Negotiating Script Development

Hi all,

Another week, another newsletter. Today I’ve jotted down some tips for how you might manage being in development on your script and getting out the other side.

I’m travelling this week, so apologies in advance for any proofing snafoos!

Hope you enjoy!

Negotiating Script Development

It would be nice for us screenwriters if the process of developing a screenplay with producers, funders, broadcasters, was always fully creative and satisfying and — despite our mandatory moaning and bitching about it — it usually is. But as with any kind of collaboration, there is also a component of managing other people’s expectations and interests to be considered.

Basically, developing a script like any other human interaction is to a certain extent a negotiation. And, like a large container ship trying to pilot its way through shallow shoals, it’s worth taking a bit of time thinking about how you might get your project to shore, broadly intact.

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The first thing I think about when I’m in development is — what’s my end goal here? I think it’s very easy in the cut and thrust of meetings and notes and rewrites to lose track of what it is that everyone is aiming for: usually, a great script that is as good as it possibly can be, and one that can get made.

What I’m talking about is a shared creative goal. A lot of heartache and pain can be avoided if everyone involved has a shared idea of what a script is and wants to be. Of course, this is something of a truism: but getting to that understanding isn’t always as easy as it might sound. Even the most seemingly clear cut of premises can spawn multiple different opinions of what kind of film that premise will ultimately become.

Secondly, as a writer, it’s important to have red lines. I think it’s very easy for us, particularly when we’re dealing with people who seem to hold a lot of power is to want to please everybody, to undertake everyone’s notes, to be the person who executes. The only issue with this is that sometimes — particularly when there are several parties involved in development — those notes might be contradictory, maybe mutually exclusive, and impossible to get right.

Also — they may be just plain wrong. Or at least wrong to you — that take the project into a place that you just don’t want to go, And so you need a good idea of what you’re not willing to do. These are your red lines.

This might sound inflexible, but actually, I think it helps us to be the opposite — having a clear idea of what you won’t do, makes it easier to compromise in any other area of the script. Because if you’re clear on what you won’t do, everything else is up for discussion.

Finally – like any negotiation – you need to know when to walk away. This is as much about the business of screenwriting, as it is the creative process. Not every process will always go well and unless you know when it’s time to say I’m done, development tends to roll on aimlessly forever.

Of course, it’s difficult. Because inevitably as screenwriters, we will put more investment of effort into our scripts than any other partner. We have a sense of the costs (all that time we’ve spent on a script) we’ve sunk into them. We say we might as well do another draft because we’ve already put so much effort into the work that we’ve done, but that can be a mistake. Knowing that you’re ready to leave a project can focus minds and let the people you’re working with know that you have values that you’re looking to stick to.

I’ve Been Watching… INVENTING ANNA

And the fictionalised story of real-life “scammer”, Anna Delvey, is an awful lot of fun: as you’d expect drama emerging out of Shonda Rhime’s stable. Like all Shondaland products it knows how to wring the drama from any given situation (heaping significance on a small piece of plot that recurs in a big way later)  and, boy, does it have pace. It’s also got two compelling central performances in Anna Chlumsky (who can do no wrong) and Julia Garner with a performance that seems to be bonkers until you realise the subtlety with which she captures her real model.

My one quibble is the (seeming necessity) that the show creates home tension between Chlumsky’s journalist character and her husband. The aim is to raise the stakes, but his moaning about her commitment to her career makes him come across as such a drag and a drip, that the audience feels the conflict could easily be overcome by his summary dumping.

I’ve been reading… FOREIGNERS: THREE BRITISH LIVES by Caryl Phillips

A rather beautiful little triptych in which Caryl Phillips brings no small measure of powerful narrative style to three Black Britons separated by the centuries: Francis Barber, a faithful servant of Samuel Johnson, Randolph Turpin, Britain’s first black boxing world champion, and David Oluwale, a Leeds resident who was killed by police after a campaign of harassment in 1969. They are all haunting, bitterly sad stories about the attempt to forge an identity in a culture both hostile and fascinated by you, with Oluwale’s story, in particular, being incredibly affecting.

All my best,

James.