Many people ask me if they should learn about selling and pitching scripts before they start writing, or after they’ve finished a draft.
My answer is: either and both – and while in the middle too!
The thing is this: you should absolutely not write a script for the market. And you absolutely should write it with awareness of the market.
Your market is your audience. All the great artistic screenwriters and film-makers in cinema and TV, from DW Griffith to Godard to Charlie Kaufman to Martin Scorsese have known exactly who their audience is, where they are and how to get to them.
Knowing their audience doesn’t distort their vision – it is a central part of their vision.
And the irony is, when I see scripts that don’t sell (and sadly I see many) very often the difference between reaching the writer’s audience and not reaching it comes down to one or two things that could be changed quite simply – either in the script or in the pitch. If only the writer knew.
So, the tip for today is: know your audience – profoundly and in detail. Do whatever research, watch whatever movies and TV programmes, go to whatever workshops it takes to find where they are, and how to sell to them.
6 Comments
January 15, 2012 at 5:57 pm
From Richard Parkin, sent by email
Charles
This is tenuous, to put it mildly.
“All the great artistic screenwriters and film-makers in cinema and TV, from DW Griffith to Godard to Charlie Kaufman to Martin Scorsese have known exactly who their audience is, where they are and how to get to them.
Knowing their audience doesn’t distort their vision – it is a central part of their vision”
The emphasis for these filmmakers falls firmly on the awareness of cinematic form not of their audience. I think you might be reasoning backwards, so to speak. The premise cannot by derived from the conclusion. That a film found an audience does not mean that the filmmaker already knew that audience or that that knowledge informed their work. You could say many of these “great artistic screenwriters” had an attitude to the audience, but that’s not quite the same thing. (‘The Birth of a Nation’ was an unprecedented success, the first blockbuster, but D W Griffith fell out with his production partners, broke up their company, and invested his own money in the production. You might say he knew there was an audience for films longer than two reals, but it would be more accurate to say, I think, that he wanted there to be an audience, or better still, that he wanted such films to exist. The people he ‘sold’ that script to were not producers, but cast and crew who deferred their wages, not for its commercial prospects, but for its artistic ambition.)
But I suppose you are aware of your audience too. You want to reassure aspiring screenwriters that selling a script doesn’t have to mean selling out.
Fair enough, I guess.
best wishes
Richard P
January 15, 2012 at 5:59 pm
Hi Richard
I don’t mind being tenuous
I agree that great artists of all kinds create their own audience – but few survive long without some idea of who that audience might be created from. Especially in film and TV. And you’re right, selling does not mean selling out.
January 15, 2012 at 6:02 pm
From Richard Parkin, sent by email
I’d love to hear some concrete instances of this ‘audience awareness’ contributing to artistic achievment in cinema, Charles. I’m sure there must be some.
January 15, 2012 at 6:04 pm
I’m not a film historian, but I think that, for starters, the indie film-makers of the late 60s and 70s knew full well that they were cultivating a new audience that had not been well catered for by Hollywood – and probably ended up producing some of the greatest movies in what looks from here as being a golden age.
Ditto the French nouvelle vague of around the same time (Truffaut, Godard, etc) – and of course the subversive film-makers behind the Iron Curtain.
On a different note, Hitchcock knew his audience inside out and backwards, and you can see him playing with their/our expectations in his trailers and movies.
Very best
CH
January 20, 2012 at 7:38 pm
From Richard Parkin, sent by email
Good, yes. That’s an instance of ‘audience awareness’. Hitchcock was responding to the vogue for documentary realism. Like you, I’m no film historian, so I don’t know whether he was responding to culture, filmmaking, or box office precedents. (The Mark Cousins book is a bit vague.) On the other hand, as I’m sure you know, Psycho deliberately breaks a cardinal rule of screenwriting: killing the (putative) lead character. It is perhaps no coincidence that Hitch was the producer on that film.
How many writers or producers who “considered the market” would dare to do this even now?
January 20, 2012 at 8:03 pm
Good point and you’ve hit on one of the core themes in all my workshops: Breaking the rules!
I studied all my favourite movies, and rapidly realised that all the great movies keep some rules and break others. The trick is knowing which to keep, which to break, and how to get away with it! 😉
Not just in the past, but now too.
That’s what I’ve been studying (and teaching) for years now.
Very best
Charles