10. It's All In The Spin
I'm a certified western nut: without a doubt, it's my favourite movie genre. Hearing that Quentin Tarantino was going to make his own western back in 2010 (and knowing that his favourite movie is
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) was enough to send me giddy with excitement. Despite the fact that Tarantino could pretty much write anything he wanted and get it made, though, it's the fact that his concept - a western set in the... south? - is so slyly unique that it's so intriguing. Fact is, it's this "spin" that you should always be shooting for when you're writing your speculative screenplay, because it's what movie studios are most interested in seeing. They want to see strong, familiar ideas repackaged in new, exciting ways. Imagine for a second that QT had to pitch this movie to a room full of executives, and consider how great the concept behind
Django Unchained sounds packed into a few neat sentences:
"It's a movie about a black slave who finds himself freed in the years leading up to the American Civil War, done in the style of a spaghetti western. He teams up with a German bounty hunter, who trains him, and the pair hatch a plan to infiltrate a Southern plantation so they can rescue his wife, who is being held prisoner there."
Wham. It's a relatively simple western plot - a generic
spaghetti western plot, even - thrown into Tarantino's trademark blender and mixed at about a hundred and fifty miles an hour. We've got a conventional idea working beneath the surface, but Tarantino's idea of viewing the events from the slave's point of view is what makes
Django Unchained kind of genius: the western genre just hadn't be tackled in such a fashion. Sure, we've had black bounty hunters before, but a slave? An entirely different ballpark. Ensure that your screenplay is working in a way similar to this. If you're writing a crime drama, what spin can you put on it to separate it from the tens of thousands of other crime dramas that have already been made? If you're writing a comedy, what does your movie make an attempt to laugh at that no other movie has laughed at before? Think about
50/50, which took bromance and cancer and successfully merged the two. When it comes to selling a script, it's all about the spin.