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186 Appendix B: Marketability In chapter 2, I touched very briefly on the marketplace for docudrama. In this appendix, I want to expand on one or two points raised in that section. Until now, we’ve been looking at the challenge of writing. However, at the end of the day, you want to sell your script and see that it gets made. This means knowing the marketplace, and knowing what the producers want and where to turn. This means understanding moods, personalities, the instability of fashion , studios, international setups, and country quirks. It means trying to understand a process that is often highly irrational and always aggravating. Sometimes, the successful suffer as much as novices in this process. Director Richard Attenborough made the rounds for almost twenty years before he could find a backer for Gandhi. This was because the marketplace seers knew there was no future for a film about a wizened, half-naked Indian politician who believed in nonviolence and was uninterested in sex. David Seidler had written successful scripts for Hollywood, but it still took him years to persuade backers that a film about a stuttering king could be successful. So much for experts. The marketing of scripts is a massive subject, and a great many books have been written about the subject. The two books I find most useful in this area are Script Planning by Tony Zaza, and Selling a Screenplay, by Sid Field. Both are good but say little on three background issues: changing fashions, codes and constraints, and the film market versus the TV market. A pity, because all three deserve attention. changing Fashions The writer has to be aware of how and why fashions change. What was fine for yesterday maybe totally wrong for today. Hollywood practice is a good example. Between 1927 and 1960, over 270 biopics were made in Hollywood by the major studios, with Producer Darryl Zanuck acting as the key arbitrator on taste. Under his lead, Warner Brothers and others turned out film after film Marketability 187 idealizing the famed of history, from Zola and Disraeli to Alexander Graham Bell and Louis Pasteur. And when they ran out of statesmen and scientists, they turned to entertainers like Gershwin and Cohan, or sportsmen like Knute Rockne and Babe Ruth. Today, there has been a major shift in biography. Lives are generally translated to the screen in a more serious and truthful fashion and are beginning to appear as theatrical features as often as they appear as TV biopics. Hence, the success of The Queen, Nixon, and The Iron Lady. Though the “heroic” bio film is still around, the emphasis, at least on TV, has shifted away from stories of the famous to stories of ordinary people to whom unusual things have happened. In his book Biopics, George Custen puts it this way: “Notoriety has in some sense replaced noteworthiness as the proper frame for biography. The perennially famous have been replaced by the momentarily observed.” codes and constraints Not only does the marketability of certain subjects change, but also the way they can be treated. From the 1930s through the 1950s, for example, Hollywood was constrained by the requirements of the production code. This code, originally set up by the producers themselves, imposed a prim morality on everything to do with screen behavior and language. Today, the code no longer exists, but many of its restraints have entered television. Thus, while almost anything is possible on the big screen, such as Colin Firth shouting “shit, shit, shit” in The King’s Speech, more caution has to be exercised when writing for television, maybe with the exception of HBO. Thus, the language, violence, and obscenity of a film such as Reservoir Dogs would not be acceptable in the normal television movie of the week. In other words, television says yes to sex and violence, but only within limits. Film or tv Market The problem of codes and constraints is really just one element of a larger question. What market should you choose, film or TV? Obviously, the feature film offers you larger rewards as a writer, but there are many other matters that have to be discussed. It would be simple if the battle lines were clearly drawn, but they’re not. Barbarians at the Gate cost $7 million to film and was originally commissioned by Columbia. Eventually, Columbia considered it too problematic for a theatrical audience, and it was taken over by HBO. Even among networks, there are differences...

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