Chapter | seventeen

Selling Yourself: Loglines, Queries, and Managers

With all our high-falutin’ talk of screenplay structure and narrative arcs, we writers sometimes lose track of the fact that this is a business. Plus, many of us are completely hopeless when it comes to money, time management, and the nuances of human social interaction. (Which is why we became screenwriters! I kid, I kid.) We dearly want to introduce our work to the world, but sometimes the world just sort of stands there, whistling to itself and pretending it doesn't notice us.

That's why agents and managers were invented. It's the job of these charming and talented people to usher you and your work out of your dimly lit bedroom and into the bright arena of business. If you luck out and find good representation, they will work unbelievably hard for you. And not just you – they usually manage more than a dozen writers at once, which I imagine must be like herding neurotic, depressed cats.

If things are working out with your agent and/or manager, you may find yourself “in a room.” This is not slang for imprisonment, but rather the industry term for a meeting between you and one or more persons with money. These meetings may seem casual and breezy on first glance, but beneath the surface they seethe with more silent judgments and unspoken rules than a meeting between rival samurai clans. Welcome to the big, wide world of the screenwriting business.

The first one's tricky, but if you've got a great idea, you're already halfway there – and I mean a genuinely great idea, not a “cloned Jesus fights vampire Longinus in modern-day New York City” kind of idea. The other half, of course, is the brilliant execution, for advice on which see every other page of this book.

(Sometimes you may not even need to execute it well. It's becoming increasingly rare, but studios and production companies have been known to buy scripts solely on the strength of a killer concept, with an eye to rewriting them from scratch. But I wouldn't rely on it.)

So that's the first option sorted – amazing idea, amazingly written. It's the last two options that are the really interesting ones.

What does it mean to write in a unique voice? It could simply mean that the prose style of your script reads like nobody else – it's instantly identifiable and different. Shane Black is the obvious choice here – pick any random page from one of his scripts and you'll see his unique, sardonic style shining through. There's an unproduced script by G. J. Pruss called Passengers that's famous for being written entirely in the first person. Now that's unique!

Alternatively, it could mean that your story is about something incredibly unusual and mostly unknown to the average reader or audience. I once read a fantastic script about a murder in a small Alaskan town in which all the characters were kids in the local Inuit hip-hop scene. Before cracking open that script, I had no idea there was such a thing as an Inuit hip-hop scene. If the concept sounds faintly ridiculous, consider that Slumdog Millionaire probably sounded pretty silly when that was first pitched. Humans are curious creatures with curious brains, always looking for something genuinely new. Show the reader a whole new, totally original world and you'll have them by the brainstem.

But what if your concept isn't incredible, and your writing voice doesn't crackle with raw genius and originality? Then you've still got one chance to win the reader over, and that's raw emotion.

Empathy. We've all got it (well, most of us), and it's a real bitch. It's what makes us worry about our workmates, get wrapped up in reality television, miss our families, and leap from our cars to help people in traffic accidents. It's also why we get sad, scared, elated, or angry while watching movies, reading books, or playing videogames. In short, it's the ability to place ourselves, mentally and emotionally, in the body of another. As far as we know, animals don't have it. Neither do most psychopaths. Along with language, it's one of the two quirks of evolution responsible for human civilization. So if you're not a fan of human civilization, now you know where to direct the blame.

Empathy is how our entire operation works. It's the man behind the curtain of screenwriting … all writing, in fact.

Some might say that we writers are, basically, puppetmasters. We create fake people in our minds and spew them out upon the page, there to dance for our delight. We give our characters imaginary problems and imaginary emotions for our audience to imprint upon while we hide backstage, safely out of sight. We're immune to the emotional connections we create; we float above our creations and our audience like airy, artistic gods.

Except that's bullshit. That's not how it works at all.

Here's the real deal with emotion in screenwriting: if we don't put a bit of ourselves into the writing, there is no emotion. It simply doesn't work. You can tell when a writer hasn't invested any of her own emotion into the script, because the audience is unable to connect with the characters. They seem soulless – images once removed from real people.

But when we do our jobs right, the characters we create aren't just amusing puppets – they're little extensions of ourselves, our fears and hopes.

Really, the distance between a writer and her audience is imaginary – just smoke and mirrors. The characters are the writer, and their emotions are the writer's emotions. After all, one must have been truly scared to write a convincingly horrified character, must have truly loved to write a character in love. Here's the bottom line: if you want to create emotionally affecting characters, you need to believe in the emotions that you're writing.

And that's it: the whole secret of emotion. Before you can make a script reader cry, you need to make yourself cry. Well, perhaps not literally, but you have to feel that emotion as you're writing. You have to fall for your own tricks, believe in your own fiction.

You know how they say the best liars are the ones who can convince themselves that they're actually telling the truth? Welcome to screenwriting, where we lie bigger and better than anyone, and our job is to believe our own lies.

Sure, it may not be psychologically healthy. And yes, it'll probably be messy and embarrassing and uncomfortable. You may want to lock the door and/or make sure any relatives are out of the house before working on your most emotional scenes. But that's the work you signed up for, and that's the reality of dealing in raw emotion.

Make the script reader cry, and they'll love you forever. Just remember: if you don't believe in the emotional truth of your story, nobody else will, either.

Actors act. Painters paint. Plumbers plumb (okay, honestly, I'm not sure about that one). And writers? They write.

If you're thinking about query letters, logically, you must already be a writer. Think about it – the only people who should be sparing even a second's thought for query letters are those who have already finished writing, revising, and re-revising an entire spec script. That's a lot of hard, bare-knuckle work. If you've done that – if you've made it that far – you have earned the right to call yourself a genuine goddamn screenwriter.

So why does your query letter sound like an apology? What's with the rambling preamble, the buried lede, and the “sorry for existing, Master” tone? In short, why does your query sound like it was written by a twitchy little ferret-person with an anxiety disorder?

I think I know why. On one hand, it feels like everything is riding on this query letter, and you have only a scant few sentences to convince a very important person that they should read your work. And on the other hand, you've spent so much time with your own concept that you can no longer see what's great about it.

Let's talk anxiety first. This is the most important email you'll ever write in your entire life! Even a single wrong syllable could mean the difference between everlasting fame and everlasting obscurity! Gaahh!

Except, no, it's not and it won't.

Here's what your query letter actually means to the person receiving it: email number thirty-seven on a slow Tuesday morning. That's it. She (and here I'm thinking manager or agent – producers probably won't read your query, no matter how nicely you phrase it) has already read thirty-six of these damn things, and they were all poorly written, fawning, obfuscatory, or downright boring. Now it's your turn. What's she expecting when she clicks to open your query email?

Just this: to find out what the script is about. That's it. Just some basic understanding of the genre and the concept, with perhaps a sentence about who the heck you are. Friendly, short, and sweet. Like this:

Dear [the recipient's actual name],

Hi, my name's Melanie McWriter. I'm a playwright with the Tulsa School of Theater and Thespianism, and I've written several award-winning plays.

I'd love to send you a copy of my latest screenplay, Buzz Kill. It's a thriller set in a near-future world overrun by giant bees. Humanity's only chance lies with brilliant entomologist Helga Honey and a crack team of U.S. Marines. Their mission: infiltrate bee-infested Washington, D.C., and take out the queen bee.

Let me know if you'd be interested in reading Buzz Kill.

All the best,

Melanie McWriter

It's that easy. Just don't write about giant killer bees. That's my concept.

Notice how Melanie McWriter quickly explained who she was, then dove straight into the concept of her screenplay. No “I think this would be a good fit for you” or “I'm a big fan of your clients’ work.” Just giant killer bees. Melanie (rightly or wrongly) sounds like she's damn proud of her concept and wants to show her screenplay off to the world. Which is exactly how you should sound when you write a query letter.

But what if you don't believe in your concept any more? Ah, now we come to the tricky part.

It often happens, in the course of writing and revising, that your original concept gets away from you. What was once a simple story of giant killer bees has become, in your head, a thematically layered, character-driven, genre-spanning tapestry of Shakespearean proportions. You've been working on this story so long that you've lost it.

Somehow, “what's your script about?” has become the hardest question in the world. What's it about? It's about life, and love, and the human condition, man. It's about everything!

Well, no. It's about giant killer bees. Remember when you came up with this brilliant idea (possibly while drunk), and for weeks you could think of nothing but the amazing bee-related screenplay you were going to write? You didn't know who the characters were or what would happen in Act 3, but goddammit, people were going to get impaled by giant stingers and it would be awesome.

Go back to that simpler, more precise definition. That's the kind of simple enthusiasm you need to bring to your query letter. Know your story, know what you're selling, and sell the hell out of it. Succinctly.

You wouldn't tell a joke like this. So for the love of god, don't pitch like this.

You have one minute.

Actually, let's make it thirty seconds. In this world of RSS, push notifications and overnight YouTube stars, our collective powers of concentration are basically shot to hell. If you can't grab somebody's interest in thirty seconds, they will tune out.

Sure, they'll nod politely, but in their head they'll be thinking about what to make for dinner or perhaps composing their next tweet (“Some jerk cornered me, tried to pitch remake of Chinatown ‘but with musical numbers like Glee.’ #ihatemylife”). Before your sixty seconds have elapsed, they'll make their excuses and dive out the window to freedom.

The way to grab your listener's attention is to lead with the most interesting aspect of your story. Take a cue from journalists: if it bleeds, it leads. By which I mean, if there's something sexy, weird, funny, or scary about your concept, for the love of god open with that.

Consider Inception. That's one heck of a complicated film. Totems, triggers, dream devices, levels, limbo, anti-gravity Joseph Gordon-Levitt. What the hell is that film about, and how would you describe it in thirty seconds to someone who'd never heard of it in their life?

Easy: Leonardo DiCaprio travels into other people's dreams. You see, he's actually a dream agent – sort of like a spy who can extract information from people's minds.

Bam. Done in two sentences. Notice I didn't mention the “inception” of the title – that whole thing where they have to implant a suggestion inside three layers of Cillian Murphy's subconscious so he'll grow up to be a real boy, or whatever – that is, the actual plot of the film. Why didn't I mention that? Because that complicated plot doesn't lead as well as “Leo DiCaprio, Dream Spy.” Once you've got your audience hooked on the catchy “dream spy” idea, then you reel them in and hit them with “ice fortress inside Cillian Murphy's brain.”

Thirty seconds. That's how long you have before your listener mentally wanders off. Use your thirty seconds to hook them in with the sexiest, coolest, or scariest part of your script.

Incidentally, the hookiest thing about your script may not necessarily involve the story. It could be casting (“I've got Jared from the Subway ads attached to play the villain”), a unique protagonist (“Imagine a female, Irish, alcoholic version of James Bond”), or an interesting setting (“the entire film takes place inside the caldera of an active volcano”). Get it? Use the best thing about your script as bait to catch your listener's interest. After all, nobody starts pitching Dracula by explaining Jonathan Harker's relationship status (and nobody even remembers the narrator of Frankenstein, probably because he has all the personality and appeal of driftwood).

So how do you identify the single greatest thing about your script?

You ask somebody, of course. If it's not immediately obvious to you, then you're going to have to get a little help from your friends. And I don't mean acquaintances or colleagues – I mean people who won't coddle, sugar-coat, or equivocate, and who won't mind reading your manuscript multiple times at different stages of completion.

You need an honest assessment of your screenplay's most exciting elements, and that requires trust. Preferred targets include family members, very old friends, and people whom you are currently sleeping with. Nobody else will have the guts to tell you that your romantic subplot is boring and you should probably refocus your pitch around the blood drinking and demon hunting. (Sorry, Dracula again. Great book, by the way – if you want to know how to write a sympathetic villain, look no further.)

Learn how to sell your pitch in just a few choice lines. Not only will you gain a better understanding of your own story, but you'll also be totally set if you ever happen to find yourself in an elevator with a Weinstein.

While we're talking about pitching, see if this sounds familiar: somebody asks you to pitch them a whole bunch of ideas. “Let's hear it – everything you've got.” You've probably got, say, five ideas – one killer concept that you absolutely adore, three half-formed ideas, and one barely-a-logline that you came up with in the bathroom five minutes ago. How do you pitch them?

That's a rhetorical question; I know exactly how. It's how every writer pitches a big pile of ideas.

First, you open with two of those half-formed ideas, just to warm up the room. Then – carefully at first, but getting more and more excited – you pitch the big one, your killer concept. Surprisingly, they fail to buy it on the spot.

When they indicate for you to keep going, you grudgingly finish up with one more half-baked pitch. Desperately, you try to wrap it up … but, oh dear, they're still looking expectantly at you. “What else have you got?” they ask. What else have you got?

Good question. And that's when you remember the barely-a-logline you came up with in the bathroom stall. Grudgingly, you hurl it at them and pray they don't ask any follow-up questions. Your big idea-dump ends with a whimper, not a bang.

Please, please don't do this.

What you should do instead is treat all your ideas as equally good and give them all equal billing. I realize this is a lot harder than it sounds. It goes against our natural inclination, either consciously or subconsciously, to champion our favorite ideas and downplay the ones we don't really understand, don't like, or haven't fleshed out.

The problem is that our champion ideas may not be the kind of thing this particular pitchee is looking for. Maybe we're pitching them strongly on romantic comedies, but they only want to hear about horror. If so, then – unbeknownst to us – that back-pocket horror concept we just plucked out of thin air might be our only real ticket. No matter how good our other concepts are, the buyer just isn't buying them.

Even if the pitched party is interested in all genres, there's still no accounting for taste. In fact, you'll be astonished at how different their taste is from yours. It happens all the time – you pitch six great ideas that play to your writing strengths and one iffy one that involves a genre you hate. Guess which one the pitchee always likes best?

Now you know that even your half-baked ideas are in with a shot, you see why it's so dangerous to undersell any concept. If you sound incapable, tentative, or bored at any point in your idea-dump, you may have just undersold the perfect pitch for that particular audience. They'll perk up … only to deflate when they realize you're not the writer for the job. You just shot yourself in the foot.

It's easy to avoid this defeat. Just pretend that every single one of your ideas is a precious, precious snowflake. Act so excited and enthusiastic about each and every idea that they'll never be able to guess which one is your favorite and which one is the runt of the litter. Polish each pitch and delivery until it shines. No, you're not an actor, but you do spend every day trying to convince others that your fictional realities are real. A little more fiction shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

In conclusion, ideas are like children. Whether you have a lot of them or only a few, you have to convince the world that you love them equally. After all, you made them, and that makes you responsible for their tiny lives. Even the ugly, weird ones that don't resemble you, and the ones you created accidentally or on a whim.

No, I don't have kids. Why do you ask?

I'd meet people outside the movie biz who'd ask me what I do. I'd tell them I write movies, that I wrote Ruthless People, to which they'd usually respond, “That Danny DeVito, he's so funny.” Or “Bette Midler – she's hilarious.”

Later in the conversation, the outsider would always ask, “When you say you wrote the screenplay, just what exactly does that mean?” To which I would say, “I came up with the idea, wrote the entire story including creating all the characters, every scene, one scene after the other, what happens in the scene, where they take place, what time of day, all the action, and everything all the characters said.” And they would be silent for a brief second, and then they'd respond with “Really?”

– Dale Launer

Let's face it: this is a depressing business. A shrinking market, indifferent gatekeepers, and a neverending sea of competition all combine to form a mile high barrier to keep newbie screenwriters out. If Hollywood were a food pyramid, writers would be on the very bottom with the Twinkies and gruel. (I'm pretty sure that's how food pyramids work.)

We keep on slaving away at the coal-face of our spec scripts, but nobody wants to read them. When they do read our scripts, it turns out they're either “not what we're looking for” or too close to a movie that just came out last week and bombed.

It can feel like producers, agents, managers, and sometimes even Lady Luck herself are conspiring against us. It sucks. So what are we supposed to do?

I don't have the definitive answer to that. As Rocky III taught us, there's no easy way out. Maybe you're cut out for this business and maybe you're not; you'll find that out in time. If you're already talented and dedicated, the only other thing you can really work on improving is your attitude. And that starts with recognizing one simple truth:

We've got all the power.

Don't laugh. It's true. It may seem like the film industry belongs to the suits and the actors. And okay, yes, in every visible way it does. But there's power in our words and in our ideas – power that they need to survive. Without us, they're less than nothing.

Think about it. Even the most brilliant directors can't make up a story out of whole cloth. An actor can't ad-lib her way through a two-hour feature film, and can't slip into a character's skin without knowing who that character is. Even the greatest producer in the world can't sell a big bag of air; he needs a script, or at the very least an idea, before the wheels can start turning.

Casting agents, gaffers, Foley artists, 3D modelers, and every single other film and television profession you care to name – they all rely on us, and only us. Geniuses and artists they may be, but they are all, in the final estimation, interpreters. They interpret our words.

We interpret nothing. We are the creators. Every piece of cinema that has ever moved you, every character that touched your heart, and every story that opened your eyes all existed in the writer's mind before they existed anywhere else. No matter how good those other Hollywood artists and creators are, they're only working from our notes, our words, our original perfect vision of the story. Every time you open a blank file with the intention of writing a new spec script, you could be making history. At that moment before you begin to put words down on the page, your potential is (theoretically, at least) unlimited. You could write the next Oscar winner, the next game-changer, the next cultural icon that lasts for a thousand years.

You could write anything. The power, and the responsibility, are yours.

Don't screw it up.

Screenwriting Tip #163:

Don't let your agent, manager, or best friend write your logline. You should always have control over how your material is sold.

Screenwriting Tip #165:

Don't self-censor. No real agent or executive is going to be offended if your screenplay has swearing or sex in it (although they might be offended by poorly written sex scenes).

Screenwriting Tip #167:

If your concept revolves around a big twist, then yes, you do have to tell people what the twist is. “Wait and see” is not an effective pitching strategy.