MASS-MEDIA CRITERIA FOR PICKING
THE BEST/MOST SELLABLE STORIES
DEAR SCREENWRITER-FILMMAKER: For as long as there have been storytellers making money by finding and/or creating and/or sharing their stories with massive groups of paying customers, the following seven filtering criteria* have been proving themselves over and over again.
From journalists to novelists to screenwriters to oral historians and beyond, these seven “angles” have helped the “working professionals” grab onto the stories that will keep them “working.” Because the stories that best satisfy these criteria are the ones most likely to keep bringing in paying customers.
There may well be additional criteria, of course. But the crucial seven, and what they mean to you as a “working screenwriter.” are:
1. Audience. Like snowflakes, no two audiences are identical. So the same story may be of much more import or interest to one audience than to another.
Thus for any story, consider what your “primary” consumer audience for that story is most likely to be (age range, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.), and if your story will be something “naturally” intriguing to that audience.
If so, then write your story FOR THAT AUDIENCE AND THEIR INTERESTS (with hope that several other audiences will follow the excited “primary” crowd into the meeting rooms, theaters, video stores, etc.).
2. Impact. Look at the story’s events: How many persons do those story events affect, and how seriously will those events affect those persons?
All other things being equal, a global catastrophe story is more likely to draw mass audiences than a local story about four simple people in an Iowa farmhouse – unless the “universals” of the latter story will be intriguing to people everywhere, with “emotionally-massive impacts” we can all relate to (e.g., In the Bedroom, Signs, The Sixth Sense, A Simple Plan, etc).
3. Proximity. Almost always, the same event is bigger news if it happens in your town than if it is 1,000 or even 10 miles away.
And although as a screenwriter you’re not writing “news,” you can still give your stories a sense of proximity no matter how many places your audience lives. Just make at least some of your characters very much “people next door” or “like people I know.”
Referring back to the Iowa-farmhouse people: If they have quirks or hobbies or other “human touches” that make them feel familiarly human, then what happens to them will feel more like it’s happening “in close proximity to all of us.”
4. Timeliness. Obviously, news is like bread — today’s is stale tomorrow. And of course, movies have never been known for telling us the news “first” (especially given the quick response of modern broadcasting and other electronic media).
But nonetheless (just like monthly or quarterly publications do), your screenplay stories can still feel timely by concentrating on telling the audience how and why something happened, rather than on when and what happened.
This “timeliness” factor is one reason so many movies are set in very-specific periods of history, and/or are scheduled around anniversaries of historical events (think how many Marilyn Monroe shows appeared in 2012, the 50th year after her death)!
And even if your story is fiction, it can focus on what was “news” in the story’s time period (viz. Mad Men), can refer to current and arising technologies and trends and social patterns (viz. Friends With Money), or predict what will be “news” in the next five to 500 years (viz. Star Trek, The Road, etc.)
Any of these approaches can give a story a “timely” (or even ahead-of-timely) feel, rather than being a story with no sense or urgency or recency whatsoever.
5. Prominence. “Names” don’t always make news. Still, thousands of skiers fall every day and go unnoticed. Yet when Gerald Ford took a snowy tumble, it was news, because he was president of the United States at the time.
That’s why so many movie stories try to give the principal characters at least some prominence in the worlds they inhabit – albeit sometimes the prominence is already in their past (viz. Tender Mercies or Crazy Heart, etc.), and other times it’s still on their horizon (Young Lincoln, A Star Is Born, etc).
Regardless, whether that prominence is past, present or future, audiences will tend to focus better on principal characters who have some superlative attached to their reputation — e.g., “s/he was/could’ve been/is/is likely to be the most/best/brightest/prettiest/toughest/etc. __________.”
6. Unusualness/rarity. The rare or unusual makes news. Charles Lindbergh and Neil Armstrong were news because they were “the first” at something GREAT (in their time). Also newsworthy is the bizarre, or strangely unusual.
Two centuries ago a newspaper editor decreed: “When a dog bites a man, that’s not news; but when a man bites a dog, that is news.”
Hollywood especially thrives on unusualness or rarity; why spend millions on stories about everyday events?!? Even if most of the movie is in an everyday world, at least something EXCEPTIONAL, UNUSUAL, RARE, and (probably even a bit) BIZARRE had better happen, or you don’t yet have a Hollywood story!
7. Conflict/connection. To survive as pro storytellers, journalists, novelists and screenwriters had better spend a lot of time covering conflict — whether war, politics, crime, sports, marriage, dating, business, etc.
Why? Because conflict always draws the attention of the curious, the anxious, the skeptic, even the optimist among us all; intense conflict cuts right to the question of: “Can humanity survive itself and its passions, and somehow find a way back to…
“Connection?”
Yes, connection. Because at the depths of humanity’s great interest in conflict is this question: Will this escalate to higher, wider-ranging and irreparably-destructive conflict, or will it somehow deescalate toward reconciliation, resolution, and perhaps even deeper connection than before the fighting began?
Among classic, enduring stories, even the most conflict-filled ones ultimately show some type of connection between once-fighting characters (albeit sometimes that connection doesn’t happen in time for a fully happy ending).
The timeless reason is, even when the principal characters are at their dying moments (as in Hamlet), audiences still yearn for them to have some sort of hopeful connection to take away from this life.
And especially when the conflicting characters have a rift of galactic proportions, it’s all the more “news” when they can somehow effect a reconciliation and find connection.
No question, in varying proportions the seven criteria above help pro storytellers judge the “news” or “sellability” or “marketability” of the stories they choose to focus on and refine and promote as their product.
The world has always been “news-hungry.” And in the competition for jobs and salaries, the screenwriters who know how to feed that hunger (while also holding onto integrity and a higher moral calling, we hope) will be the ones who keep getting produced and paid.
* The basic list here comes from News Reporting and Writing (1980), a textbook from St. Martin’s Press. I’ve specifically adapted the list to the screenwriting field. – Key Payton
Hey Key, nice article! Everything you said is such an important thing to keep in mind before settling in to an idea, or even worse, a full fledged story. I will continue to keep these things in mind. Thank you!