You’re Writing In What Genre!

By Christopher Keane

A romantic comedy/Western/action thriller with fish-out-of-water, psychological, women-in-jeopardy, period-piece elements, supported by sci-fi/horror/fantasy links with supernatural overtones?

Sure, send it over. My address? The moon.

In some of my film and book projects, I have committed a cardinal sin. I floated over borders and crisscrossed genres, making it impossible for sales departments in studios and publishing houses to sell the projects.

In a screenplay on which I worked for a year, about a couple of airplane repo men who mistakenly kidnap a beautiful young woman from a very powerful father who will do anything to get her back, I met a wall.

The kicker is that the woman is an extraordinary android and the plane jockeys, who have had huge relationship problems with women to begin with, unwittingly fall in love with her.

The fliers will do anything to protect her, while her powerful father/creator will do anything to get her back. And the chase was on.

What did we have here? A buddy movie trying to cross-fertilize with a futuristic sci-fi thriller, and a love story. This was the pitch and perception. When the agents and managers sent it around town, it was turned down everywhere. Skyjax never got off the ground.

More heartbreak in the city of heartbreaks. No one budged. It was an $80 million dollar movie that nobody wanted to take a chance on. I learned a lesson - actually a couple of them.

One was that you don’t write an $80 million movie that crosses genres because nobody in his right financial mind is going to risk that much dough on a hybrid that a studio sales department can’t figure out how to sell. This was one that didn’t make it.

Then there was one that did make it. In 1997, a non-fiction book I wrote, The Huntress, was published, a true story about a mother-daughter bounty hunting team in Los Angeles. Dottie and her daughter, Brandi Thorson, lost their husband/father, Ralph Thorson, legendary bounty hunter, when one of the cons he put in prison got out and planted a bomb in his car, killing him. After his death, Dottie and Brandi discovered that Ralph had sold the house and had accumulated debt to the tune of $150,000. What were the women going to do?

They knew one thing very well, the family bounty hunting business. They grew up in it. And so they became partners.  USA Network shot a movie-of-the-week/pilot and shot thirty four hour-long episodes. I wrote for the series, was a co-producer, made some money.

Why one and not the other? For one thing, in The Huntress there was no mistaking what the story was, who the characters were, and what genre it fit into.  The studio could sell it.

It had two women in jeopardy against a male-dominated world. The ‘women as bounty hunters’ theme was different and plausible. They went after bail jumpers who ran big companies and others who ate rats under bridges, very bad guys. They chased bail-jumping women who killed, old men, young women. In other words, they went after their prey everywhere.

The studio could SEE the story. They could sell it. And viewers watched it. It fit into a genre–action with a sub-genre: women in jeopardy.

The movie business, like most businesses, is category driven. Sales departments sell categories and rarely will venture outside of that tightly controlled atmosphere. Even though studios or networks may love everything about a series, they will turn it down because they don’t know - or don’t have time to figure out - how to pitch it to the public.

This practice, or lack of it, is, to fiscal-minded people, bottom-line, iron-clad wisdom. To the creative instinct, it stifles.

I’m of two minds about this. One mind says, yes, if you cross genres your script will be tougher to sell. But if you love what you are writing, my other mind says, don’t stifle yourself. 

My practical side tells me to use my creative juices to saturate a genre with new and more wonderful characters, details, reversals, etc. My creative mind keeps moving toward the genre borderlines, trying to stretch as much as possible without getting cramped.

My advice is to understand the categories or genres and then, if you must, stretch their borders.

Everything about your story may work, except how to sell it – which is the kiss of death. If you confuse the sales staff, you lose.

Chris Keane lives in Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA. He has written over a dozen books for major NY publishers, written and produced TV series and features for major studios, and has taught and lectured at Harvard, Emerson College, UCLA.  He is also a script and book consultant.  Chris Keane has written The Hunter (Steve McQueen) (Paramount) Dangerous Crossing (WB) The Huntress (USA Network series)

You can reach him at Keanewords@aol.com