The Promise of the Premise
My latest film, AMERICAN UNDERDOG, is a sports biopic that tells the true story of Kurt Warner, a former college quarterback with big dreams who goes from being a supermarket stockboy to MVP of the Superbowl. At its core, it's a story about faith, family and football.
Audiences make a choice to see your movie or watch your show based on THE PROMISE OF THE PREMISE - their belief in what your story will potentially deliver.
Making good on that promise is one of the single most important things you can accomplish as a storyteller.
To do so you have to get really clear about what you are promising. You can see proof of this in any movie trailer. Sometimes you will watch one and go: WTF? I have no idea what that movie is about. The reason for this has little to do with the trailer or even the editor of the trailer.
It's because the storytellers didn't do their jobs. They didn't get clear on the story they were promising, so their delivery is doomed.
Audiences have a sixth sense about this. They can smell it, even if they can't describe why they are put off by a particular piece of content.
Bu when audiences understand your promise, they can complete the unspoken agreement that exists between every audience and storyteller. They can say yes. They can vote with their feet. They can walk into a movie theater or turn on their devices.
In AMERICAN UNDERDOG we promised an against-all-odds story about faith, family and football. Now, if that isn't your thing, you're going to stay away. You're not going to buy a ticket or tune in. But if the promise appeals to you, and you show up, you do so with an expectation of delivery.
There is a whole marketing business that vets this. It's called CinemaScore, and it is the rating real audience members give to pollsters on their way out of a movie theater. When you receive an A or the rarer A+, you can be sure that movie delivered on the promise of the premise. Your audience went away happy and fulfilled, which translates into solid word of mouth. Anything in the B range means your mission was only partially a success. Below that, well, you can see where this is heading. Movies that get C's will perform woefully at the box office.
We got an A+ CinemaScore for AMERICAN UNDERDOG. I say that not to brag (ok, maybe a little!) but to illustrate my point. The score doesn't mean the film is going to win awards or Oscars. Or that critics are going to embrace it. What it does mean is that the creators honored the age-old contract between storytellers and their audience. They promised a certain story and they kept their promise. Good things tend to follow from that.
To increase the chances of your own storytelling success, deliver on the PROMISE OF THE PREMISE.
I hosted an ama on reddit…
Last week I Hosted my first AMA!
Kind of like running a marathon but with your keyboard instead of legs! It was Intense and satisfying.
A shout-out to the r/Screenwriting community on reddit.
THANK YOU MIKE MYERS!
Sometimes the God of Screenwriters is on your side…
Check out this video where I tell how the legendary comedian, Mike Myers, helped me learn an important lesson:
tales from a screenwriting life
“The Following is Based on a True Story”
A few days before Friday Night Lights opened in 2004, Universal held a premiere at the Mann’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles. Several former members of the West Texas high school football team were in attendance, watching a story they had lived play out on screen. I had spent time with these same young men immediately after being hired by the late Alan Pakula to adapt Buzz Bissinger’s best-selling book. Now, at the party after the screening, I had a chance to reconnect with them. Because it took so many years to get Friday Night Lights produced, the boys whom I had met as 20-year-olds were currently flirting with middle age. Jerrod McDougal, a player who was instrumental in giving me deep insights into his team and town, found me in the crowd, tears flooding his eyes. “All these years I saw myself as a failure for losing the state championship. But after watching the movie...” Jerrod pulled me into a hug and whispered in his West Texas drawl: “David... You healed a hole in mah heart.”
That was a pinnacle moment in a career partially spent adapting true stories into screenplays, a process in which the ‘facts’ of a particular story are constantly weighed against the stricter demands of movie structure. Or as Mark Twain famously said, improving upon the original Lord Byron declaration that truth is stranger than fiction, it’s “because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” One hundred and fifty years later, the world’s unquenchable appetite for stories and, especially, true stories, has obliterated the distinction between what is true and what is a work of imagination. Hence, the oxymoron of ‘reality tv’ or ‘fake news’ or any teenager’s Instagram. In politics, in business, in sports, in social media -- just like in Hollywood -- everything is scripted.
But there is another question, often overlooked, which has to do with people like Jerrod McDougal who live through real events that end up captured on film. Who speaks for them and their memories? And what if they are no longer alive?
The Miracle Season is the true story of what happened to the West High girls’ volleyball team in Iowa City, Iowa, after their captain and star player, Caroline “Line” Found, was killed in a moped accident, days before the season began. Kathy Bresnahan, the West High coach, had the unenviable task of guiding her players through their grief and back onto the volleyball court. The tragedy of Line’s death was compounded by the passing of her own mother, Ellyn, from pancreatic cancer, leaving this small Iowa community stunned -- and none more so than Dr. Ernest Found, who lost his daughter and wife within the span of twelve days.
I first met the indefatigable Ernie Found in December of 2013, after being hired by LD Entertainment to adapt the story into a screenplay. What began as work turned into a friendship with this gentle giant (and former center of his Hamilton College basketball team). We had long conversations about what it would mean to see his daughter’s life and legacy take shape as a piece of popular entertainment. Ernie was on the fence. Line’s brother Gregg and sister Catharine were against it. It was hard enough to live through such catastrophic loss. A script and movie would just reopen wounds that might never heal anyway. But Ernie, a respected spine surgeon and lecturer at the University of Iowa hospital, felt that the gift of Caroline’s spirit was something worth sharing with the world.
Once he said yes, I flew out to Iowa and met Coach Bresnahan, who everybody just calls “Brez”. We talked for many hours over the next few days. Brez shared with me her notes from the season, a kind of diary that she kept to help her weather the emotional storms that seemed to strike her players at any moment. More trips to Iowa City followed, where I got to interview the core group of girls on Line’s team, plus family friends, mentors, the school principal and athletic director. Part of my job description has always involved managing people’s expectations of the often tortuous process of filmmaking, reminding everyone that commissioning a script does not guarantee that a movie will be made from it. (In fact, the odds are firmly against it.) I found myself repeating to them my own shopworn commitment as a screenwriter -- not to tell the literal truth exactly as it happened, but to capture the emotional truth of their experience.
Fast forward four years. I am walking the red carpet of another premiere, this one the hometown showing of The Miracle Season at the Englert Theater in downtown Iowa City.
Due to the dedicated efforts of both LD’s producing team and director Sean McNamara, the movie got greenlit, cast, shot, edited, scored and finished, ready for an April release. But first, this bittersweet moment of screening the film for the people who lived through the story. Ernie is there, of course, towering over everyone. Ditto Line’s sister Catharine (herself a former volleyball player), brother Gregg, two of Ernie’s sisters from upstate New York, and more family friends who were close to his wife Ellyn. Brez patrols the aisles, greeting everyone in the same green blazer she wore to the state volleyball championship game. Line’s teammates from the 2011 season are seated in one row, strong and beautiful 23-year-old women who have stayed close in the aftermath of their shared tragedy. Many of them arrive with their own parents, brothers and sisters in tow. (One key cast member has also come to Iowa: 19-year-old Danika Yarosh, who plays Caroline in the film.) Suddenly it hits me that the 600-plus people packed into the Englert are the very same people who showed up to Line’s funeral and wake. This is, in fact, a memorial, red carpet and shuttering cameras notwithstanding.
There is a triumphant aspect to the ending of The Miracle Season but when the credits finally roll on screen, followed by photos and video footage of the real Ernie and Brez and the members of Line’s team, the audience is hushed. All their personal memories, all their curated pain, has been stirred and shaken. There’s Danika, the newcomer, sobbing in the main aisle, overcome with the enormity of the moment. No matter what anyone feels about the movie, Caroline and her mother are gone, and that is the truth that permeates the theater.
Later, in conversation with Ernie and Brez, I remind them of the fuss we had all made when the producers, in conjunction with the marketing team, decided to change the movie’s title to The Miracle Season from what it had been up until then, and what had become a rallying cry for high school athletes all across Iowa: Live Like Line. The message, emblazoned on t-shirts that sold out as fast as they were printed, was a call to live life the way Line did -- with great passion and verve and playfulness. It felt to everyone involved with the project like the perfect movie title and further proof of its true story origins. And yet, testing had revealed that Live Like Line was confusing to the uninitiated. (“Live like who? Like a lion?”) Ultimately, The Miracle Season won out. With the wisdom of hindsight, I believe that it was the right choice. It created this crucial and subtle separation between two worlds, the real story of Live Like Line lived by everyone who knew her, and the fictional movie called The Miracle Season that came to be because of Caroline’s death. I suggested to Ernie that his story will always be his. No movie - good or bad, blockbuster or flop - can really impact the meaning and memory of what he and Brez and Line’s teammates and families experienced during their season of tragedy and triumph. The beauty and the pain will always be theirs and theirs alone, raw and unscripted.
The last word belongs to Caroline. When Ernie was wrestling with the decision to move forward or not, he imagined how Line would have responded to the idea of Hollywood making a movie about her. Her reply came to him in an instant: “Hell yeah!”
SAG STRIKE OFFICIALLY BEGINS!
It was just a matter of time, we all knew it was coming, but now the two (perhaps) most important unions in the entertainment industry are on strike. The business is essentially at a stand still, and many are panicking.
As a screenwriter there is a lot you can do during this time to prepare.
Variety.com Reports:
“After SAG-AFTRA leadership announced that the union would be going on strike, picketing began on Friday. In New York City and Los Angeles, actors have joined writers outside the studios, picketing and rallying outside of Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, Amazon, NBCUniversal and others in both cities…”
Welcome to Navigating Hollywood
Welcome to Navigating Hollywood, a resource for screenwriters of all levels to learn how to pitch, break in, sustain a career, and “thrive in the face of a million “no’s”
In this section there will be weekly posts about relevant industry news with insights, anecdotes to learn lessons, and additional content that can help you develop your career as a screenwriter.