Karen Sandler

Tag: script

  • RTW – What Makes a Book a Movie?

    This week, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday offers up the blog prompt What is it that makes some books ideal for a film translation? I feel a little like that kid in class whose teacher finally asks a question she knows the answer to. The kid who suddenly wakes up and waves her arm, praying the teacher will call on her.

    Well, okay, I’m not that much of an expert on books being adapted into movies. But I have written a half-dozen or so screenplays and have written and produced a few short films. My book Tankborn and its sequels Awakening and Revolution were all adapted from a film script to books (so I’m hoping they can some day go the other way too). So I’ve actually thought a lot about what kind of books make good movies.

    IMHO, the one quality that makes a book most adaptable into film is a high concept premise. What’s high concept? I define it as a premise that can easily be described in one sentence. I’ve also heard it defined as a premise for which you can immediately imagine its movie poster. Hunger Games is an excellent example. In the future, teens are chosen in a lottery for a fight to the death with other teens. Jurassic Park–scientists recreate dinosaurs using DNA and the dinosaurs fight back. I think Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies books, in which “ugly” children are converted to “pretties” at age 16, but there’s something rotten at the core of the process, is pretty high concept and would make a fantastic film franchise.

    But not every movie is high concept, nor is every book that’s adapted to film high concept. Another crucial quality is that the book is very visual. There’s plenty of action on the page as opposed to lots of internal dialogue or long descriptive passages. There’s a whole lot of the novel Pride and Prejudice that’s left out of the movie because it just doesn’t translate into the visual medium of film.

    A third quality of a filmable book is that its story already follows a three act structure. I bet if you analyzed the movies you’ve seen, you’ll see the three act structure in most of them.

    What does that structure look like? The first act sets up the characters and their story dilemma, then there’s an inciting incident at the end of the first act that sets the hero/heroine on his/her way to their goal. The stakes continually rise in the second act, and there will be a turning point in the middle that changes everything, then a dark moment at the end of the second act. Then there’s the third act’s climax and denouement.

    Think about some of the books you’ve read, and I’ll bet many of them use this three act structure. Maybe the author made a conscious decision to write their book that way, or maybe the book ended up with three act structure because it’s a great way to write a story.

    So think about your own book, or if you’re not a writer, think about a fiction book you’ve recently read. Is it high concept (can you describe it in one sentence)? Is it extremely visual? Is it already written in a three act structure? Then you might have a very film adaptable story. I hope Hollywood comes knocking.

  • Embryonic TANKBORN (How a Script Became a Book, Part 2)

    Screenwriting is an entirely different world than the publishing world. The most obvious difference is the format–a script looks entirely different from a book manuscript. In a film script, dialogue is set off in blocks with wider margins. The dialogue alternates with description, each scene identified by an interior or exterior location. As an example, here’s an early script for Blade Runner, one of my favorite movies.

    A script is also 3-hole punched and bound with brads. A book manuscript, on the other hand, is not hole-punched and is generally kept together with rubber bands. At least manuscripts were rubber-banded together in the olden days, when they were sent snail mail to agents and editors. Nowadays, everything is e-mailed.

    It’s always funny to watch TV shows and movies where one of the characters is a novelist. The screenwriter who wrote the script bases the character on their own experience as a writer. The book manuscript will be three-hole punched and bound with brads. The novelist always hands his/her manuscript over to their editor or agent in person. The fictional writer is able to do this because they always seem to live in NYC, just like most actual screenwriters live in L.A. and are able to have personal contact with their agents/producers.

    Anyway… When I wrote Icer, the script that I eventually used as the starting point for my YA book Tankborn, I didn’t just have to learn how to write a story that was suitable for the screen (i.e., everything on the page had to be visual). I also had to learn script format. One problem with this is that although there were many sample scripts available (at that time, in printed, hardcopy form that I could order from a service) the majority of those were shooting scripts. Shooting scripts contain all sorts of camera directions that aren’t appropriate to include in a spec script (a script written on speculation). It took some years of education to figure that out.

    As I mentioned in a previous post, part of that education was a class I took through UCLA Extension. The instructor liked my concept enough that he helped me with the beat outline (essentially coaching me through the plotting process). Later when the script was finished, he suggested that he and a writer friend of his option my script for $1. I wasn’t comfortable with that arrangement, so I was then on my own.

    Here are the first few pages of an early version of Icer.

    Nothing much happened with Icer for a few years. I kept writing, mostly short stories, but a few TV scripts as well. We moved from Southern California to Northern California and my husband and I agreed I’d stay home with the kids and write while the kids were in school. I focused on novels, pretty much forgetting screenwriting.

    Then I stumbled across a tiny ad in Writer’s Digest magazine requesting scripts. Talk about a leap of faith. No way of knowing if the person on the other end of the ad was a fraud or the real deal.

    It turned out to be the latter. I got a call out of the blue one day from Fern Baum of the production company Kanter-Baum. Fern was the daughter of Martin Baum, legendary agent at Creative Artists Agency. Mr. Baum agreed to shop my script on behalf of his daughter.

    I was thoroughly awed by the massive Lichtenstein mural in CAA’s lobby, and my jaw just about dropped seeing the Oscar displayed in a case in Mr. Baum’s office (which had been awarded to Gig Young and bequeathed to Mr. Baum after Gig Young’s death). Even still, I was pretty ignorant about who Marty Baum was and the honor he paid me by agreeing to work with me.

    We went through a number of re-writes and eventually Icer went out to a long list of studios and production companies. One of those submissions was to a brand new studio called Dreamworks, SKG. Alas, Dreamworks passed. Icer was eventually optioned by Prism Entertainment Corporation, a small production company that had previously done a number of lower budget films including When the Bough Breaks starring Martin Sheen.

    I actually had one of those Hollywood “meetings” at Prism where they gave me notes (kind of like an editorial letter, except in real time). It was pretty cool. Everyone threw out ideas, some of them great, some not so much and I scribbled madly. (Note: One of the better ideas is an element that will figure into the second book of the TANKBORN series, TANKBORN AWAKENING.)

    Everyone was very enthusiastic about the script. The notes led to another round of re-writes and the script continued to improve.

    Prism unfortunately couldn’t get funding to proceed so they weren’t able to go any farther with Icer. I co-wrote another script for Kanter-Baum, but we weren’t able to get anywhere with that one either.

    A few years later, I met another producer who liked Icer, Craig Nicholls of Pendle View. We went through another round of re-writes with an eye toward decreasing production costs. By this point, CGI had come of age and what once would have been very expensive special effects could now be done at a much lower cost on a computer.

    With Craig’s guidance, I was able to kick Icer up yet another notch. Still no takers ready to finance the film, despite Craig’s best efforts. He worked with me on another script, a quirky YA time-travel called Timewrecked (now there’s a screenplay that’s ripe for novelization!), but we couldn’t get any traction on that one either.

    You’ve probably gathered reading this post that as tough as it is getting a book published, that’s a cakewalk compared to selling a script and getting it produced. I do confess I never felt completely comfortable in that world. I was never quite sure I had the format down, that I wasn’t over-writing (a screenwriter shouldn’t be directing the actors, for instance), that what I put on the page could be transferred to the screen. Books I understood. Scripts are even now still a mystery to me.

    But writing Icer led me to writing Tankborn, so obviously the time working on that script wasn’t wasted. And it was an amazing challenge and there were some very exciting times. I’m grateful for those who helped me along the way, who worked so hard to see my vision on the screen. I hope they’re satisfied with seeing it on the page instead, between the covers of a book.