2.
Your Movie's Concept

"...don't hoard your best material. Squander it."
--Richard Krevolin, Screenwriting from the Soul

I began my screenwriting career "thinking like a playwright," which was a great mistake. I did not realize how important "concept" is in the highly competitive arena of Hollywood, and as a result I often had "struck out" without realizing it even before I had put one word on the computer screen. The concept of my movie story was not "a grabber."

This was a hard lesson to learn. I urge you to learn it much sooner than I did.

What's It All About?

In his essay "A Foot in the Door," Terry Rossio (who co-wrote Aladdin), puts it this way:

"As a screenwriter, your choice of film premise is your calling card. Not your witty dialog, not your clever descriptions. Not your knowledge of structure and subplot and subtext. The very first decision you make as a writer -- 'what is my film about?' -- will define your creative instincts in the eyes of the industry. Like actors and directors, you will always be known by the projects you pick (or in this case, by the projects you initiate). You must -- you MUST -- choose well."[URL]

This sentiment is echoed throughout the movie industry.

David Trottier, author of The Screenwriter's Bible, makes the same point in one of his columns on the Internet:

"Jeffrey Katzenberg, in his now-famous internal memo to Disney executives, preached the following: 'In the dizzying world of movie making, we must not be distracted from one fundamental concept: the idea is king. If a movie begins with a great, original idea, chances are good it will be successful, even if it is executed only marginally well. However, if a film begins with a flawed idea, it will almost certainly fail, even if it is made with "A" talent and marketed to the hilt.'

"Read this observation from Leonard Kornberg: 'When a script comes in, it is the concept that gets it purchased.'

"Jason Hoffs, while at Amblin Entertainment, said, 'Probably 80% of the spec scripts this year were bought for concept and not execution.'

"According to Robert Kosberg, 'Screenwriters usually focus on the craft of screenwriting - plot and developing characters. But these all fall aside if the initial concept is not clear. Find great ideas. Keep asking yourself, do you have a good idea here?'"[URL]

High Concept

Late in the 1970s, according to Justin Wyatt in his book High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood, Hollywood distilled the demand for good movie concepts into a single buzz word: high concept. [REF]

What is high concept?

In How to Sell Your Idea to Hollywood, Robert Kosberg, who is something of a Hollywood legend in his ability to pitch high concept to studios, defines it this way:

"The essence of high concept is that it is both brief and provocative. It piques the imagination and promises that big things are going to happen out of an ordinary situation. . . . The test is in whether you can describe a provocative movie in one or two lines. If someone else were to look at that one-liner and ask, But what's the movie about?, then you do not have a high concept. The next step is to breeze through a copy of TV Guide and read the one-liners used to describe scheduled movies. Try to emulate the style and structure of TV Guide listings in executing your idea." [REF]

In The Screenwriter's Bible, Trottier lists these features of high concept:

Perhaps now you can see how the mindset of a playwright isn't always compatible with such stringent demands on "concept." I am used to writing stories that matter to me, and my reasons for beginning a stage play are always more personal than commercial.

In the Hollywood arena, this is more the motivation of an independent filmmaker than of a screenwriter. As a writer, you are entering a marketplace filled with more screenplays demanding attention than you can imagine (see one writer's discovery of the screenplay morgue). A screenplay's concept is what sets one story quickly apart from another.

Good Movie Concepts

How then does one come up with a good commercial movie concept?

In his essay "Beachcombing", Terry Rossio believes good concepts share a number of features:

I would add that they also are easily placed in one of the major genres: drama, comedy, action/adventure, suspense/thriller, epic, scifi, romance, detective/crime, horror, western. Or in some combination or more specific version of them: romantic comedy; erotic thriller; coming of age comedy; epic historical drama.

Genre is especially important when marketing a story, which naturally becomes a major concern in business-focused Hollywood. Which shelf will they put the video of your movie on when it's released? The clearer, the better.

Genre

So let's look at genre a bit more closely:

Robin U. Russin and William Missouri Downs provide a valuable discussion of genre in their book Screenplay: Writing the Picture. They categorize story genres by the emotional response of the audience, as follows:

While not an exhaustive list, this approach is a good one.

It's important to give thought to the genre of your story and to create it within the borders of a clear genre or a clear cross-breed of genre.

Examples

Let's look at some examples of good movie concepts. The pithy one- and two-sentence expression of a concept is called a logline, about which we'll have much more to say when we turn to marketing concerns.

Consider these movie concepts:

Get the picture?

Here are two more recent movie concepts (from 1998) that created considerable "buzz" and even a bidding war:

  1. a homeless man lives in the Statue of Liberty;
  2. number eleven on the FBI's Most Wanted List is so angry at missing the top ten that he goes on a killing rampage, eliminating everyone on the list before him.

The latter is more detailed than the former, but each quickly presents a dramatic situation that clearly can be filmic. That's what "high concept" is really about, creating an idea that is quickly seen to "be a movie."

Or consider this article from Variety (May 6, 1999):

HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - Off just an e-mail pitch from an unknown French screenwriter, producer Larry Thompson (``And the Beat Goes On: The Sonny and Cher Story'') has locked up the film and TV rights to Internet thriller ``Murder.com.''

Thompson signed a low six-figure deal with Philip Devereaux, the 23-year-old ``Murder'' scribe, without any preliminary discussions or read-throughs.

``Murder'' tells the story of a French serial killer who brandishes a human virus for a weapon, and torments his victims through e-mail.

Thompson, who has no clue how Devereaux managed to grab hold of his e-mail address, has flown to France for a first-time meeting with the uncredited writer.

No production date has been set for the project.

Here it almost appears that the producer bought the title of the script, "Murder.com," which indeed is a natural. When a producer "turns on" to a concept, things can happen very quickly indeed. The urgency here, buying "without any preliminary discussions or read-throughs," suggests how badly the producer wanted this project. May you be so lucky!

More examples of high concept.

Loglines

These one-line concepts are called "loglines" and learning how to write good loglines will do two things: help you focus on the spine or foundation of your story and help you market your script when it is done.

Many loglines follow this pattern:

CHARACTER + ACTION + GOAL

For example: "A boy (character) befriends an alien (action) and helps him return home" (goal).

Or: "A man (character) cross-dresses as a nanny (action) in order to see his kids (goal).

These can be improved with implied or stated conflict: "A lonely boy befriends an alien and rescues him from the government so he can return home." "An estranged husband cross-dresses as a nanny in order to see his kids despite his wife's objections."

Once you get the hang of them, loglines are powerful tools. Their very brevity forces you to think about the spine of your story.

More about loglines.

Loglines v. Situations.

Exercise

Start a notebook in which you write the concept (as a logline) for each movie you see. Discuss these with your screenwriter friends and try to improve them.

Is High Concept Necessary?

High concept can be a disturbing thing to learn about. It seems to reduce movie ideas to a formula, gutting out the creativity and imagination that most writers take pride in.

If you believe this, try coming up with a high concept idea yourself. Talk about a challenge! So many good movie concepts hit me in the head with a sledgehammer, as if to say, Dummy, why didn't you think of that? But coming up with these blockbuster ideas on your own is very difficult to do.

But there also is a downside to Hollywood's attraction to "high concept": sometimes writing quality gets lost in the shuffle. Consider these startling words from literary agent Bob Bookman, as quoted in Linda Stuart's Getting Your Script Through the Hollywood Maze:

"I've read a lot of scripts that sold in the half-million to million-dollar range, and it really depressed me....I represented a screenwriting team and sold two or three scripts of theirs for a lot of money. They were all very high concept-driven scripts that, in my opinion, were not very well written. Those were the highest numbers that I got for spec scripts, and it depressed me a lot." [REF]

On the other hand, not every movie has a high concept. Sure, we can usually reduce a movie's idea to several sentences, but many movies are much quieter and character-driven than "high concept" seems to embrace, particularly movies made by independent filmmakers working out of the studio system.

Look at the loglines of two of my own scripts that have been optioned:

High concept? Yes, in the sense that the dramatic situation is immediately understood; but no, in the sense that these are not blockbuster "big" ideas. These are what several producers have called them: ideas for "good little movies."

But now I go after bigger fish and am trying to generate "bigger" ideas. In the summer of 1998, in fact, I sent my agent a dozen ideas for future screenplays -- and only three of them struck a chord with her as being "big enough" to generate interest in the mainstream. (These, of course, are the next three scripts I turn to.) The point is, generating commercial ideas can be difficult.

Another way to make your ideas more marketable is to work in popular, identifiable genres, such as action/adventure, thrillers or romantic comedy. In the summer of 1998 I optioned a psychological thriller to a producer for development into a cable television movie. In my work for the stage, I write nothing resembling this genre but suspenseful stories attract me to movie houses, and so I quite naturally write what I like to see. You should do the same.

Concepts for Learning v. Concepts for Selling

One of the first things you must do as a screenwriter is define your territory. Do you want to write big blockbuster movies for the studios or "good little movies" for smaller producers?

Many of the same principles of screenplay craft apply, no matter what your choice (and you can do both at the same time, with different scripts). But making a choice - or at least being aware of the different facets of the marketplace - is important, so you know what market you are dealing with.

As critical as choosing your movie concept is, it is less critical in the beginning of your career. This is because you can learn craft with a less marketable script as well as with a highly marketable one. In the beginning, you should write movie stories that you feel passionate about; you should write the stories you can't help not writing. There's time to worry about marketing later.

There also will be time later to fine-tune the difficult skill of creating movie concepts that are "naturals," the kind of idea you hear and know immediately is a winner. But since in the beginning of your career you are going to have to market this concept as a spec script, you need to learn the craft of screenwriting before you learn anything else.

A good movie concept will jump out at you. An estranged father cross-dresses as a nanny in order to be able to visit his children (another take on Mrs. Doubtfire) - now why didn't I think of that?

Your Project's Concept

Now it's your turn.

Write the concept for the project that you are going to develop through this course. Write it as a logline - you'll be filling it out later as you work on the paradigm chart and (possibly) step outline and (possibly) treatment.

Spend some time on this - first, in choosing the concept. Come up with five before you select the one you'll stick with. Then put on your "ad man" hat and see how good and intriguing a logline you can write.

Save your work so you can return to it later.

[NEXT]


MODULE 2: SCREENWRIGHT: the craft of screenwriting

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