Coming Up with Your Spec Idea

To get in the room with a producer or an exec, you need a killer spec screenplay.  If they like your work, and think you’ve got good ideas, you’ll have an ear in someone with the power (or at least the desire) to get your movie made.  You might also get on a list and be considered for assignment work, meaning that you might get hired to do a book adaptation or a rewrite or a remake or even an original screenplay based on a property they own or an idea they’ve had.  Typically, execs are looking for the next great “high concept,” or a story idea that’s easily stated in one sentence.  Sometimes, that means referencing another film.  For example, the pitch for Speed was “Die Hard on a bus.”  The pitch for Speed 2?  “Die Hard on a Boat.  The pitch they really don’t want to hear?  “Five friends who have just graduated from college find that the more things change, the more they remain the same.”  This is “low concept,” or “soft,” because there’s no hook to get audiences interested.  You can’t visualize the poster, or picture the trailer, and even though this means they might miss out on St. Elmo’s Fire, it’s a fair trade for not having to wade through the hundreds of bad spec scripts each year that follow this story line. Blake Snyder's Save the Cat! is a great source for inspiration, and he gave us some great insights just last week.

Just having a high concept isn’t enough.  Your spec script must then prove that you have not only mastered standard Hollywood screenplay structure, but also that you’ve transcended it.  Take another look at Being John Malkovich, highly praised for its eccentricity and originality.  It’s tempting to say that it throws all the rules out the window, but it actually doesn’t.  It’s still recognizably a narrative feature.  It’s not an experimental film; it experiments.  Charlie Kaufman’s execution of his gleefully kicky high concept proves that he knows what he’s doing when he sits down at the typewriter.

If you’re having trouble coming up with something on your own, you might be inclined to turn to a true story or a published work for inspiration.  Think carefully before you do so- copyright laws in the U.S. are quite stringent, and you could be opening yourself up to a world of pain.  It’s highly recommended that you consult a lawyer before proceeding with a story based upon a book, a magazine article, or a true story, as copyright law is more complex than can be presented through these examples.

So what qualifies as “fair use”?  Basic
rule of thumb is that any work first published or translated
prior to 1900 is likely to be fair game.  This explains
why there are so many works ‘inspired’ by
Shakespeare (Ten Things I Hate About You) and
Jane Austen (Clueless, Bridget Jones’ Diary).  The
U.S. Copyright Office has pamphlets and brochures that
explain how to calculate when a work passes into the
public domain and is no longer protected by copyright.  Dover
Books, a publisher, is a good source for finding
public domain titles.  Another way to be reasonably
sure that something is in the public domain is if multiple
publishers are printing copies of the same work simultaneously.  However,
there can be exceptions, based upon living heirs and
reprint rights, which is why it’s important to
consult a lawyer always, without exception.

There is no good reason for commencing a screenplay adaptation of a work currently protected by copyright.  If you do not have the rights, at best no one will read your work, and at worst you might be targeted by a lawsuit.  This applies to books, short stories, musicals, plays, magazine articles, and the like.