WEDNESDAY'S SCRIPT TIP:

MIXED GENRE SALAD

COWBOYS & ALIENS?

Whenever I talk about genre, someone always asks why they have to write in any genre... Good question. The answer is that genres tell the audience what to expect from the movie. If we decided to go out to dinner, I might ask you what kind of food do you like? That's genre. You might like Italian food or Chinese food or Thai food or Indian food or Continental (French, or "Freedom" as we call it today) or maybe just a hamburger. We categorize foods so that we know which restaurant to go to to get the kind of food we have a taste for. It works exactly the same with movies and screenplays. If you have a taste for a comedy you might go to see HORRIBLE BOSSES. If you want science fiction you might to see DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. If you wanted a kid comedy you might see SMURFS. The genre defines the type of experience you can expect from the film. If you went to see SMURFS and it was filled with *violent* zombie attacks that scared the poop out of you, you probably wouldn't like the film... the same way you wouldn't like spinach ravioli with sweet & sour sauce. Yech! So knowing your genre is an important element in creating your story - you don't want to pour on the sweet & sour sauce if the genre is Italian food. That doesn't mean you can't be a little inventive - Wolfgang Puck puts all kinds of weird stuff on a pizza... but you knew that before you went to his restaurant. That's what he's famous for - mixing genres.

And Mixed Genre movies are popular in Hollywood. COWBOYS AND ALIENS is a western mixed with a sci-fi alien attack flick. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is an adventure with fantasy & sci-fi elements, CASABLANCA has a little of everything. I think mixing genres is a great way to come up with something new and interesting...

But you don't want to end up with an unfocused "kitchen sink" script. Figure out what the "dominant genre" is going to be. You might end up with two dominant genres - but if you end up with more than that you could be in trouble. An "Action-Comedy" or a "Romantic-Comedy" are things we understand, but what's an "Action-Horror-Western-Musical"? I have trouble imagining that... and part of selling a film (through trailer or poster) is giving the audience basic information so that they can imagine what the movie will be like.

This doesn't mean your Horror-Western can't have a great horse chase action scene or a couple of songs that the leading lady sings in the saloon... but those aren't what the movie is about. It's a Horror-Western. When the audience pays their $10 they are expecting the emotional experience that a horror-western provides (whatever that is). They have a taste for a Horror-Western, and they expect cowboys facing off for high noon shoot outs with zombies or vampires or ghosts. They don't expect them to break into song before they start shooting.

Even when we mix two genres, one will be dominant - it will set the tone for the movie. So our Horror-Western may be a horror movie that takes place in the old west. or a western about a gunslinger's ghost. The horror movie will focus on the horror aspects, using the west as a location - maybe a haunted Wells Fargo Relay Station where ghosts kill people who spend the night. The western version will use the conventions of a western, but with a supernatural element - maybe a shootout at "high midnight". Both are mixed genres, but each started with a different genre.

I think there's a difference between an Action-Comedy and a Comedy-Action. It all has to do with the tone of the story. A movie like BEVERLY HILLS COP is an action movie with a protagonist who is funny. The dominant genre is action. The story is an action story rather than a comedy story. You could remove the comedy from the story and it would still work as an action piece (in fact - it began as a Sly Stallone action film and all of the funny lines came in when they rewrote it for Eddie Murphy). A movie like THE IN-LAWS (original version) is a Comedy-Action film. It's first and foremost a comedy. The action is the background where the comedy takes place. A movie like HOT FUZZ does the "AIRPLANE thing" and sends up action movies - makes fun of them - while still keeping a straight face. You might think because everyone is so serious and the story makes sense (in a nonsense sort of way) that this is an Action-Comedy. Nope. The action scenes are over the top silly. You laugh *at* the action. That makes it a comedy first. Knowing which is the dominant genre is critical when you're dealing with tone - for an example of how important knowing your dominant genre is, take a look at HOLLYWOOD HOMICIDE. What a mess! It doesn't know if it's an Action-Comedy or a Comedy-Action and ends up being neither funny nor action packed.

CHOCOLATE IN MY PEANUT BUTTER!

A couple of years ago I was doing rewrites on my horror comedy that was supposed to shoot in Hawaii (but now looks to be shelved forever)... I was thinking about this very subject.

This was an assignment, based on the producer's idea... which was kind of silly. I had suggested a variation that was more of a straight horror concept (similar to the movie BUG with Bradford Dilman), but the producer wanted his giant monster movie that was kind of silly... so the story would have to have comedy elements in order to work.

First thing I had to figure out when I was writing this script was what my dominant genre was going to be - did I want to write a comedy script with some horror or a horror script with some comedy? Was my audience people who wanted to laugh or people who wanted to be scared? This script already had a home - and the producer wanted to sell it as a horror movie. So the script would be a clever horror movie, rather than a comedy with some scares. The current low budget DVD market is for horror movies, not comedies.

SLITHER was probably one of the best reviewed films around when it came out - critics loved it - but it flopped with audiences. The problem with the movie? Funny as hell, but not scary. When audiences rent a horror movie, they want horror. That's the basic. Now, it can be funny as well - but it *must* be scary. Horror is the default genre, if you want to attract an audience. This makes complete sense if you think about the "horror audience" and the "comedy audience". Horror movies have a loyal audience - there are horror movie conventions and horror movie magazines. No comedy movie magazines, though. A horror movie audience might accept a little comedy in their film, but would a comedy audience accept suddenly having a character get chopped up with a chain saw? It's easy to see which makes more sense as the dominant genre.

So I set out to write script a clever horror movie, rather than a comedy with some scares.

How something like this usually works is the ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN theory - the comedy makes us let our guard down, so that the scares are even more frightening. We're expecting a punch line, but we get a jolt - and we jump twice as high. I like to think of it as peaks and valleys - with the horror "valleys" as the comedy "peaks" and vice-versa.

Remember the Reeces commercials where the two guys collided, and "You got peanut butter in my chocolate!" "You got chocolate in my peanut butter!" One of the things I noticed when I looked at films like this is that the peanut butter and chocolate seemed to work better un-mixed. The horror needed to be scary - and whenever a movie made fun of the horror, it didn't find a very big audience. SLITHER, which I loved, was one of the best reviewed films when it came out... but audiences stayed away. The most frightening scene in the film is when the girl in the bathtub is listening to her iPod and has no idea a million spermies are crawling toward her. That's a real horror scene. But much of the rest of the movie plays the horror for laughs - making fun of the "monster". That doesn't work very well. It's funny, but not as scary. The main "monster" is scarier as an asshole husband human than as a monster (where he does zany things) and the fat-chick who explodes is completely played for laughs. You want to keep the chocolate and peanut butter separate! Don't make fun of the monster!

REAL SCARES

A couple of my main examples when writing the script were THE HOWLING and PIRANHA (both written by John Sayles) where the scares are real... but the people are smart alecs and quirky. Both films are filled with real suspense, real scares, and the typical blood and gore you'd find in a horror movies. The horror is real horror. Both of those films got great reviews, and made tons of money. And spawned sequels (James Cameron did PIRANHA 2: THE SPAWNING). And remakes. Remake rights to PIRANHA sold to Fox for a whole bunch of money... and we have had a couple pof "big budget" remakes... that got everything wrong. No real scares. Silly and crass. I have no idea why they don't just remake John Sayles brilliant screenplay - do you know how much a studio would pay for a John Sayles genre script today? They'd be bidding against each other for *weeks* to get hold of a script like that... and the new version has thrown away the great Sayles script and is probably going to mess it up!

While the pirahnas are eating the guests, or the werewolf is basically raping Dee Wallace Stone in a porn theater (then, attacking and *eating* people at the resort), the characters react just like I would when confronted with a monster - nervous humor. When characters end up in a crazy situation, they acknowledge it. The films treat the threats as a *real threat* - never playing it for laughs. Oddly, this makes the comedy more funny, because it's a tension breaker. One thing that works in this cross-genre is a character who is more focused on some small issue than the big one - like the Mayor in SLITHER who has a certain soft drink requirement while his entire town is being destroyed by monsters around him (I have a character more angry about missing a football game on TV than the monster attack).

So my theory is - respect the monster (or whatever provides the scares) and find the humor in the characters and situations. But keep the chocolate and peanut butter separate. Make sure the horror part is really scary.

SLITHER may have not been a hit with the mainstream audience, but writer/director James Gunn knows how to mix it up and added comedy to superheroes and ended up with GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY... which seems to be doing okay.

Our script can't be all things - it has to be a specific thing. You need to be able to focus your story so that the audience knows what to expect from the finished film, and so that *you* know what sort of elements are going to work within the framework of your story. You don't want to pour marinara sauce on your pork fried rice. Your story might combine a couple of genres and have scenes that fit in a couple more genres. But when that film ends up at Blockbuster they're going to put it on a shelf that has a sign overhead - what does that sign say? What is the dominant genre? Even when you are mixing genres, you need to know whether you have a comedy film (where people may get punched but it doesn't really hurt) or an action film (where it hurts like hell when people get punched). Knowing your genre is important in the creation of your script. If you mix genres, you need to know what genre is dominant. So what's your genre?

What kind of food do you have a taste for?

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Distilling Your Screenplay!

Loglines, Treatments, Pitching, Look Books, Pitch Decks, One Pagers, Rip-O-Matics?

You have written a brilliant 110 page screenplay, but how do you get anyone to read it? You need to distill it down into some form of verbal moonshine or story rocket fuel that will ignite that bored development executive or manager or agent and get them to request your screenplay. But how do you shrink those 110 pages into a 25 word logline or a 2 minute elevator pitch or a one page synopsis or a short paragraph? This 100,000 word book shows you how! Everything you need to know! From common logline mistakes (and how to solve them) to how your pitch can reveal story problems to the 4 types of pitches!

272 Pages - ONLY $4.99!

READY TO BREAK IN?

THE BUISINESS SIDE

*** BREAKING IN BLUE BOOK *** - For Kindle!

Should really be called the BUSINESS BLUE BOOK because it covers almost everything you will need to know for your screenwriting career: from thinking like a producer and learning to speak their language, to query letters and finding a manager or agent, to making connections (at home and in Hollywood) and networking, to the different kinds of meetings you are will have at Studios, to the difference between a producer and a studio, to landing an assignment at that meeting and what is required of you when you are working under contract, to contracts and options and lawyers and... when to run from a deal! Information you can use *now* to move your career forward! It's all here in the Biggest Blue Book yet!

Print version was 48 pages, Kindle version is over 400 pages!

$4.99 - and no postage!

FINAL DRAFT SOFTWARE

Use your creative energy to focus on the content; let Final Draft take care of the style. Final Draft is the number-one selling application specifically designed for writing movie scripts, television episodics and stage plays. Its ease-of-use and time-saving features have attracted writers for almost two decades positioning Final Draft as the Professional Screenwriters Choice. Final Draft power users include Academy, Emmy and BAFTA award winning writers like Oliver Stone, Tom Hanks, Alan Ball, J.J. Abrams, James Cameron and more. * * * Buy It!

copyright 2023 by William C. Martell