While Keane has been a good
imaginary friend of mine for the past week, I am sad to say that we have had a
falling out. It wasn’t a messy affair, no hair was pulled and no punches were
thrown, but we simply grew apart. While I agree with many of his points made in
the first few chapters, I found myself rereading entire paragraphs because I
had dozed off in the middle. My lack of interest could potentially be a result
of my new “mistress”: Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder. With almost a
decade separating the two books, I felt that the references in Save the Cat!
were easier for me to relate to in the first chapters of the book. I do not
blame Keane for being from a different cinematic era, I was bogged down by the
constant Google searches I had to do every time Keane mentioned a movie from
the seventies.
Therefore, I’ve decided to ever so
slightly alter the format of this blog, even though I am certain doing so would
break one of the Ten Commandments of the “blogosphere”. While I will continue
to log the number of pages I’ve read of novels or pages I’ve written, I will
not continue to update you on the number of pages I have left in the “how-to”
screenwriting books. In an Internet shopping frenzy, I bought four
screenwriting books off of Amazon. Instead of finishing one at a time, I’ve
decided to jump from book to book and create my own mental collage of important
screenwriting tips. While I will miss holding Keane’s familiar hand, I am
excited and ready to adventure anew with Blake Snyder.
Similar to Keane, Snyder focuses on
the “sell-ability” of a screenplay. However, unlike Keane, Snyder was able to
force me to envision the room full of Hollywood executives that I would have to
pitch my story too. The urgency I came away with to create a solid pitch after
reading Snyder’s first chapter showcases his ability to teach through his
writing. Using a practical approach, Snyder highlights the four things that
every one-line summary, or logline, should contain in order to be considered a
great idea by professionals. Snyder summarizes these four points at the end of
the first chapter as well, driving home the importance of the irony, higher
concept, audience/ cost, and title within your logline.
When Snyder explained what he meant
by irony, I imagined flipping a pancake in a pan. The flip, or as Snyder says,
the “unexpected”, is what grabs your reader’s attention. For example, one of
Snyder’s favorite movies, which I think is brave for him to admit, is Legally Blonde. In this movie, a
stereotypical blonde sorority girl gets into Harvard Law School. This is the
flip, or the part of the movie that makes it unique and original. This moment,
Snyder has convinced me of, is necessary for any good script.
Next, Snyder equated a movie’s
higher concept with its logline’s ability to make the reader imagine how the
rest of the movie would unfold. This is the part of that high-anxiety Hollywood
meeting where the executives look at your one-liner and decide if it could pan
out on screen. Can your reader envision a two-hour sequence of events from your
one sentence? If the answer is no, Snyder argues that you have to go back to
scratch, to that blank Word Document and come up with something better. Yes,
it’s harsh. But I appreciated Snyder’s honesty.
Now I thought the audience and cost was
the tricky part. Some might argue that a good story can be enjoyed by men and
women, children and adults, etc. However, if a big-shot producer can’t look at
your logline and immediately know whom it would be marketed to, then you are
making it easy for him to say his favorite word, no. Similarly, if the sum of your movie already entails three chase
scenes on Venus and a toboggan race down the Alps, you’re shooting yourself in
the foot. Although I would encourage all writers to be reasonable, I disagree with
Snyder that money should be your focus when coming up with a movie idea. Yes,
money is how things get done, and therefore you do need to keep it in mind, but
if you have a phenomenal movie idea that takes place on Venus, I wouldn’t
advise you to rewrite it in a more doable location.
And lastly, the title. Snyder says
that a good title balances plot summary with originality so that it sums
everything up but doesn’t “hit the nail right on the head”. For example, Things We Lost in the Fire and The Day the Earth Stood Still grab my
attention due to their originality AND tell me what the movie’s about. However,
I don’t think Snyder’s rigidness to this “ideal title” is necessary. Similar to
the dating world, sometimes a good title doesn’t follow the formula Snyder has
given us. Some of my favorite titles that don’t sum up the movie for me but
still grab my attention include The Men
Who Stare At Goats, One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest, and It’s Kind of a
Funny Story, just to name a few.
In a Keane-esque fashion, Snyder
ends the chapter with a series of exercises to get the reader practicing how to
create a great logline. Because the most you all know about my novel write now
is the number of pages I’ve written, I’ve decided to practice my logline-making
skills by coming up with one for my own writing. And so…
LOGLINE FOR Cul-de-sac
Soldier
In
the movie, Cul-de-sac Soldier, a lonely boy plays “war” with a group of
neighborhood kids in the summer of 1963. But when these boys take pretend too
far, everything goes to chaos.
MOVIES WATCHED: 3
SCREENPLAY PAGES WRITTEN: 12
NOVEL PAGES WRITTEN: 56
PAGES LEFT IN MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR
PECULIAR
CHILDREN: 260
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