[NoHo Arts District, CA] – Episode four of the Writing for Actors blog by Scott Edward Smith focuses on “Corporate vs. Creative.”
Being creative in a corporate-driven industry can be a challenging issue for writers. Scott Edward Smith gives his take on how to navigate the often ignored issues of Corporate vs. Creative.
“Corporate versus creative” is a really important concept. When creative people are dealing with the corporate side of the entertainment industry, this can be a big issue. Writers and other creative people pay so little attention to dealing with this or understanding it. Until it’s right in their face and it’s a crisis moment.
And you can’t ignore it because if you take the time you can relate it to your own life. It is not corporate and creative, it’s corporate versus creative. They don’t exist as a positive thing, but they do create positive works. You have to understand that, and be willing to roll with it.
There’s two elements in it. Step 1 is the experience of corporate, which is they’re meeting you and you’re meeting them. And Step 2 is dealing with them.
By corporate, I mean big corporate who could be Universal Studios or people investing in a Broadway show. It could be a producer who wants to turn your project into a series, or it could be a company willing to fund your project in an Equity waiver theater. You are still dealing with people that have a bottom line – money – and they are treated differently.
Let’s look at the technicalities of that. There’re two areas. One is the pitch, and the other is, which comes before the pitch, the script. The script is what you deliver, whether it’s a play or whether it’s a screenplay or a television series.
Let’s look at the script first. I will tell you from working several years in development at studios, how a script lays out on a page is really important. You better be at 120 -130 pages. If you’re above 130 pages, you better be Robert Towne or Akiva Goldsman– someone established so length wouldn’t be an issue. Keep it within the structure that the industry knows.
Corporate knows a thing. If you start getting beyond 120 pages the first thought in their head is “that’s more money.” They’re not thinking “the story is more interesting” and they’ll go with it. They’ll go with it if you’ve written five scripts that have made a lot of money, just keep it focused.
And the other big thing about it, I will tell you this, is I’m not talking about the CEOs. I’m talking about the production executives, or a producer, who are going to read it first before they go pitch it to the people that are gonna give you the money to do it. What it looks like on a page is important.
When those executives on a Friday leave with 12 scripts and two books to talk about on Monday morning, when they open up a script and on that first page, it’s just a bunch of words going down, you have a problem. There needs to be a lot of white space in scripts. They’re trying to experience the movie or the play and not really what you think about the actual staging of it or where they are or what’s going on. You’ve got to technically just break it up so it looks, well, engaging. It looks like it is going to be a good read. It doesn’t look like a dictionary.
Now, about “the pitch.” First impressions are really important. The pitch is about you. It’s not about your script. You may not think you are of interest to anybody, but you are. If it’s a studio, they’ll have a development department and there will be an executive in development who has had readers read the script and give them material on it. They’ve read it and now they’re ready to call you in. So the pitch is extremely important because they’ve already read it. It’s not like they don’t know this story. They want you. They want to know that you know what the trailer is. When you come in, shake hands, talk talk talk, you need to nail it in 60 seconds and that’s it. Because they want to know that you are workable. That’s in the pitch. Because they are dealing with a lot of money, a lot of people turning numbers and pieces of paper have no idea what’s happening on the lot. I worked for a long time as a story editor, I worked in development. Those meetings are really just about figuring out, can this person tell me what this story is about and can I work with them.
If you collaborated on the script and there’s two of you, whether you do it in the car before you go into the meeting or whether you get together beforehand, break it up into three acts: you’re gonna do act one, I’ll do two, you do three, and we’ll do the wrap up together. It’s a show. They just wanna know where you are on the spectrum as a creative person?
It’s the best thing when you’re a writer and as with an actor, uh, the best thing in your life is that you’re confronted with corporate and it’s the worst thing you want to deal with , it’s not gonna happen without them, and it’s never ever going to change. You just need to know that it’s about you embracing it.