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Lesson 2
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Lesson Two:
What I learned from this assignment: How to consider marketable components and put them in my pitch.
Margaret Doner
Down to Heaven
Logline: When a good-hearted medical student’s bride dies minutes before the wedding, his guardian angel hops into her body and enrages the bride’s vengeful ghost.
Most Marketable Components:
1. Similarity to box-office success such as: City of Angels, Heaven Can Wait, Meet Joe Black, Wings of Desire
2. Great Role for Bankable Actors:
Annabelle: A quirky, and lovable angel who can’t do her job right because she feels too much for the humans she is bound to protect.
Yvonne: Annabelle’s side-kick. A street-wise, wise-cracking, angel who tries to keep Annabelle in line.
Charlie O’Hirn: A medical student who wants to “get out of the system,” and treat his patients like people instead of “cases.”
Betsy: The doomed bride, whose ghost teams up with the underworld to get her body back from Annabelle.
3. Wide audience appeal
How to pitch through these three components:
Guardian angels becoming too attached to their human charges is a subject that film goers have loved ever since Heaven Can Wait, City of Angels and Meet Joe Black. Annabelle is a quirky, lovable angel who can’t do her job right because she feels too much for the humans she is bound to protect. Her side-kick, Yvonne, a wise-cracking angel tries, with no success, to keep Annabelle in line. Annabelle doesn’t listen, and when her charge, Charlie O’Hirn’s bride, Betsy, dies right before the wedding, Annabelle enters the bride’s body. Suddenly, she is thrust onto Earth and into a wedding ceremony. Instead of saving Charlie the pain of finding his bride dead, Annabelle discovers that she is now “stuck” on Earth. After their wedding night she falls deeper in love with Charlie than she thought possible. Because the angel, Annabelle, has transformed Betsy into a soft and more loving person, Charlie, who had doubts about marrying the ambitious and cold (original owner of the body) Betsy, now finds he is more in love with her than he thought possible. Betsy, on the other hand is furious that she is stuck in the astral plane as a ghost, and is desperate to evict Annabelle from her body. When Annabelle and Charlie move to Woodstock, NY, a town where “old souls run amuck,” Betsy follows them and enlists the power of the demonic realm to help her evict Annabelle, and get her body back.
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H. Vince’s Marketable Components
Power Players – 2023
Lesson 2: The 10 Components of Marketability
What I learned from doing this assignment is…
To find the best attributes of this movie determining whether it can sell or not.
Tell us your current logline:
A narcissistic mentally abusive business owner creates a negatively intense closed-door relationship with his desperate office manager causing her to question her current reality.
Look through the 10 Components of Marketability and pick one or two that have the most potential for selling this script.
A. Unique.
Usually people hear about physical men/women closed door relationships. This one is mental.
B. Great Title
MENTAL
C. True.
N/A
D. Timely — connected to some major trend or event.
Professional women, mental illness awareness, trans
E. It’s a first.
Yes. Usually men/woman closed door relationships are an office romance, affair or scandal.
F. Ultimate.
Give audience a fly on the wall, behind the curtain glimpse of a secret closed-door relationship.
G. Wide audience appeal.
Women in any professional stressed closed-door relationship will have a chance to relate.
American Psycho, one of the best thriller/horror movies about an executive is a cult classic.
Work relationships are appealing to audiences in dramatic and comedic form such as in the movies “9 to 5”, “Obsessed”, “The Devil Wears Prada”, “Office Space”, “Horrible Bosses”, “Up In The Air” or the TV series “The Office”.
H. Adapted from a popular book.
N/A
I. Similarity to a box-office success:
“American Psycho (2000)” starring Christian Bale grossed $34.2 million – theaters
$8 million – budget
“Obsessed (2009)” starring Beyonce grossed $73.8 million – theaters, $21 million in DVD sales
$20 million – budget
“Up In The Air (2009)” starring George Clooney grossed $166.8 million – theaters, $22.9 million in DVD sales
$25 million – budget
“The Devil Wears Prada (2006)” starring Ann Hathaway and Meryl Streep grossed $326.7 million, $98.4 million DVD sales
$35 million – budget
J. A great role for a bankable actor.
SANDY: professional woman, manager, acting therapist, stressed
PAT: says whatever comes to mind, relentless, toxic
Tell us how you might pitch the script through the two components:
Imagine being a professional woman stuck in a constant obsessive sounding board closed-door relationship with a narcissistic curmudgeon boss. He’s dangled the carrot causing you to desperately stay and experience high overturn rate and developing delusions. Once you try to finally escape, you’re faced with worse consequences.
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Edward Leschke Project
Title: The Cocktail Party
Logline: A Washington DC Republican lawyer throws a charity fundraiser cocktail part as a way to enhance her chances for an ambassadorship, but her Democratic husband threatens those chances in his pursuit of clearing his reputation.
Unique (w/ True): Comedy involving a Republican and Democratic couple inspired by Carville and Maitlin.
Timely (Audience appeal): It’s theme and plot is the current hot button political topic of lies and misinformation.
Lesson Learned: Might be best to focus on these ten marketing elements before even going into detail on the plot.
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Paul Sokal’s Marketable Components
1. Logline: What if an anonymous committee of lay people decides who lives and who dies? In 1961, a 25-year-old teacher is shattered to learn she is dying of kidney failure and if she can’t convince that committee that she deserves to be one of the first five people in the world to receive chronic dialysis, she’ll be sent home to die.
2. Components of marketability
a. Unique
b. Great Title
c. True
d. First
e. Great role for a bankable actor
3. This script is inspired by a true story that has not been told before on the big screen. It involves ordinary people who are suddenly thrust into life and death decisions, including a protagonist who must fight for her own life, only to realize, once she’s be saved, that others deserve salvation more than she does, triggering her to make the ultimate sacrifice.
4. What I learned doing this assignment is to focus my pitch on a marketable aspect of this movie, not so much as the story.
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Roger Stone’s Marketing Components are Unique Story and Wide Audience Appeal
What I learned was how important it is to narrow down my hook in order to incorporate it in my pitch.
Current Logline: 14 year-old social misfit tries to prove her neighbor is actually an alien.
Components: Unique Story is Timely with Wide Audience Appeal
Since UFOs are a timely subject, I should emphasize that my lead character is a teenage girl who gets involved in searching for a crashed UFO.
Maybe I should change my title from Spaceman and the Freakshow to My Neighbor’s Dad is a UFO pilot.
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Stephanie O’Leary’s Marketable Components
WHAT I LEARNED Doing This Assignment: Breaking down marketable aspects is critical to selling your story. A lot of money is on the line; help Producers see the possibility of multiple elements that would appeal to a diverse, paying audience.
LOGLINE: Space harvesters abduct and transform astronaut Brie Foley, forcing her to examine the mysteries of faith, the price of willfulness, and the cosmic cost of cravings and appetites.
The 3 Best Marketability Components Title, Unique, and A Great Role for a Bankable Actor
How I could emphasize the Title – There are no elephants, narwhals, walruses, or warthogs in space. TUSK means something else in this part of the cosmos – something rare and expensive for those who want it, and something terrifying to those employed in its manufacture.
How I could emphasize the Unique Aspect – The portrayal of Intergalactic Trade and how the entities fulfill their demand for raw materials is shown in an utterly new way.
How I could emphasize the Bankable Actor Aspect – The main character is a strong role for a young female (significant events happen in her mid-teens and mid-twenties). There’s also a secondary character that’s revealed to be more than what he seems (mid-twenties to early thirties). His last scene also reveals the potential for a sequel.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by Stephanie O'Leary.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by Stephanie O'Leary.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by Stephanie O'Leary.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by
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4. What I learned with this assignment is: Now the purpose of my story is even more clear to me which helps with the re-write. I need to raise the stakes showing how devastating distorted views of reality and ourselves can become and that the inner wounds we attained in childhood can be transformed into something of value.
1. Logline: A depressed teen finds her calling as a dog whisperer when she runs away from rich foster parents to be with her biological mother who turns out to be a stripper MMA fighter who struggles to pay the bills.
2. Components: “Mother Love” has a wide audience appeal in that teenagers will empathize with the pain of constant criticism by a parent and the satisfaction of being successful at something when a parent didn’t believe in them. Parents will be glad their children learn about the dangers of running away and how stripping is an ultimately dead-end career. Men and women alike will be aroused with the physicality of pole dancing, MMA fight fans will enjoy the hazards and excitement of the sport, and animal lovers will identify with the ups and downs of dog ownership.
The movie is also somewhat timely as seen with the popularity of UFC and cage fights going on all around the world, the millions of videos of adorable hilarious pets in action on social media sites and there is not a day goes by without news of some type of underage sexual abuse going on behind closed doors.
3. Pitch with the Components: Imagine a film that satiates the need for excitement and an erotic experience that men and teens will enjoy but also something mothers will approve of because it represents them in an ultimately heartwarming and courageous way.
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1. Unique – People don’t realize how close to home it occurs.
2. Great title – Title to Change (tbd)
3. Inspired by a true story
4. Kids and young adults in dtla are being used as hard labor slaves, or sold and traded.
5. Our characters are for the first time meeting the kid slaves.
6. Ultimate, yes
7. 18-28 yo give or take, and run from there.
8. Adapted from a popular book – N/A
9. The Hunger Games (2012) The first of a franchise, its opening weekend grossed over $150M domestically. To date, its earned $690M in just the US.
The Running Man (1987) took home $38M from the box office and a lot more when considering video rentals, ancillary markets, and other domestic and world wide distribution.
10. A single father in a rocky relationship with his 6-year old’s Mom, a woman real estate attorney, and a nursing student decide on the best way to help these kids make a break for it.
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A
The story of a man who conquers his internal demons and not only becomes a better person but the stuff of legend and an action movie to boot.
I
Top Gun Maverick
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Reply to Lesson 2
Current logline: After learning that her new house is inhabited by a hostile entity, and overwhelmed by unwanted demands from the entity as well as from other deceased contacts, a teenage girl must open lines of communication with the dead as well as convince her parents and friends that she is neither psychotic nor a witch.
Marketable components:
Great title – “Home with a Past” (new–former title “Piece of Local History”) – can emphasize the location of the story and how the attachment of its resident entity has taken over the main character’s life and forced her to take part in the dying moments of other dead children’s lives.
Similar to other successful films – In many ways resembles “The Sixth Sense,” only the prime roles are a black teenage girl and the mother of a white friend.
WHAT I LEARNED FROM THIS ASSIGNMENT – A totally different way of viewing the screenplay, from the standpoint of a producer rather than the write/creator.
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LESSON 2 ASSIGNMENT
Susan Arnout Smith’s Marketable Components
1. Current Logline: A Hawaiian teacher, gutted over the loss of a child, is being consumed by the Dark, and God sends an Angel down to bring her back before her Dark consumes others.
2. 10 Components of Marketability: top 2
G. Wide Audience Appeal: Huge Faith-based market for good scripts.
J. Great Roles for Bankable Actors:
• Angel: Conflicted
• Shelly: Wounded
• Lolani: Warrior
• Lanny: Cunning
3. Elevating Wide Audience Appeal: G
Off-shoot of Faith-based films is a new category: Light-based films dealing not with religions but Spirit.
Popular to Christians and also popular with a secular audience, or audiences of other faiths, as it’s not about Christianity, but about Light dwelling in every heart and its vulnerability to corruption. Core: YOU MATTER. THE CHOICES YOU MAKE, MATTER.
Elevating Great Roles for Bankable Actors: J
• Angel: Powerful, conflicted, fierce
• Shelly: Wounded, scrappy, vulnerable
• Lolani: Invalid, warrior, truth-teller
• Lanny: Cunning, manipulative, hungry
4. What I Learned Doing this Assignment is:
I have participated in numerous classes here, and this time, have a changed attitude. I am committed to finishing this class and achieving my goal of getting my screenplay optioned and then made. I am shifting every fearful thing from avoidance and retreat into a powerful learning experience filled with joy, calm and resolve. I am tapping into the creativity I’ve always known is there, and using this process to fuel my growth, discovery and the gifts I am able to share with the world.
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