“Rx for ailing screenwriters: Read this tonight and call me in the morning.”–Tony Bill, Academy Award-winning Producer of The Sting
The book was Making a Good Script Great by Linda Seger.
Working with Sheila taught me that I could easily integrate feedback. My challenge was learning what kind of feedback an agent or producer would give.
Up until now, I hadn’t been that interested in reading books about playwriting as a craft. I learned by seeing and reading plays. Most of the plays I read were either considered classics or had won the Tony or Olivier Award. But I had never selected what plays I read based on how much money they’d made or asked myself what made them commercial: the question paramount in the mind of every professional script reader, agent, and producer.
Seger is a Hollywood Script Consultant with a knack for explaining her work in a way I could understand and internalize. She followed the development process for two scripts that had been nominated for Best Original Screenplay. The script that didn’t win became the top-grossing film of the year. The film that won finished in seventh place at the box office. More importantly for me, both scripts had actually been produced and the screenwriters involved had people asking them, “What’s next?”
Seger laid out her thesis of what made a script commercial: marketability + creativity + structure. I began testing it with every book, movie, or play I consumed, starting with an anthology of the ten longest-running plays in Broadway history.
Marketability: Is this a situation members of the audience have lived or would like to live vicariously? Is it an underdog story? Revenge or getting even? Coming of age? Greed? Finding one’s true self? Standing up for what’s right?
Can I express the theme in a tagline?
Creativity: What is the hook? Is it compelling? Am I grabbed by the premise?
Structure: Is the script tight enough to hold my interest from beginning to end?
Then I turned the questions on myself.
The play I’d faced the least resistance to was Who Shot Captain Dark? I couldn’t have been more obvious about the genre and what the show had to offer audiences.
Though the Chicago Dramatists audience appreciated the highly compromised reading of Escalators, at least one audience member had no idea what I was trying to say. Stage Kiss was a clearer proposition but probably wasn’t that original. Ode to a Dead English Playwright, despite cribbing so much from Shakespeare, was highest on originality. I would need to boil the theme down to a tagline.
Turning my eye to the Broadway musical market, I didn’t have to ask myself what Andrew Lloyd Webber would do. I only needed to look at what he’d done.
The unmasking scene in Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera is one of the most iconic in cinema. I’ve seen the silent movie once. I’ve seen the unmasking scene hundreds of times.
The movie was remade with music in 1943. But Andrew Lloyd Webber didn’t decide to make it his own until he saw a touring stage production that used existing classical music. The Gaston Leroux novel was in the public domain, so he was free to adapt it himself.
The show’s theme is expressed in the title, a mysterious masked figure “haunts” the Paris Opera. One of his signature shenanigans is dropping a chandelier (suggested by the shattered glass lettering of the title). The graphics include the mask and the rose to symbolize the beastly figure’s love for his beauty.
It’s an underdog story of a musical genius trying to bring his vision to life, a revenge story, and a tragic romance.
Lloyd Webber’s version dragged more than the film adaptations, but audiences were willing to overlook that because The Phantom of the Opera had something that transcended the commercial. The West End was sold out years in advance. Demand for tickets to the Broadway production was so strong that the run was extended several times before the show opened.
Seger explained works of universal appeal in the most life-changing paragraph I’d ever read.
“A myth is a story that is ‘more than true.’ Many stories are true because one person, somewhere, at some time, lived it. It is based on fact. But a myth is more than true because it is lived by all of us, at some level. It’s a story that connects and speaks to us all.”
Seger cautioned against mining myths as starting points for scripts because they were too predictable. That may have been more true for movies than for musicals. As unknowns, Andrew Lloyd Webber and his lyricist Tim Rice adapted stories from the best-selling book of all time: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar. Presenting them as “rock operas” made them original.
I decided that my next show would be an adaptation, one whose appeal producers and audiences already knew. But to choose the right story to adapt: one that would have universal appeal, I first had to learn the world’s myths. For a teacher, Seger suggested the man behind the top-grossing film of all time.
