immediately ask him, “What made you get involved with this project?â€
His reply?
Hold on to your hats…
“Because I could see that this would be a Guy Pearce infomercial.â€
I say, “Really?†He says, “Absolutely. I’m in every scene.â€
So eventually, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby meander over and we all chat for a few minutes. Nothing special but certainly enlightening and quite possibly, contact information was exchanged. LOL.
But there you have it… On top of your high concept, you’ve got to pay attention to your characters. Are you giving them memorable lines? Does your dialogue contain subtext? Are your characters unique? Are they in a lot of scenes? Are they making decisions? Do they have goals? Character arcs? Are your characters memorable? Would an actor read a page or two of your characters, slap the script shut and say, I’m IN???
I don’t know… To me, it was like getting struck by lightning. I immediately went back to my hotel and went through the script I am almost finished rewriting and asked myself if THIS screenplay could also be an infomercial for some actor.
Kinda. Sorta. Hmmm. Maybe not.
I then made a couple of passes with INFOMERCIAL in mind…
We happy now.
Unk
Tags: First Snow New Mexico Film Commission Guy Pearce Mark Fergus Hawk Ostby The Unknown Screenwriter
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18 Responses to “It’s in the stars…”
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Boy, you got great timing.
I’ve been rethinking my latest spec. And guess what I was thinking…
I said guess, damn it!
I was thinking of reducing the protagonists screen time and adding scenes with the supporting characters.
If I know Unk, he’s scratching his head right now. Sorry, man.
What was my reasoning? Hell, I don’t know. Maybe I thought the supporting characters were too thin, but adding scenes won’t fix that. Maybe I thought the protagonist would get boring by the third act, but reducing scenes won’t fix that.
I guess I just felt that it’s rare to see a film that follows protagonist from the first ‘til the last frame. I probably started thinking there was something wrong with my script cause that’s what it does.
Thanks for the post, Unk. You just saved me some time — there’s nothing worse than attacking a problem with the wrong solution.
Poke
Yeah, that’s a pretty common practice…a sexy entrance and some memorable lines off the top should be there to hook that ’star’, ideally its in a story that’s working also. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of shite scripts get a name attached because thats all the writer did was frontload the draft with flamboyant long-winded speeches that would be death on screen but gave the star a woody and they signed on. Try to get a name/star interested I agree, but remember you’re making a ‘movie’.
Well hey… My point of the post is to simply make sure that the scenes containing your main characters are great scenes that will lure great talent.
My rewrite is definitely not an infomercial for anyone.
Should your Protagonist be in EVERY SCENE?
Doubtful but it all depends on the story.
Unk
Another good post.
The advantage of being a director as well as a writer is I’ve had lots of time to work with actors and whether they are lowly film students or celebrities they all seem to want the same things.
They all want parts in movies that are going to give them an opportunity to show what they can do as actors.
I know when Nicole Kidman wanted to do Dogville with Lars Von Trier her agent was dead against it — but she took the part — and she took the part because she wanted to stretch herself as an actor and the part in Dogville is an “actors” role — rather than a glitzy star role.
If you look at Hollywood there are very few great parts for actors who want to “act” and actors know when those roles do come up they are potential award magnets.
A star who has become locked into an “Action Hero” rut, will actively look for roles where they get to play something else, just to break the rut and open themselves up to offers of a wider range of roles.
So, what constitutes a great role for an actor isn’t just about screen time, it isn’t just about having big speeches, it’s about giving the actor the opportunity to achieve their ambitions.
Totally agree. Write parts that actors not only want to play, they feel they HAVE to play . . . you betcha!
It’s high concept regarding characters . . . not only can they automatically SEE it, they feel it’s something they should have done a long time ago.
It’s not just about creating a part that an actor will want to play. It’s about giving the audience somebody they want to watch. I have a script that received complaints that the main character disappeared from the story for a long time in the second act. I hadn’t realized I’d done that, so now I’m taking steps to fix it.
I spent most of the last year working on two scripts for an indy producer/director and one of the characters turned out to be so compelling that we have actresses contacting us begging to play her.
Hmm, I wonder who I can get to play Gangster 1, 2 and 3, Fat Man, Cop #1, Guy With Broken Nose…
Hey what’s the max word count on a high concept sentence? Mine is kind of a run-on at the moment….a Russion half man/half cyborg cop travels back in time to prevent his parents from getting a divorce so that he can be born, but in order to succeed he must assissinate one of the divorce lawyers involved in the case, who himself is about to become a father.
This post got me thinking of great showcase scripts… the one that always comes to mind for me is Taxi Driver. DeNiro is in nearly every scene in that film, and it shows a gradual change in psyche, from from wierdo loner to wierdo loner who attempts to assassinate a presidential candidate and shoots up a whore house.
Even that film had a few scenes without the lead, with a couple featuring Harvey Kietel and Jodie Foster as well as Albert Brooks and Cybil Sheperd.
“How ’bout this? WE aren’t happy with the buttons. WE aren’t paying for the buttons.”
When I went to do a table reading of my spec pilot that thought entered my head a bunch. I was inviting all my actor friends over to read a script as a big favor because they all had more important stuff to do, so I wanted to make it worth their while. Turns out, the script needed more work anyway so I cancelled the table reading, but it got me thinking of scripts in a new way.
Nobody wants to play a boring part. So now when I write a part I always think of whether or not I’d want one of my friends in the role, then try to find a way to make it good without interrupting the momentum of a story.
Huh? Character arcs? Hehehe…
I once had a (semi-popular) actor tell me, “I don’t want to be the guy who learns. I want to be the guy who KNOWS.”
Great post, man.
-MM
Couple of comments.
1) My first screenwriting teacher told me, “imagine Jack Nicholson is playing your lead.” By that, she meant that he’s going to need to be in just about every scene – not all – but most. And the part has to have some meat. No cardboard characters need apply.
2) I love Aaron Sorkin’s stuff and, by and large, all his characters are smart. There’s plenty of funny in his writing, but there are no dumb people. It plays into what Jane Espenson had once said about comedy. That there are characters who are intentionally funny and characters who are unintentionally funny.
An interesting example of a smart funny character could be Bluto from Animal House. All that he does is intentional. The opposite is Clark Griswold from National Lampoon’s vacation. The majority of the humor is derived from the mistakes he makes unintentionally. Both are funny, but it determines what kind of character you create.
Although it seems off-topic, I use it as an example of what makes characters engaging and interesting to read or watch.
Not all actors are stupid.
So a lot of them can see beyond line counts and how many scenes they are in.
What they are looking for are characters which are going to be memorable.
Writing memorable characters is more about having people who have believable objectives, who have secrets which create subtext, characters who are forced into situations that leave them emotionally vulnerable.
When you’re thinking about writing great parts for actors it is better to think about scripts like Crash, rather than looking to genre movies.
If you can give the actor a part that reduces the audience to tears, because it is so poignant, so ironic, then you’ll be fighting the stars off with sticks.
Unk,
We used the “playing against type” infomercial card in a small way with our Indie film Dead Horse. Daniel Von Bargen (Lords Of Illusion, Seinfeld, Basic Instinct, O’ Brother Where Art Thou, et al) was drawn by the character, who’s in nearly every scene. His character is also not a cop, general, or any other power figure type — all of which Daniel has played often. His character in our dark comedy is an alcoholic/manic-depressive hell bent on killing his married girlfriend’s husband.
So that’s another way of attacking the actors out there – come up with material for them they’d normally never play. It may attract them…especially if you’re working in the Indie world.
I lost a deal recently because of this exact thing. Someone loved my characters. Raved about them, actually. Except one. My protagonist.
I am redrafting the story. It was a “brooding hero” type thing so I am going to reel in the brooding a bit and see what happens. It won’t change the theme of the script but it will heighten the “energy” of the protagonist.
I’ll see where it takes me, I guess. This craft is always such an adventure. I love it.
Great post!
Interesting post, thanks. A couple of actors I know have said that they’re always interested in scripts that allow them to do things they haven’t done before or that stretch them in some way. And at a talk I went to ages ago at the RSC, the three actors on stage (who played Hamlet, Ophelia, and Reynaldo) were asked “what’s the play about?” – the guy playing Reynaldo said, “well, its about this young guy at the Danish Court called Reynaldo”. Got big laughs from the audience, but essentially he was saying that each character needs to be substantial enough for them to see themselves as the centre of the story. Good advice for the more minor characters, I’ve always thought.
[...] All I can say is that this script GOES BACK to an earlier post, It’s in the stars… The script’s dialogue was enough to get some pretty oustanding talent on board but it also goes to show you that you still need a solid structure along with some great characters to keep people in the seats. Unfortunately, I heard a lot of dissatisfied banter as I stood in line waiting to get out of the theater… A few younger people enjoyed it but the older audiences just weren’t buying it. We shall see if the magic ticket-buying demographic can save it… I heard it only cost about $25 Mil to make so it only needs about three more half-way decent weekends of box office… LOL. [...]
[...] All I can say is that this script GOES BACK to an earlier post, It’s in the stars… The script’s dialogue was enough to get some pretty oustanding talent on board but it also goes to show you that you still need a solid structure along with some great characters to keep people in the seats. Unfortunately, I heard a lot of dissatisfied banter as I stood in line waiting to get out of the theater… A few younger people enjoyed it but the older audiences just weren’t buying it. We shall see if the magic ticket-buying demographic can save it… I heard it only cost about $25 Mil to make so it only needs about three more half-way decent weekends of box office… LOL. [...]