Writing & Selling Crime Film Screenplays

Karen Lee Street

• Publisher: Creative Essentials
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781842439746
• eBook ISBN: 9781842439753
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmdrehbücher

Advice from an expert, ranging from learning the subgenres to approaching financial partners

Aimed at screenwriters, producers, development executives, and educators interested in the crime genre, this book provides an invaluable basis for crafting a film story that considers both audience and market expectations without compromising originality. A brief historical overview of the crime genre is presented for context along with an analysis of various crime sub-genres and their key conventions, including: police, detective, film noir, gangster, heist, prison, and serial killer. The book focuses on the creative use of these conventions and offers strategies for focusing theme and improving characterization, story design, structure, and dialogue. Paradigms, story patterns, and writing exercises are provided to assist the script development process, and strategies for revision are discussed along with key questions to consider before approaching creative or financial partners.

AN INSIDE JOB:
THOUGHTS AND EXPERIENCES OF
INDUSTRY PROFESSIONALS WORKING
IN THE CRIME GENRE

‘I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.’

(François Truffaut)

‘I always ask myself one question: what is human? What does it mean to be human? Maybe people will consider my new films brutal again. But this violence is just a reflection of what they really are, of what is in each one of us to certain degree.’

(Kim Ki-duk)

VICKI MADDEN

Vicki is the director of Australian development consultancy and production company Sweet Potato Films and has extensive international experience as a television and feature film script editor, story producer, show runner and writer. She brought her script editing skills to crime series such as The Bill, the classic British television police procedural that ran from 1984 to 2010, and Lynda La Plante’s Trial and Retribution. Vicki also wrote Australian tele-movie Blood Brothers, based on the 1993 murders of Jeffrey Gilham’s family, and has been writer and show runner on several crime series. Vicki spent two years as a script executive for Nine Network (Australia), so she knows how to develop concepts that sell and find an audience. She continues to use these skills as a ‘gun for hire’ brought in to redevelop television shows with declining ratings and to assist producers in putting together concept documents. In addition to her own projects in development, Vicki offers script consultancy services and runs an online course for emerging writers, ‘Into the Box’, through the Australian Film Television & Radio School. www.sweetpotatofilms.com.au

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Any thoughts as to why fewer detective and police story features seem to get off the ground as features when they are so popular on television? Or would you disagree with this?

Television has mastered the police procedural/detective genre so well that it is hard for a feature to sell itself as simply a police story or a detective story. Audiences want more bang for their buck when they go out and pay money. There are, of course, still plenty of feature films that are dressed up as something else, but, at their core, they are police procedural and detective stories. Even Batman is a cop show – just so happens the top detective wears leather and has an unhealthy interest in bats… Cross-genre films (and TV) are the big thing now so, while a studio or network may dress a film up and sell it off as an action thriller (The Bourne Identity, Die Hard, Batman, The Matrix, etc), or superhero film (Batman, Spiderman, Superman, etc), ultimately these are all stories where good versus evil and all the standard tropes of the detective and police procedural genres are used. House MD is a good example of the cross-genre. It’s a medical show but uses the tropes of a detective show – only the perpetrator is a germ or virus. House is a detective – they base him and Wilson (his off-sider) on Holmes and Watson. There are many clues within the show itself but primarily it’s a detective series.

Would you briefly summarise what your work as a television script editor entails and how that differs from script editing a feature? And, from an insider’s perspective, what skills are required to be a successful crime series writer who works well with script editors?

The television industry has become a huge hungry beast for money and unfortunately very few people who run TV networks have any interest in the business as entertainment. It is just another business they run to make money. The pressure on producers, then, is to trim down budgets to their core essentials and speed up the turnaround process. I started my writing career at Crawford Productions – at that time, and for many years, it was one of the largest and most prolific production companies in Australia. It was the training ground for the majority of our industry but sadly it is now closed. Hector Crawford ran the place and he was more passionate about TV than anyone I’ve ever met since. I remember he called me down to his office one day. I had only been working at the place for a month and was training on The Flying Doctors as a trainee script editor. I was terrified before the meeting as Hector was, and still is, legendary in the business. However, it was one of the most amazing meetings. He told me he wanted to pass over some knowledge to me and to ensure that, as I moved forward with my career, I would always keep the passion and understand the importance of our role in bringing stories to the small screen. He told me to have pride in my work – never release a script with one single typing mistake in it (I always remember that!) and never send it out until it was the very best script it could be.

That message has long been lost and finding people like Hector Crawford in the TV industry any more is almost impossible. I say all this because it is relevant to your question – what is the role of a script editor in television and how does it differ from feature work?

In television a script editor’s role was to work in-house, exclusively on one particular show, and help guide the script from its conception to delivery, under the guidance of a story editor/script producer or show runner (depends what country you’re working in). This is the role I normally work in as well as writer, but I also script edit when necessary (read: starving). Why? Because script editing is the most under-valued, over-abused job in television. You are the proverbial meat in the sandwich trying to please the requirements of the show and the fragile ego of the writer. No one really wins (but the show will make a profit from all the stunts and locations you just cut out).

Whereby the script editor in TV used to be the mediator and note giver and ‘sounding board’ for the writer, they now become furious re-writers, putting in all-nighters trying to keep up with the relentless, breakneck speed and demands made on them by the show’s producers.

As a feature script editor, the job is more hands-off and the script editor provides notes for the writer and the relationship is more intimate – they work sometimes even before a producer is onboard. They can work more as a team – the writer has more control and the script editor’s role is not to serve anyone else but the writer, to see their vision and, hopefully, contribute to it. They can be invaluable and they can be a curse.

I would like to digress here for a moment and give you my humble opinion on a couple of key issues that also contribute to the ‘scathing hatred’ a lot of writers have for script editors. It is a fundamental problem that the TV industry and some writers actually fail to recognise (usually the writers who bang on and get so upset). And it is this: just because you can write, that doesn’t mean you can tell a story…

There it is. A simple fact. Not all storytellers are proficient writers. They are vastly different skills but barely acknowledged or recognised by producers. So, what happens is this – someone can write a good script so suddenly a producer will hire them as a show runner/story producer. The show flops. The blame-game starts. But no one recognises this simple fact. I’ve worked with top-shelf writers who cannot plot to save their life. I’ve seen brilliant storytellers struggle with writing – but producers think they are one and the same.

To counterpoint that, there are a few writers who can do both, and they are invaluable in television, but I could count them on one hand. Until producers understand the roles within the script department, that problem will always exist.

There is barely any acknowledgement of the important role of the story producer in the UK and Australia – no training or very little – and no understanding or respect for this role by producers who don’t like being told how the script should be. Everyone thinks they are a writer and story producer and, for some strange reason, everyone in TV seems to be allowed to have input. In one job I did in Ireland, and I kid you not, a producer asked an on-set nurse to go into the edit suite (that I hadn’t been into as story producer) and asked her if she thought the scene worked. She didn’t, so they cut it.

Do you think that the training a writer receives working on a crime series – following a specific format, with a script editor and producer along with tight deadlines – is a plus when writing features? Or are there any negatives? I also ask this as some well-known television writers have found it difficult to get feature projects off the ground. Can a feature script be ‘too TV’?

There are always positives and negatives when writers go from TV to features and vice-versa. Television teaches you discipline. Discipline can mean the difference between success and failure – no matter where your talent sits. I know a couple of amazingly wonderful writers who have never completed a feature through lack of discipline and won’t touch TV because they don’t want to be known as a TV writer – go figure. Writing for TV also teaches you to think quickly. You learn to hold on to and juggle many stories at once and somehow, mentally, you start to plot them all in your head.

Downside – you become used to the speed and that produces shallow writing. You have ‘go-to’ clichés that work in TV but are not acceptable in features – however, with the standard of TV going up thanks to HBO, Foxtel, etc, the demands on TV writers are increasing. We’re also seeing a flood of film writers turning to TV now and that is changing the way we view TV shows.

TV writers also find the breadth of features, in terms of story as well as length, difficult to grasp at times and I have read quite a few feature scripts written by TV writers that are just too – well, television.

The Bill (sadly now defunct) had a reputation as a series that offered new writers an entry into television writing; few other series today seem to offer that in the UK. Any interesting new writers you worked with on The Bill? Any that made the transition to writing crime features? What marked them out in your opinion as particularly noteworthy?

Soaps in the UK are excellent training grounds and The Bill was especially because it was an hour-long format. I can’t remember any new writers especially, as it was back nine years ago, but there were a couple of writers who stood out – those rare ones who you could trust with a story, to plot it out and write it in fast turnaround – a godsend for the furious pace in which we had to work. I do remember a couple in particular: Jake Riddell and Tom Needam. They saved my butt a few times, I can tell you!

You’ve worked with Lynda La Plante who has a knack for coming up with commercial hits; given your own experience with commissioning projects and ‘rebooting’ ailing series, where does she go right?

Lynda La Plante is probably the most inspirational woman I have ever met in my professional life. She is also a wonderfully eccentric and smart and intelligent woman who I am lucky to call a friend. (Jimmy McGovern and Paul Abbott are the most inspirational men.) Lynda has a natural gift – I don’t mean she’s just good, it’s a gift, for storytelling. Her gut instinct is spot on, and she can sniff a good story a mile away. She is a natural born storyteller. Ev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blurb
• Author Biography
• Title
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• The Motive
• The Modus Operandi: An Approach to Genre for Screenwriters
• Judge and Jury: Genre, Public Taste and Censorship
• The Crime Continuum
• Whodunit (or Whose Story is It?)
• The Crime Continuum and the Protagonist’s Journey
• Basic Crime Genre Protocol
• The Master of Deduction: the Detective Sub-genre
• To Protect and to Serve: the Police Story Sub-genre
• Wise Guys and Tommy Guns: the Gangster Sub-genre
• The Shadowy Art of Deception: Film Noir
• Designing the Crime: Heists and Crime Capers
• Other Crimes and Misdemeanours: Pop Art, Comic Book Crime, the Auteur’s Voice
• Lock ’Em Up and Throw away the Key: Prison Stories
• Serial Killer Stories: Meeting the Monster
• Classical Stage Serial Killer Films: to Name Something is to Give it form
• An Inside Job: Thoughts and Experiences of Industry Professionals Working in the Crime Genre
• After all the Planning and Preparation
• Copyright