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Script
into Novel - The "High Concept" Scrovel "You
live where? You're unknown and you think you can sell a spec script to
Hollywood from there? Jeez!" These were the words of an
award-winning scriptwriter, so I was paying attention. "You have to
be here, here in El-Ay, living within twenty minutes of a coffee meeting.
And if you can't do that, then you rewrite it as a novel, sell it, then offer
the film rights. Okay?" Well,
it wasn't okay. This was the man who had taught me about "High
Concept," provoked me into writing a script that fit the criteria he laid
down for High Concept movies, and now wanted me to fly seven thousand miles to
the place he thought I should sell it - or alternatively to rewrite it as a
novel, doubtless a High Concept novel. The
Initial Teaching "High
Concept?" That's an idea born thirty years ago, when made-for-TV
movies were in their infancy and the industry learned that the most significant
difference between these and the traditional feature films was that there was no
time for word-of-mouth to sell them. (If in the office the next morning
someone said that Massacre at the Lakeside was really terrific, it was
too late for everyone else to see it and thus to see, hear and read the
accompanying sponsors' messages that earn the money.) As the
smaller budgets of the TV movies prevented much being done to create
pre-awareness, new marketing ideas were essential, and these would have to be
very efficient in their use of the time bought for them. At most, they
would have to exploit a couple of 25-second promotional trailers, the logline in
the TV guides, and a magazine advertisement (perhaps). They would have to
have immediate impact, instant story premises that insist "must-see,"
at least one known star, a memorable title, and the logline had to capture the
future audience in 25 seconds. Out of
this came the idea of simple high-profile conflict, and "High Concept"
was born for the television industry. But then came an important
development-- some of the brightest executives who had led the new thinking
moved into the world of traditional features, just as the era of blockbusters
began, and just as the new competition was gearing up to steal its revenues.
Videos, video games, cable channels, computers and computer games all vied for
the entertainment sector's discretionary spending power. For Hollywood it
was a new world. And so
"High Concept" came to Hollywood. Plots had to be easy to
describe, very compelling, and thus easy to sell. This meant easy-to-sell
everywhere-- by word-of-mouth with the audiences, by the sales and marketing
executives, by the studio executives to the producers, and (very important,
this) by the scriptwriters making their pitches to bored studio executives.
Remember-- easy to describe and very compelling, or, as my accomplished friend
put it: "imaginative and wild and simple." Later he said:
"A High Concept idea is one that can be presented very
compellingly in 25 words or less and sound like a great, fantastic
idea to the savvy Hollywood buyer's ear for the intended target audience
and implicitly acknowledges-- and solves-- the studio's marketing
challenge." (So,
fundamentally, "High Concept" is a marketing term. A High
Concept is one a knowledgeable Hollywood executive with a chequebook will find
fantastically irresistible to his target audience.) Later,
in discussion, in respect of a spec script we refined this to: 1. Fits an
established genre Loglines? Okay, here are some
easily recognised ones:
Cop trapped at the top of an isolated office building when
terrorists take over a corporation party that includes his wife,
hides and fights them. (Die Hard)
Die Hard on a nuclear-armed battleship. (Under Siege)
DNA-engineered dinosaurs created for an island theme park
get loose and start eating people. (Jurassic Park)
Great white shark eats tourist and water-phobic sheriff has
to go out to sea to kill it. (Jaws)
Jaws in a space ship. (Alien)
That
was my preliminary education in the fine art of writing spec scripts. That
plus two other mandatory instructions-- "Write first about what you
know!" and "Introduce the principals and start the action in the first
seven pages." Well, I
was an aviator with some significant specialist knowledge in very light
aviation, I was a defense analyst with special interests in anti-terrorism and
counter-insurgency, and I was an historian with a fair knowledge of how society
functions. Why not write a story that has a princess using experimental
airplanes to escape terrorists and includes a love interest? Why not write
Roman Holiday with Uzis and a double bed? Why not write Roman Holiday
with the SAS and a kingsize bed? Why not put the action in America? So with
the plot taking shape in my head I could scribble out the logline on the back of
an envelope-- "Cop assigned to Princess's Chicago visit rescues her from
terrorists, sneaks her away to uninhibited Arizona lifestyle, unpredictable
passions blossom, then the terrorists find them." Fifteen days later
the first draft was complete (and the first seven pages in PDF format are here).
But was
it High Concept? Established genre? Of course-- it was a romantic
comedy-adventure. Readily castable? Sure-- for it needed only an
English, tall, athletic, beautiful blonde, plus an American athletic and
beautiful brunette, plus an all-American rugged hero. Profitable recent
precedent? That depends on what recent means, but in style it did have
similarities with Romancing the Stone, and of course it would appeal to
all those whose parents flocked to see Roman Holiday. Logline?
Done that, but the pitch would have to explain how uninhibited the lifestyle is,
and why the passions are unpredictable. Listener's prejudices?-- just say
that although the heroine is not Princess Di, the audiences will think she is.
That should remove fears of public disinterest. Next
came the slimming operation, reducing the script to only 120 pages, with
adequate margins and all the spacing correct. (The attached PDF file has
inexplicably cropped the bottom margin, but in reality it is one inch.)
This was accompanied by the exhortation that one must "be prepared to kill
your favorite children" but, of course, it's really a restriction that
imposes tight disciplines on composition and which makes the language tauter.
As I had already settled into an economic style of description, quite alien to
all my professional work, I actually enjoyed the challenge and eventually, with
the loss of four scenes I rather liked, I met the 120-page limitation. Changing
to a Scrovel The
finished work was shown to some studio executives in England, who said they
liked its wit and pace, but who insisted that I should of course be pitching it
to Hollywood. The action was in America and it needed an American star and
an American supporting cast. I knew that and so, as I was on the wrong
side of the Atlantic, I decided to start the novel. At
first it seemed deceptively easy. After all, I had the dialogue, and this
could be treated as a skeleton onto which the meat of the much enhanced
description could be hung. So, as a first step, I rewrote the script in
novel form, as a draft, turning the abbreviated directions into sentences and
adding "he said" and "she said" to the speech. Then I
put it in a drawer for a couple of days, to clear my mind, and then I took it
out and read it through. Guess what? It doesn't work. It was
awful. A novel
does not consist of dialogue and description. A novel consists of dialogue
integrated poetically, sensitively and knowledgeably with description. A
screenplay's dialogue is delivered to an audience watching the expressions and
body language of the speakers. Subtext is transmitted visually with
delicacy (one hopes) and humor. Verbal subtext, in contrast, has to be
transmitted with subtlety and wit using only the words on the page. So,
although the story would remain unchanged in its essentials, I would have to
rewrite completely. Much of the dialogue would remain, of course, but
integrated with the description, not just thrown at it. And then I should
have to think more deeply about style. Screenplays ask for a greater
degree of suspension of disbelief than do novels, and sequences that would have
a reader blinking in puzzlement are accepted on screen without a question.
Should I tackle such episodes with exposition? Or could I leave them as
they are, together with an implicit explanation to the reader that this is a
converted screenplay? Or
should I produce the story as a gentle and affectionate parody of Hollywood's
romantic comedy-adventure genre? And if so, could I use that parody as an
umbrella to allow experiments in the composition? This idea was prompted
by a reexamination of the economic style I had used for the directions in the
script. My award-winning screenwriter friend had assured me that the
script clearly demonstrated I had my own unique voice, and that I should keep
it. I now sought to keep it in part for the novel. For example, for
an establishing shot I had written:
The traffic is busy, noisy, smoky. Pedestrians bustle by,
nervous and unsmiling.
The traffic crawling by is busy, noisy, smoky. Pedestrians
bustle along, nervous and unsmiling. So why
not, within the parody style, adopt some of that economy, tend to keep sentences
short, and write in the present tense? The
decision reduced other difficulties. The hero's girlfriend is, the
contents of her bookshelf suggests, bisexual. The princess is latently
bisexual. (High Concept demands imaginative scenarios.) The eventual
seduction scene follows the conventions of the cinema and avoids the unromantic
and unappetizing meat-market fleshiness found in so many modern novels-- yet,
I'm told, loses none of its eroticism. Economy is successful also in
forcing the reader's mind to supplement description, another trick of the cinema
that can be very effective in prose. So the
book was rewritten as a gentle and affectionate parody, one that, despite it
being parody, is immediately recognizable as potentially a High Concept movie. The
Future of the Scrovel A
scrovel is a High Concept novel written with the economy of a script, and if it
should occur to a reader that its style is reminiscent of a script, then,
depending on the reader's profession, that may provide a very convenient
introduction. Certainly, ROYAL
FLUSH is readily available as an e-Book, but it has been made so in the hope
that it will attract the attention of someone with Hollywood contacts. Other
writers who, for one reason or another, have failed to have their spec scripts
picked out from the thousands that are written each year, might care to
experiment in the same way. If their scrovels do succeed, then studio
executives making the buying decision have an alibi if the movie bombs--
"Well, boss, it was a success as a book. No one thought it would fail
as a film." That sort of alibi can be the final factor that creates a
sale. Happy scribbling! Happy scrovelling! Check
out the e-book here: http://www.baronage.net/banneret/rf.html. |
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