Could The Next Hollywood Be New York?

by R.S. Mellette

To work in the film industry, one goes to Hollywood; for publishing, New York. But could that paradigm change in the near future?

Way back in the 1990's, a book was something that came on paper and a movie on film. To buy a book, you went to the bookstore. To see a movie, you went to the theatre or a video store. They were two very different businesses.

Today, both movies and books are digital files. If you want to buy a book, you go to Amazon, iTunes, or Nook. To see a movie you go to ... Amazon, iTunes or Nook.

For computers, the only difference between film and literature is the size of the file. Tour a publishing house or a digital film lab without looking at the computer screens and you'll be hard-pressed to know which was which. They are both transcoding files for different platforms, QCing those files, preparing metadata and art (posters or covers), checking chapter breaks, compressing, and uploading them to the providers.

So, consider ... Motion Picture Studios don't really make movies anymore; haven't for a long time. Sure, they find the projects. They develop the material. They finance the productions, and they distribute them, but the nuts and bolts of turning ink-on-paper into images on the screen is jobbed out to production companies. Imagine makes movies mostly for Universal. Village Road Show for Warner Bros. etc. Of course there is a tight partnership, since the Studios are often putting in most of the money, but even that is beginning to lean more heavily in the direction of the production companies.

Let's say you're a publishing house. The book industry has become so volatile that you need some ballast. You need to leverage the assets you have in a way that can spread the risk. But what assets are those? You have a company full of people who know a good book when they read one, and they are willing to read a ton of them to find the gems. You have a library of good stories, and you're buying new ones all the time. But does that make you a valuable company, or the most insane person in your neighborhood book club?

What's the first thing a movie studio does? They find the projects. You, as a publisher, are sitting on a mountain of them. Not only have you found the diamonds in the rough, you've polished them and presented them to market. You have developed the material.

In your library are Romance Novels that could become a money machine in your own Harlequin YouTube channel. And you're buying new stuff. You just shelled out cash and resources for Mindy McGinnis's Not a Drop to Drink, which is screaming for a wide theatrical release. If you're good, you can lock up the film rights before Hollywood knows what hit them.

In fact, the right of first refusal on the movie is now going to be in your standard contract.

What's the next thing a studio does? They finance. You're a publishing company. You're in New York. You can't swing a big black cat without hitting a handful of hedge fund managers who would love to place a bet on a Big Six project. Where the independent film producer has to beg and explain what they are doing, you can say, "I'm the person who found Hunger Games and Harry Potter. Wanna play with me?"

So, you've got the money. You've got the properties. Now comes the tricky part every homeowner can attest to, finding the right contractor to build on your property. If only there was a high turnover rate in Hollywood. Then there would be plenty of experienced executives looking for the chance to get back into producing. They'd have the connections to put together a string of companies to produce your entire slate.

Oh, wait! There IS a high turnover rate of executives in Hollywood. You can't swing a hedge fund manager without hitting a former studio executive. Or, in my case, a current festival director who gave you this idea in the first place.

So if this is such a brilliant plan, why hasn't anyone done it before?

Not everyone has access to the intellectual property you do, and there's distribution. In the theatrical days, a company had to have a strong relationship with the theatre owners to squeeze their films into the crowded market. That's still true of theatres, but the future is on line. You, as a new studio, are going to have to have a working relationship with the platforms that distribute films, and – bingo! You do.

Amazon, iTunes, Nook, etc. You've been delivering to them for years. You have servers and staff in place to QC, package, and upload to all of these platforms. Once you are delivering films, Netflix, Playstation, Hulu, Vudu, Cinema Now and more will come knocking.

And you're vertically integrated. When people like the book they just read on their iPad; one click and they're watching the movie. What? The movie hasn't been made? They can pre-order it You'll send it directly to their device as soon as it's ready. Talk about crowd funding, a movie could be profitable before it's even shot.

And none of this takes into account the lower budgets on films. The guilds all have "made for New Media" contracts in place with attractive rates. Shooting digitally is a fraction of the cost of the old film days. You could crank out low budget Romance Movies as fast as Cali MacKay can write the books. For the bigger budget theatrical releases, you can partner up with – and learn from – a major studio. In fact, they probably own your company anyway, so the good faith negotiations will be a breeze.

But what about the writers? Will new writers be willing to sell their film rights at the same time they do their book? That's an individual choice, of course, and I hope agents and writers alike will comment here about their thoughts on the subject. Personally, I'd say yes for a few reasons.

First, you're not selling the rights, you're selling the exclusive option to buy the rights within a certain time period. At the end of that time - if they haven't sold it - you get to keep the money you were advanced, and go try to sell the option to someone else. If your agent is good, you might sell a 3 year option from the contract date. It will take two years to get your manuscript to market, and then one year to establish sales. Hollywood will read an unpublished manuscript, but they won't take a lot of interest if it doesn't have sales behind it, so you've been paid for three years of an option, when it's only costing you about six months of post-publising time.

Another reason to sell your film rights to your publisher is that they will be into your project for a lot of money. Turning the red ink on your balance sheet to black is a big motivator in the corporate world. They are going to want your manuscript to be as big of a hit as possible, and that larger investment is going to keep you on their hot sheet.

And finally, it's money! Take it! Sure, most Hollywood movies are based on books these days, but most books don't get made into movies. Yes, there's a chance that they'll hold onto the rights and do nothing, but they paid you. That's better than you and your agent shopping the project around to production companies for nothing. Let your publisher take the project to the same producers with the sales pitch, "and we have the money to produce it." You're in a win-win all the way.

Now, if only I could figure out how to make this a win for me... because, you know, it's all about me.

R.S. Mellette is an experienced screenwriter, actor, director, and novelist. You can find him at the Dances With Films festival blog, and on Twitter, or read him in the Spring Fevers and The Fall: Tales of the Apocalypse anthologies.

A Physical Experiment

by R.S. Mellette

Let's play a game.  It should take about 10 minutes, and be fun for you and educational for us all.  I'll explain why after the game.

Here are the rules:

1. Read the following few words of a work in progress.

"You're in a lot of trouble, young lady." 

Adults say the stupidest things sometimes.  Of course twelve-year-old Suzy Quinofski was in trouble.  She was covered in dirt and dried tears.  Her fingers were cracked and bloody from digging in the ground, and she was being questioned in a police interrogation room.  The man informing her of the obvious was Detective Mark Danner. 

"You don't know the half of it," she said to him.  Actually, he didn't know a tenth of it.  He didn't know a millionth of it.

"Then why don't you fill me in?"

"Because you couldn't comprehend it if I did."

"Suzy!"  Janice Quinofski, a.k.a. Mom, used what Suzy called her "bad dog!" voice, reserved for those rare occasions when Suzy needed disciplining.  Obviously, Mom wasn't accustomed to seeing her sweet, straight-A, multiple-scholarship-contender, daughter acting like a street kid.  This was a whole new world for both of them.

"What, Mom?  It's true."  Then to Danner, "No offense.  I don't think there's anyone on the planet who could understand it."

"It's not that complicated.  I just want to know what happened to Billy Bobble."

"I told you.  He disappeared."

"Disappeared to where?" asked Danner.

"If I knew that he wouldn't be 'disappeared,' would he?"

"There was an explosion," said Danner.

"No, there was an endoplasmic eruption of what we think might be Bose-Einstein condensate on an OTC scale."

"OTC?"

When Suzy didn't answer, Danner turned to her mother.  "Off the chart."

"Out of all of that what you didn't get was OTC?" asked Suzy.

"Maybe I'm not as dumb as you think."

Suzy nodded her head toward the two-way mirror that filled a wall of the interrogation room.  "Maybe you've had too many lawyers complain about abbreviations in your transcripts."

"Call it what you want," said Danner to Suzy ...  "Something blew up and it took Billy with it."

"Maybe so," said Suzy, "but not in the way you think."

"How then?"

"If Billy exploded his guts would be all over the school yard.  Did you find any bloody remains in Linda Lubinski's hair?"

"Suzy!  Billy was your friend."

"Is my friend, Mom.  Billy is my friend and I wish they would let me out of here so I could help get him back."

"How would you do that?" asked Danner.

She hung her head.  "I don't know."

"Okay, good.  That was honest.  Keep it up and together we can find Billy."  Suzy's silence passed as capitulation. 

"Your friends have told us—"

"They aren't my friends."

Danner stopped to acknowledge what she said, then went on.  "They told us you and Billy were working on some sort of elaborate magic trick."

"Not a trick.  Actual magic."

"Hey, I need that honesty.  You're smart enough to know there's no such thing as actual magic."

"Okay, if you want to get all Arthur C. Clarke on me; 'Technology advanced to the point of being indistinguishable from magic' - which for you would probably be a cell phone."

"Suzy!"

"That's all right, Ms. Quinofski.  Suzy, you can be as surly and sarcastic as you like, so long as you tell me what happened.  How did Billy disappear?"

"It's a long story."

"I get paid by the hour."

"You won't believe me."

"Try me."

"Okay."  Suzy glared at him with as cold of a stare as she could muster and told the truth.  "Billy Bobble has a magic wand."

###

Done?  Good.  Now:

2. In the comments section write a sentence or two describing what the characters in the excerpt look like WITHOUT GOING BACK TO RE-READ IT and WITHOUT READING ANYONE ELSE'S DESCRIPTION. 

3. When you've done that, read the rest of this blog, then feel free to add another comment at the end and read the other descriptions.

You've had to go through this experiment because I am still bitter about something a high school teacher did to me grade-wise decades ago.

It was my senior year.  English Composition.  We were told to write a paper describing a person we knew.  I'm sure our teacher – whose name escapes me – was just following along in the lesson plan.  I don't think she'd been out of college a full year yet.  We were supposed to learn about descriptive paragraphs, so the assignment was to describe a person.

I happened to have an afterschool job in an ice cream shop at the time, and a girl I worked with was extremely annoying, so I wrote about her.  Thing is, I never wrote about what she looked like, only what she said.  The story was nothing but dialogue.

My teacher gave me a B+.  I think.  I do remember she thought I'd be all excited about the plus.  "It's really good," she told me, "but you didn't do the assignment.  You didn't describe the character."

"Sure I did," I complained.  "Tell me what she looks like."

I kid you not, a police sketch artist could have drawn a picture from her description, and you'd have sworn it was a photo of this girl.  I nailed it.  I put the image of the character in her mind.

No go.  Still a C+.  Or B+.  Whatever it was, it wasn't an A.

Flash forward years later to someone giving me advice on screenwriting.  "You don't want to paint too clear of a physical picture of the character because you don't know what star might read the script.  If you say she looks like Pamela Anderson, and the script lands on Meryl Streep's desk, then you've screwed up."

But now I write novels as well as screenplays, and I like using actions and dialogue to make the reader think I've told them what the character looks like, when in fact, I've only given them clues and they've filled in the rest.

OR...

I'm fooling myself and what I think is style is simply laziness.  Honestly, I don't know, which is why I created this experiment.

If you wrote a description in the comments – and I hope you have, because this post will be embarrassing without them – go back and re-read the excerpt to see if you can find where you got your ideas from.  The writing is from my latest WIP, Billy Bobble Has A Magic Wand.  I'm curious if the magic has worked.

R.S. Mellette is an experienced screenwriter, actor, director, and novelist. You can find him at the Dances With Films festival blog, and on Twitter, or read him in the Spring Fevers anthology.

Novelist vs Screenwriter vs Playwright

by R.S. Mellette

I've written stage plays, screenplays (large and small) and novels with nearly the same success, and lack thereof, so I thought a comparison of how I feel about each might be useful. I have no doubt arguments will abound, which is a good thing. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.

THE STAGE: "Theatre is dead." That proclamation was made to me by the late, great, set designer, John Paoletti, as we met to discuss the set for a 99-seat production in Los Angeles. Such "Equity Waiver" plays are to theatre what garage bands are to Rock & Roll. This particular play had an all-star cast, so it was a great little garage band—but could only be considered professional by the quality of the work, not the dollars earned. Paoletti designed sets for theatre all over the country. As we talked about the production, he was drawing pieces for a play back in Chicago. He worked constantly. In any other profession his labor and skill would have made him a rich man, but he was far from it. This is what prompted him to say what he did. "Theatre is dead, and television killed it."

I had no argument against it. Still don't. But the skills of the stage, the lessons learned in front of a live audience night-after-night, are invaluable when it comes to film and television—where the artist may never hear or feel the audience's initial response to their work. In film, 1920 is ancient history. You're considered a scholar if you know what Thomas Edison might have to do with Steven Spielberg's success.

Theatre can trace her roots back to before God. An understanding of what moved an audience in ancient Egypt, or Greece, or what made Italians in the 16th Century laugh, or how Theatre survived the hard economic times of English reconstruction—and how these same human storytelling techniques have worked in our day—give a writer a deep pool of knowledge to work from. Damn the marketing people and their test screenings—a writer with a strong theatre background has 3,000+ years of research and feedback from billions of people to draw from. Better still if this writer has spent time on stage performing other writers' work. The best teacher is the instant feedback of a paying audience.

In writing for the stage you are capturing the power and majesty of the human voice, from kings to paupers, the supremacy of the words are yours to wield. Sure, you might write in a deus ex machine, but without the deity to speak from atop the device, the special effect isn't much good.

With minimal stage effects and limited settings, a playwright is forced to entertain and educate with nothing but words and the interaction of characters—but this is the basis of all writing, isn't it? The stage demands a higher level than books or film, and is the only medium that offers the immediacy of the moment. An actor speaks the words, the audience hears them, and the playwright is there to gauge the reaction. Quickly, the author learns what resonates and what doesn't. Soon, he or she can play the audience like a violin. Actors often say they can literally control how an audience breathes, but it is the writer that gave them the setting and words to exercise that power.

THE SCREEN: No critic or academic can speak intelligently about film if they haven't rolled up their sleeves and done the grunt work of production. If they haven't worked as a grip, a producer, or director, then they have no real idea of where the writer fits into the picture. The production crew see the writer as someone who lounges around with the director and producers, or who might talk to the cast from time-to-time. More often than not, they have no idea who the writer is at all. He, she or they might not ever come to the set. The director and producers, working with the cast, may make last minute tweaks to the script, and so the writer is seen as superfluous.

But a good producer or director knows what the writer has done. Months or years prior to production, they've been working together to turn blank paper into living, breathing characters in a real world. The author can be so cavalier on the set because their hard work was done long before anyone else had a job on this project. If the script started as speculative—written first and sold later—then the author has worked more hours on the film than anyone else has or will.

But if the screenwriter faces the blank page, he or she does not face a blank audience. They are writing for other professionals in the business for whom a shorthand has evolved.

INT. NEW YORK APARTMENT—DAY
Brad's studio apartment is as much of a wreck as his life.

That's all the writer needs to include to give those crew members who work so hard during production the picture of what they need to achieve.

Some writers find it hard to learn this shorthand, and I think their work suffers for it. They lack trust in their designers, directors and cast to do the detective work necessary to flush out the details of the world everyone is trying to create. The designers are going to read the entire script. They will know what kind of wreck Brad's life is, and can then apply their talents to reflecting this in the set. No spoon-feeding necessary, and by allowing more input from various sources, the finished product has a depth to it that a spelled out description might lack.

This type of writing, once mastered, can become a lot of fun. All the author need deal with are characters and story—the meat and potatoes. They have a cast, crew and editors to take care of the minutiae. The art of screenwriting is to use the least amount of words to make a clear image pop into the minds of trained, professional, readers—and to be able to make them all see a similar picture.

NOVELS: You're a control freak? You want to be the auteur? Forget about film, become a novelist. Here you are the art department, the cast, crew, editor, director and craft service person picking up the trash—and yet, if you are successful, you will still have to collaborate with editors, marketing people, agents, etc.

The novelist faces a blank page in both the creation and production of the work. All that can be assumed about the audience is that they can read the language that's on the page—and yet, the author has to put the same story into every reader's head. They have no soundtrack. No special effects. No magic of the theatre. Nothing between their brain and their audience's but the written word.

I can tell you, having made a feature film (on film) and written two novels, they are comparable in their tedium. An editor will work for sometimes an hour or more on a single cut of a film that flashes by in one 24th of a second and is never seen by the audience again. An author will do the same with a word in a sentence.

An animator once told me that cartoon characters must blink when they turn their heads, or they don't look real. A novelist once said, "If you use the word 'suddenly' then whatever follows, isn't."

With all of these differences, what I'm finding as I work in the three media is how they are becoming more similar. Modern novels require less description than their 18th-early 20th century counterparts. Perhaps it is because television has shown us so much of the world that the details of exotic locations or people are now common knowledge. Perhaps it's because we have so many ways to fill our free time, that a book had better cut to the chase or it will never compete with the explosions and spectacle of the big screen or video games. What theatre that has been successful lately has been based on movies—just as they used to be based on histories or commonly known tales.

No matter what medium a writer chooses to work in, they seek the same result—resonance. They must touch the audience in a way that it amplifies within them. That's the art of it, and it's the same for all. The craft is what will differ.

Thanks for reading.