Sell Your Story - Non-Fiction, Novel, or Children's Book - to Hollywood!

Welcome to this edition of the Real Fast Results podcast! 
Today's special guest is Dr. Ken Atchity, who is a very well-known
Hollywood producer.  As a matter of fact, he is a producer and
author who has also worked as a literary manager, speaker, writer,
editor, and professor of comparative literature, among other
things.  During this exclusive interview, Ken shares insight
on what it takes to sell your story to Hollywood.  Without
further ado, please welcome Ken to the show... What's Your Promise
Today? I think what we're trying to get across today is giving our
audience insight into how a story gets sold into Hollywood and
whether they should have any hope of selling their story into
Hollywood.  That's my goal. What Are the Benefits of Selling
My Story? Every book writer and storyteller would like to see their
story in front of a maximum audience.  That's what I have
dedicated my last 30 years to, is helping storytellers find their
maximum audience, and I long ago realized, of course, that the
maximum audience is the screen.  We used to call it the "big
screen" and the "little screen" before the advent of the flat
screen in homes.  Sometimes that screen can be as big as the
one at the movie theater.  But, in any case, television and
film take stories around the world.  There isn't a country,
with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia, that doesn't love
movies. When you get a story told to the movies, the world gets to
see your story.  You know, it can be dubbed in 182 languages,
etc.  If the story came from a book that you wrote, then guess
what?  The book will sell many, many more copies than it ever
sold before.  We've had several examples of that in the last
couple of years.  The Lost Valentine with Betty White ended up
selling a whole bunch of copies of the book, which was republished
for the purpose. Meg is about...after years and years of
preproduction, Meg is going into production this summer in New
Zealand, and we've already geared up the books to be sold again,
even though they've been selling for 15 years now.  They'll
really sell now because the movie becomes a commercial for your
story, for your book.  So, it will sell more books. 
You're getting your story out to everyone, the people who read and
the people who watch.  That's the exciting part about making a
Hollywood deal. Can You Run Me Through the Steps of How My Story
Might Get Told? I think the first and most important element your
story needs to have is to be universal.  It needs to be the
kind of story that everyone wants to hear about.  There aren't
that many stories in human experience, but we want to hear over and
over again because every time we hear them anew, we actually hear
things we haven't heard before, and we think of that story in ways
that we hadn't thought before.  Therefore, it applies to our
life and gives us a better inkling of how to deal with this crazy
hodgepodge of stimulation that we call life.  Stories
are...When we stop, and pause, and ask the question, "What's it all
about," and "What would happen if a person like me got stuck into a
situation like that,"...That's kind of the ancient formula of
storytelling. So, its first quality is it has got to be something
we care about universally.  You can start with the Seven
Deadly Sins, or the Seven Virtues, and it isn't hard to figure out
what people care about.  Love, and hate, and fear, and loss,
etcetera, these are all big human subjects for stories, and
therefore universally applicable.  That's the #1 quality that
you need to have.  The second quality that a story for
Hollywood needs to have is a hero.  I use the word loosely
because I know better, as a former professor of classics and Greek
drama.  I know that the real word is protagonist.  The
Greeks invented that. The very first plays that were staged in
Athens only had one actor.  He was the protagonist.  He
was not only the protagonist, he was the only actor, and he
basically came out on stage and acted out a story.  Later on,
some genius added the second actor, who was known as the
antagonist, the one who tries to stop the protagonist because he
has opposite goals.  You know, we were off and running with
drama when we had those two actors.  We still need that first
actor, the one whose story it is and who has to do things in order
to make his story turn out either happily or tragically.  So,
that's what the protagonist is all about, but he's the first...He's
the actor, the one who causes action to happen, and he is the
primary reason that we're watching.  That means the
protagonist, the hero, has to be sympathetic. Sympathetic is
another ancient Greek concept.  It doesn't mean that we have
sympathy because he lost his mother or he lost his daughter. 
It means that we are able to suffer along with him.  That he's
got such charisma as a character that we instantly get his
suffering and can experience, through him and with him. 
That's what "sympathetic" means.  So, we need a sympathetic
hero.  If someone's completely unlikable, we lose interest
within the first few minutes, but this hero doesn't necessarily
have to be a good guy. My favorite example is Shakespeare's Richard
III, where this ugly, kind of crippled, stupid guy comes out onto
the stage in a black costume and proceeds to tell us how unhappy he
is with life because he's constantly getting the short end of
everything and that he's finally decided to do something about
it.  He's going to go out and kill his brother's family and
take the throne, after committing the 10 crimes that he predicts
that he will commit.  Within a few lines of this amazing
opening, everybody is totally rooting for him, not because he's a
good guy, but because we are fascinated, mesmerized, horrified, by
his candor.  You know, his outspoken willingness to tell us
how bad he is and that he's going to do something about it, and we
watch in horror for the rest of the play, until he finally brings
himself down in ruins along with the whole kingdom. There's an
example of a sympathetic hero.  Or, the beginning of Lethal
Weapon, the first movie, when Mel Gibson wakes up in his really
sleazy-looking trailer and reaches for a beer can that's
open.  He takes a slug of beer, stands up and takes a walk
into his bathroom and pisses.  Then, sits down again, pulls
out his gun, and starts Russian roulette with the barrel of the gun
in his mouth, and then we learn that he's a homicide
detective.  Within the first few minutes of this, we can't
stop watching.  Here's a story in which the hero is a suicidal
homicide detective, and of course, he's matched with a partner who
has only got a couple of weeks to retire after a long and happy
career.  So, this is called creating sympathy for the
characters, and these are some of the qualities of a great story.
Those are three big things that you need to have to get your story
sold to Hollywood.  There are others.  There has to be a
very three act structure.  What are the three acts?  The
beginning, the middle, and the end, not necessarily in that order,
as a famous Italian director once said, but you have to have
them.  The ending has to be conclusive and satisfying. 
It can't just be intellectual, and thoughtful, and [open
ended]...Movies that have those types of endings are not huge
blockbuster successes.  People pay for stories, and stories as
far as ordinary people are concerned, the audience, is "I want
something that instantly drags me into the story, that keeps my
attention the whole time, and then that punches me at the end with
a conclusion so satisfying that I feel like I really got my money's
worth for my ticket.  And, if I'm watching on television, that
doesn't cause me to push the remote at any time during the story,
other than maybe to turn the volume up. That's what it's all about,
and that's what we are all looking for in Hollywood.  The good
news about Hollywood is that it has become a lot more complicated
than it used to be.  It's much more voracious for stories than
it used to be because we have so many channels, and so many
outlets, and so many ways of distribution.  All of them have
to be fed, like a dragon that's eating rabbits.  It needs
rabbits every day.  If it sees a rabbit it likes, then it will
make a deal. It chases rabbits, and you know, one of the things
that struck me when I entered this profession, from the academic
world years ago, is that there are people called "trackers" who
spend their whole days tracking down the rights to stories, and
calling people like me and saying, "Do you control the rights to
XYZ story?"  All they want to hear is "yes," or "No, but I'll
tell you who does control them."  Then, they report back to
their bosses, who pay them monthly just to track stories.  I
thought, "Wow, this is really the world of storytelling if people
are tracking them, not to mention paying lots of money for them,
and investing millions and millions into making movies out of
them." What Can I Do to Punch Up the Ending to My Story? Be
creative.  That's where the creativity comes in.  You
want to have an ending that leaves people bowled over and
thoughtful, and sitting there in the theater thinking about it
because they're so impressed by it.  If it's an action movie,
it's going to be a big, climatic action scene with explosions, and
guns, and all of that kind of stuff.  If it's a romance, you
want a very satisfying conclusion.  It doesn't always have to
be a happy ending, although in today's world that's what mostly
succeeds.  I always use the example of the ending of Witness,
where Harrison Ford's character is leaving Kelly McGillis'
character, who lives on an Amish farm in Pennsylvania.  He is
a tough Philadelphia detective, and as they kiss for the last time
and he gets in his car, the audience is heartbroken.  They are
thinking, "This is the most beautiful romance we've ever seen, and
now he's leaving?" The director, Adrian Lyne, shows a very large
place, a ranch or a farm, with a very long driveway.  That was
probably the most important thing, when they were location
scouting, was to choose it for the length of the driveway because
his last shot is of Harrison Ford's car driving down that
driveway.  As it's driving down, we see that it's slow, it's
hesitating, and we're rooting for him to make a u-turn and go back
into her arms because she's standing there in tears, watching her
leave.  Then, as it keeps going, and he doesn't turn around,
we start thinking, "Wait a minute, would I believe that?  A
Philadelphia detective decides to live on a farm with Amish people,
or would I believe it if she jumped in his car and went to
Philadelphia with him?  Can I see a future in that?" 
And, you realize, you get resigned to the fact that that's not the
way this story can end. Finally, he reaches the end of the driveway
and disappears from view as he turns, and you feel stunned by the
beauty of the story and by the realization that some romance
doesn't have to end in wedding bells and have happy endings. 
It doesn't make it less beautiful; it just makes it more
real.  So, there's an example of enhancing an ending so that
the story leaves you satisfied. And, notice that the director
is  filled with dramatic insight because he knows that it will
take that long for the audience to be rooting for the ending he has
chosen for this story.  You know, if you did it too suddenly,
you'd feel weird and dissatisfied.  So, suspense and drama are
what movies are all about, and if what you started with isn't
dramatic or suspenseful enough, you write a treatment to fit your
story, and in that treatment, you make sure the ending is more
dramatic than what your source material was. What is a
Treatment?  What Else Will I Need? I wrote a book about
treatments years ago because I kept hearing the word, and I
realized no one had a common definition of it.  My partner and
I, Chi-Li Wong and I, did a survey of 200 execs in television and
film, and writers and directors, and got back responses.  We
used those responses to explain what a treatment is and to define
what a treatment is.  Basically, it's a tool that has two
functions.  It's a tool for focusing your story, like a
diagnostic tool, and it is a tool for selling your story, a
marketing tool.  So, diagnostics and marketing. I always urge
the writers that we work with to write a treatment before they even
start writing a script or anything else.  The treatment is the
perfect way to do it because you're not invested emotionally in the
pages you've created.  Since they're simply a tool, they're
not the final result, and you don't have to moan and groan if we
decide to change the sex of a character, or if we decide there are
too many characters, you can just cut out the character and put him
in the back of your head for another story sometime. So, a
treatment is very useful because it allows people to read a quick
overview of your story, you know?  It can be five to, say, ten
pages long.  There are no rules about that.  We say a
treatment is a relatively brief narrative, a loosely-written
narrative.  I always say the best way to think of it is like a
passionate letter to your best friend, explaining the night that
you walked out on your wife.  You would not be using
expository prose from sixth grade lessons; you would just be
explosively describing, "I came home, and I found her naked in the
middle of the living room, dancing with my neighbor who I thought
was my best friend."  And, "blah blah blah..."  You just
instantly blurt it all out.  That's what a treatment is, and
it makes someone immediately want to make this movie, basically.
That's what a treatment is, and it's one of several things you need
to market your story.  Another thing that you need is a pitch,
which is a one-line pitch of your story that will be unforgettable,
describing the situation in a way that makes the listener want to
know how it comes out.  As I said, the skeletal, generic pitch
is, "What would happen if a gal like this found herself in the
middle of a situation like that?"  That's what your pitch
needs to be.  Once you have that pitch, it's called a logline,
you can then email it to people in the industry who might be
interested in looking at your story.  They'll then ask you,
"I'm interested in the idea you have.  Do you have the
treatment, or what do you have?"  And then, you send them the
treatment to further hook them. At the end of the day, if you
started with a script or if you started with a book, they'll ask to
see that too, but it's a sales scenario in which these are the
tools that you use to make the sale.  A one-page synopsis is
part of it too.  Like, you'll have a pitch, a one-paragraph or
one-page outline of the story.  Well, not an outline; you
shouldn't use that word because that's one of those sixth grade
word that, synopsis/outline, nothing to do with drama, nothing to
do with Hollywood.  We want something that punches us in the
face and makes us decide, you know, "you've got to see it". 
That's the biggest, probably...Most used sales pitch of friends to
friends on the phone, or email, or text is, "You've got to see it."
Then, they might say, "Well, what's it about?"  And you say,
"It's about a dog that waited for its master for 25 years, until he
came home."  You know, that's the pitch.  "Okay, I'll see
it."  You know, "Who is in it?"  "Richard Gere. " 
"Okay, I definitely want to see that."  You know, it's that
simple.  It's not complicated psychologically; it's just
human. So, If My Story Doesn't Have All the Elements That it Needs,
I Can Just Repair It in the Treatment? Exactly.  The
treatment, what the beauty of it is...Let's say your story is based
on a book that you wrote, if your book doesn't have a conclusive
ending, now you give it one.  If your book doesn't have a
well-defined "Act II", with a lot of ups and downs and twists and
turns, you make sure the treatment does.  You might have to
invent some of that stuff, but that's okay.  You're the
creator.  You invented the story in the first place.  Now
you try to make the story a movie, and movies are governed by
action.  I always say there's two kinds of action.  One
is, "He opened the front door and she shot him."  You know,
"She was standing there with the shotgun and blasted at him." 
That's action. But, dialog is also action in a movie.  It's
not action in a restaurant where you overhear someone at the next
table because mostly people are saying kind of inane things like,
"How are you feeling today...Oh, I'm feeling okay.  How about
you?"  This kind of dialog is not dramatic dialogue. 
Dialog is...You know, there's a famous scene from China Town,
Robert Towne's script, in which the detective, Gittes, is with the
leading lady, and he says, "I want the truth,' and she says, "My
sister...She's my sister."  And, he slaps her and he goes,
"The truth, god damn it, I need to hear the truth," and she goes,
"My mother," and he goes, "I just want the truth," and he slaps her
again.  "My sister, my mother, my sister, my mother..." 
Then finally, "She's my sister and my mother."  This dialogue
suddenly reveals why this woman is so tortured and why, you know,
the things that have happened in the story have happened. It's
extremely dramatic, with very few words.  There's a great line
in a Hemingway short story that I also love, in which these two
people are sitting and waiting for a train in Spain and he is
jabbering away, talking about like, "It's fine, you'll just go
there and let a little air in, and then everything will be fine,
and we'll be just the way we were before, and there's really no big
deal to it."  The girl is not saying anything, and he keeps
talking.  "I'll go with you if you want me to.  I mean,
I'm willing to do it, but you can do it by yourself," and so
on.  And, she says, "Would you do me a favor?"  "I'll do
anything for you.  I told you, I'll do anything for
you."  Well, she says, "Will you please, please, please,
please, please stop talking." The next line is...The man did not
say anything for a moment, and then he said, "Would you like a
beer?" You realize, at that moment, that there is no future for
this couple, that he is not on her wavelength, and that they are
headed in a different direction.  That's all done with
dialogue.  There's hardly any action in the story.  You
know, there's hardly any physical action.  It's done with only
dramatic dialogue, which is action.  And so, novels have much
non-dramatic dialogue in them, connectives that get you from one
place to the other, but when you actually want to turn it into a
film, you need to get rid of all of that and replace it only with
the dialogue that moves things and makes things happen. Any More
Words of Wisdom for People Who Really Want to Do This? It's
difficult.  That's my first word of wisdom.  It's not
easy.  Think about it.  Everyone in the world would like
to have their stories told by Hollywood, but the great part about
it is the difficult part.  The fact is, when you succeed you
will have done what everyone in the world wants to do.  So,
you need to be your own decider here and not listen to the advice
of anyone.  Just go for it, and never stop going for it. 
Just learn as much as you can about the business (It's called "show
business" for a reason), and about how it works.  That is our
#1 goal...is to help you to understand the business procedures by
which it works so that you have a chance there, and never forget
that they are looking for you as much as you're looking for them. I
always say, "People think of it as a dark, slow-moving river that
you can never get across.  In the middle is an island with
beautiful trees, and flowers, and beautiful people."  Once you
get on that island, even though it was difficult to get on it,
guess what?  It's going to be even more difficult to get off
of it.  That's because once you're in there, they want you to
[stay], and they become loyal to you because they're proud of the
fact that you crossed that island.  They recognize you for
that.  So, it's a great goal, and it's a goal that never gets
old because no matter how old you are, you can still sell stories
and Hollywood is still listening to them.  You know, people
say, "How many chances do you get at Hollywood?"  Well, you
get as many chances as you are willing to take.  That's how
many you get. Where Can I Go to Learn More? If you're interested in
selling your story to Hollywood, you can definitely head on over to
http://realfasthollywooddeal.com/ .  There, you'll find an
on-demand webinar that I helped to produce.  It will take you
much more in-depth into how to go about selling your story, you
novel, your short story, your story idea to Hollywood.  It's
completely free to check this out. The aim of the webinar is to
help you to take that next step in your education, or at least dip
a toe and find out whether or not you want to take the
journey.  You may not. The fact of the matter is that it is
difficult, but for a lot of people it's well worth it.  That's
up to you to decide.  The webinar that's being offered for
free is an on-demand webinar.  You can go, and register for
it, and basically start listening to it within 10 minutes from
right now.  Again, you can check out much more thorough
training on this topic at RealFastHollywoodDeal.com.
IMPORTANT:  If you listen to the on-demand
webinar and wish to continue your education I have a special coupon
code which will save you $300 instantly - please you the coupon
code PODCAST when you check out. Real Fast Results
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