Script to Screen: Inside the Development Process - March 7, 2009

IFP’s Script to Screen Conference

Tips from the Pros: Inside the Development Process
March 7, 2009
New York, NY

Producer Mike Ryan lead another producer, a screenwriter (the very jovial and enthusiastic Kelly Masterson) and a couple of development executives in the discussion about what else, but development, the process of reading and evaluating scripts that may or may not be eventually produced and brought to the screen. The following are highlights from that discussion.

Moderator:
Mike Ryan, Producer, Old Joy

Panelists:
Quentin Little, Producer & Former Development Exec, HDNet Films
Kelly Masterson, Screenwriter, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead
Cordelia Stephens, Development Exec, Belladonna
Angela Lee, Development Exec, Vox 3

Ryan: How can companies be approached with scripts? What is your experience with this process?

Little: We look into the type of material they have and what their mandate is…We make sure you’re very specifically demographically targeted…It’s a lot harder for us to accept unsolicited submissions. They may however read unsolicited queries. You can send in a query letter. It’s a sense of your project, but not the script…You want to narrow it down to a short and concise couple of sentences…Be sure you’re capturing the essence of it.

Stevens: Our submission process is fairly open. We really read all the query letters that are sent. We don’t read unsolicited scripts…I really don’t like to get a query letter in the mail, I liked to get it emailed…It’s really important that the query letter tells about the script in a way I can read it in a few seconds. I’m getting dozens of query letters every week, probably five or six every day…From all of those query letters, we probably select one or two scripts a week that we’re going to bring into the company. We’re also getting scripts sent in by agents…It’s a big mistake to give too much or too little information…I just want to make a point that this is a marketing process. Is this film good and will it make money…because that’s the game. The marketing process culminates with the distributor…When you’re submitting that query letter, I’m convinced that (the film will) get somebody into a movie theater on a sunny afternoon.

Lee: We also don’t take unsolicited scripts…Another venue for getting in touch with development execs is getting your project accepted into events like the IFP Market. It’s an amazing event that’s using new voices that I wouldn’t otherwise heard of and then have relationships with.

Ryan: As a screenwriter, what’s your process of approaching companies?

Masterson: Two years ago, I was exactly where a lot of you are…I was a playwright for 20 years. I made all the mistakes that these people are telling you not to. I sent out scripts. I did everything I could. I came to events like this. I targeted people like Angela and gave them 30 seconds of my time with my log line…The most important thing that will change your life is getting the movie made. I got there two years ago. It took a long time to do…Now I have an agent and a manager…I have pet projects, things that are still very close to my heart that I spend a lot of time on…If you believe in your script, that’s the movie you want to get maid, find the right people. It sounds very simple, but it’s not at all.

Ryan: Once the query letter has been written and a development executive is interested, what can the screenwriter expect in that first meeting? What’s the next step?

Lee: It depends on how far along we like the script…Let’s say for example, we’re happy with where the script is at, we see that there’s potential, there’s interest in the marketplace…the decision makers at the company agree to the vision of your project and bring it on…we’ll do the meet and greet. At that point if we’re happy with it we’ll probably start to negotiate the option…At our company, we’re going to either be able to make it, fund raise for it and get it to production pretty quickly. Our company would not focus it on...numerous years…I would say we’d option it for a year to 18 months.

Stevens: It’s maybe important to explain how options actually work…It gives a production company the exclusive rights to try to raise money and attachments to that script. You may not get paid very much when a project is optioned…We take projects at different stages. We want to meet the writers to get a sense if they’re somebody we want to work with…It’s sort of a dating process.

Audience Question: Should you trust someone to option your script for $0?

Ryan: The Door in the Floor is a good example. It was optioned for $2. Why…because Ted Hope said ‘this is a tough sell. I need to invest my time and money to get this and it could take six months of my time and money to get this to somebody like Jeff Bridges. If you believe in me and I’m not subsidized by a studio and I’m going to go with this vision of the script…and I’m going to invest my time, I need it for zero.”

Little: Keep in mind, even at Guild minimum, you’re looking at a couple of thousand dollars per a year to 18 months. Work that down by hour, that’s minimum wage. It’s pretty minor. I don’t think it’s a sign of bad faith.

IFP Script to Screen - Writers in Collaboration - March 7, 2009

IFP’s Script to Screen Conference

Writers in Collaboration
March 7, 2009
New York, NY

Writer/Director Ira Sachs (Forty Shades of Blue, Married Life) moderated a discussion on the collaborative writing process. He started the conversation by saying that everything he does is about how well he works with other people. “There’s almost nothing that isn’t about trying to negotiate between your own instincts and what you share and look for from others…This panel is about how you work communally, but still have a vision.” Below are highlights from the discussion with writers who collaborate with either a partner or a team for film and/or television.

(Photo by Brian Geldin)

Moderator:
Ira Sachs, Writer/Director, Married Life

Panelists:
Ryan Fleck, Writer/Director, Sugar & Half Nelson
Todd A. Kessler, Co-Creator, “Damages”
Daniel Zelman, Co-Creator, “Damages”

Sachs: How did you start working collaborators?

Fleck: (Anna Boden and I) started working together in film school…I started helping her with her projects, she started helping me with mine, giving me notes on the scripts that I was working on…I directed Half Nelson, but she was always there, very much involved with that. On Sugar, we co-directed that together.

Kessler: Daniel, Glenn and I, Glenn’s my brother so I’ve known him for a long time. Daniel had been a friend of ours since college…Basically, we’re writing and producing television. That’s something an individual can’t do alone…We do 13 episodes a season so that’s 13 scripts. Sometimes scripts are written in a week…one person can’t write that much…The core of our collaboration was that we wanted to work together and not have to bring in other people. If anyone has seen Damages, you’re aware that there’s a lot of betrayal and manipulation and narcissism…all the things that we experienced working with other people. So we wanted to limit some of that and the three of us got together.

Sachs: How do you work in the writing stage?

Zelman: There are two different phases. There’s the writing that begins prior to the season’s beginning…the first season was the pilot…The three of us sit in a room and just talk a lot and discuss what we’re interested in. It really begins with a character. Damages began with the character played by Glenn Close (Patty Hewes)…We began by discussing her and what it was we wanted to explore through her. It really just becomes a brainstorming session…Once the season is up and running, that’s the second phase…We divide up the script and we all write pieces of that script and then we pass our pages back and forth…There’s a lot of re-writing of other people’s materials. We kind of create a factory mill where every scene goes through every writer. We feel that by the time it goes through that process, it’s better than it would be than with any one of us.

Sachs: How are each of the collaborations you’ve worked on different? What’s worked best for you?

Kessler: On The Sopranos (for which Kessler wrote during seasons 2 and 3), David Chase is the creator of the show and was kind of infamous for having very long stretches of time between each season…The more time you have, the better off you are because you have more time to think about the stories and the characters. Because you had to generate so much material so quickly, you’re able to read books and live lives and see what’s going on in the world that you can bring to the work…We would start with David coming back. He’d have these long sheets of paper, episodes 1-13…He would have these mileposts in the season, the second season for example, the character of Big Pussy, would die by the end…There were these long arcs and it was our job as writers to help fill in those spaces. That’s something we’ve put to use on Damages, what we call tent pole scenes.

Sachs: One of the things I realized collaborating with co-writers on screenplays is you get systems into place. How can those systems be helpful and how can they also inhibit creativity? How did you work together with Anna?

Fleck: When we started writing Sugar, we needed to get out of the city. It was really distracting. The McDowell Colony (where they went) is a great place to go…If you don’t have the luxury of going away somewhere, just start writing…When Anna and I worked together, there was no science, no pattern…We typically separate…We come up with an outline…come up with the main beats and then we’ll separate and start writing the scenes…We’re usually not writing together until we’re re-writing.

Audience Question: How do you avoid legal problems amongst collaborators? What degree of trust do you need to have?

Fleck: I think when you’re first starting, there’s a degree of mistrust…I think that’s healthy to have…You don’t need a lawyer to get everything worked out on paper. Ultimately, that’s not going to matter…unless there’s millions of dollars at stake, you’re not really going to go sue them.

Zelman: I totally agree with what you’re saying that at the end of the day, a lawyer for contracts are not going to protect what most needs to be protected…It’s almost like a spiritual question…There is so much time and energy put into doing these projects, that it’s like a marriage. If you just don’t feel a fundamental trust with the people you’re collaborating with creatively, it’s a leap of faith…You just have to be committed to each other and understand that you’re going to splice through those moments. If you don’t have that faith, it’s a very dangerous place to be.

Audience Question: How did you work with your co-writer on Forty Shades of Blue?

Sachs: I worked with a co-writer named Michael Rohatyn, who was not the co-writer on my next film (Married Life) who was Oren Moverman. The process for me is generally I have an idea for something that I’m interested in. I often take a good stab at a first draft myself just to try to get as much of the instinctual things that are personal. The more autobiographical stuff tends to come out alone. I think that’s true for my co-writers as well. I send them off to go write at certain times…For me it’s very important as an artist and I project this as well for my co-writer, that they have the space at a certain time where they are just playing with their own memories and ideas and that they don’t need to verbalize everything to me for it to become something that I want to see on the page…One of the biggest challenges of collaboration is, and it’s the same with an actor, I try to talk very little to the actors, except when I need to…I want to see what they’re going to bring me. That’s a very good part of collaboration, trying to tap into what that person has that you don’t have.

IFP's Script to Screen Conference - Conversation with James Schamus - March 7, 2009

IFP’s Script to Screen Conference

Conversation with Keynote James Schamus – CEO, Focus Features
March 7, 2009
New York, NY

(Scott Macaulay & James Schamus. Photo by Brian Geldin.)

Focus Features CEO James Schamus makes his second appearance here at The Film Panel Notetaker (his first being at the Woodstock Film Festival last fall) with my notes taken in a packed hall at the New York Film Academy Saturday morning during IFP's Script to Screen Conference, which was created to help aspiring and working screenwriters explore new opportunities. Filmmaker Magazine Editor-in-Chief Scott Macaulay moderated Saturday’s conversation with Schamus. The discussion moved a bit beyond the script writing process, so here I will focus (bah dump bump) on the elements of the conversation that may be most helpful for the screenwriters reading this blog.

Macaulay’s first question was, how do you know what a screenplay is, to which Schamus replied, “It’s completely a business plan…American screenplays are essentially 124 pages begging for money…The scripts are moving into predetermined generic modules…On the other side, the fantasy side, there is the writer/director mode…all of us live somewhere between the two ends of that spectrum…On that spectrum, you are doing something that serves as an object…The problem of getting too far on the (writer/director side) of the spectrum…a screenplay in the production context is 123 pages of advice and if the advice is a little hazy or if someone stops taking the advice…once you stop taking your own advice, everybody stops, too…The key to making a movie well…is that everybody on the set is making the same movie.”

To elaborate on the writer/director paradigm, Macaulay noticed that fewer directors seem to be going down this path. Macaulay asked Schamus if he’s noticed this, too, and if so, why does he think so? Using Ang Lee as an example, Shamus said, “Ang was never a writer/director. He was always a filmmaker. That definition seemed in and of itself sort of liberating a couple of years ago, became actually quite constraining…That said, writer/directors are still clearly the DNA that will never rinse down American independent cinema…You can be a non-writer/director and still be an auteur…(that) came out of (France’s) Cahier du Cinema writers who were not writing about themselves…they weren’t filmmakers yet. They were writing about filmmakers who had household name recognition…What they were doing was using auteur theories to excavate the idea of the director as the central signator…inside the Hollywood system and use that wedge open a completely different appreciation of cinema.”

With Focus’s upcoming release of Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre, Macaulay asked Schamus how Focus got involved with working with a first-time feature filmmaker. Schamus said, “We continue to adapt our business to audiences. In this case…an audience that’s open to a first-time filmmaker…To me what’s exciting about Sin Nombre besides how masterful and amazing the movie is…how do we create a Latino audience in the United States? We saw his short, which he was developing at the Sundance Lab [More about screenwriting labs, contests & worshops in a near future post here]…We’re really an internationally oriented company…80% of my day is spent on movies that are circulating across the globe.”

And what about Schamus as a screenwriter himself, mostly working on adaptations with Lee, Macaulay asked. “With Ang, it’s literally whatever I can find that will scare the shit out of him,” Schamus revealed. “I actually really like Hollywood movies. I like the system. It’s an incredibly interesting cultural machine.”

Opening the conversation to the audience, one person asked the perennial question, how does one submit a project to the company? Schamus recognized that the answer is a “Catch 22” saying “you need representation…If I accepted an unsolicited manuscript; my own lawyers will now sue me.” Later someone asked if it’s best to come to Focus with the complete package of a producer, director and a star, to which Schamus replied, it varies. “It usually means someone we believe internationally, in a territory other than the United States, somebody who has a bit of a profile that we can leverage.” And for people looking to work as spec script writers, Schamus said, “Spec scripts are for people who want jobs. That genre only functions in the Hollywood context …There’s no spec feature market (for example) for European art films…It’s basically the Energizer Bunny approach.” And finally, does age bias really exists for screenwriters? “For whatever reason, there is a bias against older writers, except there are a handful of A-listers. Part of it is, if you actually establish yourself as a writer-for-hire let’s say by your 30s, that business is fairly lucrative…and then, after 10 years…that’s it.”