by Lucy V Hay
What We Can Learn from Cancer Hair
Write Tips:
• ‘Write what you know’ is very often misunderstood by spec screenwriters who believe they must write their OWN experiences only. In recent years, the phrase has been frequently disregarded by those writers who say it’s invalid, citing futuristic science fiction arenas and ‘larger-than-life’ scenarios. In other words: you don’t have to be a murderer to write great screenplays about serial killers. I prefer to take a more balanced approach and suggest writers think about ‘write what you know’ with reference to research. Gail has never experienced the impact of cancer and its treatment personally, yet was still able to access this world view and create an authentic depiction of Claire’s journey by talking to others who HAD. However, even if Gail had undergone cancer and its successful treatment, relying on just her own experience may have meant the end result was not as successful.
• Later in this book, in the Hours case study, writer/director Eric Heisserer will talk about what he calls ‘screenwriting mitosis’: the notion of taking an idea for a story from more than one source. Gail pretty much mentions the same here, when she talks about the lady in the wig and the completely bald woman in the canteen. A key element of authentic drama, then, is taking on the experiences of many people, not just one – which makes sense, given you’re trying to appeal to an audience of more than one person.
• As I frequently insist on my site and via the B2W social network, writers and filmmakers must do something different from ‘the usual’ in order to be in with a chance of getting noticed. Short drama screenplays about dates and cancer are ten a penny in the spec pile – but by combining the two Gail suddenly stands out. And this is the key thing to remember: standing out is not about doing something completely mad, just ‘left of the middle’.
• As with many short drama screenplays (and probably just as many feature-length ones), Cancer Hair started off very theatrical in feel, with dialogue ‘taking over’. However, having a low budget is no excuse for having a screenPLAY like this: short films deserve to be every bit as visual as their feature counterparts. Whilst drama can arguably get away with a little more dialogue than your average genre film, spec writers must remember screenwriting is still a visual medium. Often, as Gail found, it’s investment in visuals via the story world that is key in bringing us the character’s journey, not dialogue.
Selling Points:
• As mentioned at the beginning of this book, it’s unlikely a spec screenwriter will sell even a feature-length drama screenplay the traditional way, with most projects being ‘labours of love’. This is even more the case with short film. Be realistic and set yourself goals: if you have no filmmaking prowess, consider learning ‘on the job’ by writing and making achievable shorts first. If you really can’t do that, make sure you find ways to network and make contacts with filmmakers wherever possible. Join filmmaking groups online and read filmmaking bulletins. Go to networking events and courses about filmmaking. In addition, short film is a very popular way of training media students, so contact your local college and/or university and offer your scripts. Enter competitions where the prize is to get your short film made, or find a crew for one of those ‘make a short film in a weekend’ challenges. In other words, leave no stone unturned!
• I’m always surprised by the number of screenwriters who insist they do not want to be directors because, as far as I’m concerned, that’s the TOP way of getting noticed in indie film. Writers tend to stay away from directors, or, if they find them, screw up their chances by being too militant, especially over the problem of money (there isn’t any, especially for drama). I have literally lost count of the number of times I’ve heard directors complain, especially about short film scripts, ‘I couldn’t find a decent screenplay, so in the end I just wrote it myself.’ This is crazy and suggests the following: i) writers need to find some directors, pronto, in the ways I described in the previous section, or ii) there need to be more writer-directors, whose actual PURPOSE is directing AND writing, rather than just writing out of necessity. Pick one of these and DO IT… it is seriously your way in. Stop looking a gift horse in the mouth!
• As a writer and director, Gail thought long and hard about her goals and how to get there. As she wants to build a career (rather than just make a one-off film), it was important to her to pay those involved in helping her. That’s not to say that collaborations are wrong: many people work for free in the industry, for different reasons and with different objectives (some of them good and some of them bad). Certainly, had Gail asked for people to do this gratis, she would not have been short of offers. On the same basis, when thinking about raising the money for Cancer Hair, she gave a lot of consideration to what she considered ‘ethical’, especially given the subject matter. With all this in mind, Gail decided to self-fund, rather than pursue avenues like crowdfunding. That path isn’t possible for everyone, of course – especially not to the tune of £15,000! – but perhaps there is an argument to be made for filmmakers NOT automatically using crowdfunding when there are so many projects competing for attention; or at least for them to use it in a more informed way.
• Whilst it’s true that there are many distribution opportunities for short films in terms of film festivals, there’s a whole other industry dedicated to getting your film into the most prestigious ones. What’s more, it’s not always clear why your film has been rejected, even if you’ve paid your money to an advisor to help you. In short: there are acres of GREAT shorts that have never seen the light of day at a film festival, and this is certainly not because their makers haven’t tried, often parting with their hard-earned cash. So don’t pin all your hopes on film festivals; think beyond them from the outset. What other opportunities are out there for your short drama? Identify your own: if your short drama story features a female protagonist or people of colour, why not target filmmakers accordingly? Then you can pinpoint funding opportunities, festivals and similar schemes on that basis. Scour the trades and keep a close eye out online for appeals for submissions to short film nights at café bars, pubs and universities or other venues. Why not stage your own short film night, using it as a further opportunity to network? If you have website building skills, why not create a whole site for your drama screenplay or produced film, creating pages dedicated to ‘behind the scenes’, including a PDF of the screenplay, and send the link to friends who are teachers and lecturers in creative writing or English? Why not visit schools and youth groups and show the short film, followed by a Q&A session?
• Later in the book, Dear Frankie’s screenwriter Andrea Gibb will posit the notion that she has seen NO difference between the ability of female directors and their male counterparts to do their jobs. I totally agree: gender is no barrier whatsoever to talent as far as I’m concerned. Yet go-getting types like Gail Hackston, who make their own opportunities and run with them, are still relatively rare in my experience. And whilst it’s certainly true that the industry can be sexist (especially at the ‘higher’ levels, i.e. awards and certain funding and distribution opportunities), there is absolutely nothing to physically stop more women from doing what Gail has done – a self-funded short film. Obviously not everyone has £15,000 to spare, especially women who are mothers and not working, or are raising children on their own. Yet there are still FREE opportunities to network and create with other people on micro or no budgets that women just aren’t always taking advantage of. We have to ask ourselves why this is in an attempt to address it wherever we can – and by ‘we’, I mean men too. All of us need to be the allies of women in film so that we can break this cycle, once and for all.
TRUTH AND DARE
DRAMA AND TRUTH
In recent years, ‘drama’ has become a bit of a dirty word, especially for distributors, but, as we know, it’s still very much part of the industry and most likely always will be. Read the trades and you’ll see oodles of drama features being made, with many winning big at film festivals and/or high
-profile awards ceremonies. Often the most beloved and enduring movies will be dramas, with true stories scoring especially high, as seen in the IMDb list in the previous section. So, low-budget drama offers new and/or penniless spec screenwriters a significant ‘foot in the door’ by way of short film and transmedia strategies, especially web series, which can also win awards as well as recognition. But first we need to define what drama ‘really’ is, if we are to write our own spec drama screenplays.
DRAMA, A DEFINITION
We all have our own ideas on what makes ‘good’ drama. In attempting to create it, we will package any number of storytelling devices and elements to induce a response in our desired target audience. For the purposes of this book, however, it would be advantageous in the first instance to pin down exactly what I mean by ‘drama screenplays’ so we can all begin on the same page, quite literally. So, to me, drama screenplays are:
• Low-budget. Budgets, especially in the UK, have got lower and lower in this age of austerity. It is not uncommon to make genre films like comedies and horrors for between £100,000 and £300,000 all in, for example. In contrast, some of the produced drama case studies in this book may seem high-budget, the two highest being Dear Frankie, weighing in at approximately £2 million, and Saving Mr Banks, coming in at a whopping £35 million. What’s important to remember here is context: Dear Frankie was made with screen agency support, at a time when budgets and film funding had not been cut as severely as they have now; and, in the case of the latter, £35 million isn’t a lot of money (really!) to Hollywood. As a first-time writer or filmmaker, your chances of raising in excess of £200,000 for your drama screenplay are extremely small, so knowing what is possible for that kind of money is absolutely essential.
• ‘Small’ stories. Drama screenplays are usually deeply personal stories about a single issue that nevertheless have a universal quality, meaning something to their target audience and, in some cases, beyond. Drama stories carry something ‘recognisable’ about them, so audiences can see reflections of their own lived experiences within the story, meaning dramas about growing up, cancer, abuse, addiction, love, relationship breakdowns and parenting are extremely popular. However, even in the case of ‘big’ subject matter like war, the viewpoint in a produced drama is usually personal too and does not take in the conflict as a whole.
• Emotional. Drama movies, whether feature-length or short, are designed to provoke an emotional response in the audience, the most common being pathos. However, the best drama stories are not one-note. They include a range of emotions, so there are moments of light as well as shade.
• Authentic. Authenticity is crucial in all storytelling, but in comparison to genre film, in which characters must be seen to DO authentic actions, drama characters must be authentic in terms of their emotional responses. Writers are essentially rendering their characters’ psychology, as well as their actions, in drama, which is why writing a drama screenplay is so difficult. I will return to this notion in the section entitled ‘What is Emotional Truth?’
• Realistic. Dramas are typically set in the ‘real world’, even when they employ obvious artifice like period drama 12 Years a Slave (2013), or an ‘unreal-real world’ like the film set on the moon in The Truman Show (1998). Dramas usually do not make use of highly stylised filmmaking technique or tone, adopting as close to a ‘real-life feel’ as possible, though there are obvious exceptions: mockumentary, as in It’s All Gone Pete Tong (2004); non-linearity, as in (500) Days of Summer (2009); or cinéma-vérité, such as End of Watch (2012).
• About ‘struggle’. The word most often associated with ‘drama’ is ‘depressing’, but I believe great drama stories are not depressing (and will go into more detail as to why in this book). Also, where does optimistic fare like Juno (2007) or Little Miss Sunshine (2006) fit in? Even stories with devastating resolutions like Brokeback Mountain may still include hope for the future. On this basis, I posit the notion that ‘real’ drama (as opposed to ‘genre’) is about STRUGGLE, not necessarily pathos.
My definition of drama, then, is this:
A personal, realistic and authentic story about the internal conflict and struggles of a character, so that we might appreciate their world view, specifically their psyche.
The main idea of drama is that the audience can relate their own experiences to those of the character, which in turn elicits an emotional response. Or, to put it bluntly: good dramas are about THOUGHTS and FEELINGS – the characters’ AND the audience’s!
WHAT IS ‘EMOTIONAL TRUTH’?
We can hopefully all name the main emotions, but ‘What is truth?’ is a philosophical question argued over for centuries and never yet answered to all of humanity’s satisfaction (and nor could it be). When thinking about audience response to produced drama content and a filmmaker’s desire to create that response in the first place, though, I’d venture ‘emotional truth’ is primarily about placing honesty and integrity of emotion at the heart of the story, via the following:
• Authenticity. Though it will, of course, depend on the story being told, certain elements of ALL stories must create opportunities for the audience to imagine themselves in the characters’ places and/or relate the characters’ actions to their own lived experiences and/or knowledge. Though it is neither possible nor desirable for a screenplay of any kind to recreate a character’s journey or actions EXACTLY as they would be in ‘real life’, audiences still have to be able to suspend their disbelief; the events and actions of the characters have to feel ‘right’, never deviating from authenticity. This doesn’t mean drama screenplays can’t sacrifice facts for the sake of drama, and it’s certainly true that most dramas will not please everyone. Arguably, then, the notion of authenticity and emotional truth comes down to writer and filmmaker intention: we are, to quote producer of Rob Roy (1995) and The Flying Scotsman (2006), Peter Broughan, ‘telling lies to tell the truth’.
• Passion. Ever been told your story is derivative? I think everyone has at least once – or will be at some point – and scribes often get insulted, believing they are being accused of ‘ripping off’ stories already in existence. Whilst this may be true as well, I’ve found that, when it comes to drama screenplays, the problem is generally to do with a lack of emotion or ‘passion’ in the piece, usually because the writer has concentrated more on the craft elements of the script than the story and characters at its heart. It’s possible even for complete messes of screenplays to be full of passion and emotional truth; more than once I’ve ended up working with a writer who is largely inexperienced but has poured his/her heart and soul into a piece so on the button that the producer in question has asked them through the door regardless! The key here is ensuring that you master the screenwriting craft, whilst maintaining the passion or fire the story lit under you and which made you want to tell it in the first place. If you let that spark go out, in the course of multiple redrafts and countless rejections, your drama screenplay is sunk.
• Pain. Pain is one of the driving forces of human endeavour: avoiding pain; confronting pain; dealing with pain. So it makes sense that great drama often comes from a place of pain, both for the writers and the characters within those stories. Recognition of shared pain brings people together and helps them heal, which is a massive motivator for filmmaking teams to want to make certain drama screenplays… and for audiences to want to see them. In contrast, the pain of marginalised sections of society can educate the majority, making them think, perhaps for the first time, about those people’s lives and difficulties that most have disregarded up until now.
But, again, ‘real’ drama isn’t just about pain or one long misery fest; there should be light as well as shade, humour as well as tears… but this is what a very large number of writers forget, unfortunately. As already outlined, I believe drama is ‘a personal, realistic and authentic story about the internal conflict and struggles of a character, so that we might appreciate their world view, specifically their psyche’, and o
ne recent movie that did this especially well in my view is the one I’ve chosen as the second case study of this book.
CASE STUDY 2: THE TRUE STORY
SAVING MR BANKS (2013)
Written by: Kelly Marcel, Sue Smith
Directed by: John Lee Hancock
Produced by: Alison Owen
Budget: $35 million
Q: What’s good about it?
A: It features a female anti-heroine with her own rigid world view AND agenda, yet still manages to make us not only understand her reasons, but empathise with her too.
MY LOGLINE: The story behind the battle of wills between Walt Disney and author PL Travers over the rights to and adaptation of her classic novel, Mary Poppins.
Writing and Selling Saving Mr Banks