Give the Monkey a Banana

Last Friday, producer Tracey Becker, spoke to the NWSG (Northwest Screenwriters Guild) members. (She was one of the producers of Finding Neverland, staring Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet.)

Tracey had a lot of great stories about her experiences as an actor and producer. One piece of brilliant advice stood out for me — "Give the Banana to the Monkey".

Simple but True

The advice is simple, give the audience/producers/industry what they want. Don't try to sell them stories they don't want or can't sell.

If they are looking for character driven, high concept stories, give them those. Don't try to sell them your story about three women in a restaurant talking their divorces — it doesn't matter how dripped in drama those divorces are.

Value Proposition

I'd heard this advice before, but it was in a corporate environment. They called it the Value Proposition.

When I was writing for the Weyerhaeuser Company a few years back, the leaders hit upon this novel idea — instead of inventing products and then trying to convince customers they needed them, why didn't they ask the customers what they needed and create those products.

I wrote countless articles on the topic, trying to convince people this was the way to go. The articles were filled with phrases like "the sum total of the benefits the customers will receive as a result of the relationship".

I should have just written . . . GIVE THE MONKEY THE BANANA!

But MY Story is Great

You might have that amazing story that isn't high concept/genre based/[you fill in the industry need], but one you know they will LOVE if they just read it.

You can try to sell it. It'll be tough though — maybe impossible.

Tracey's advice, see if you came make that amazing story look like a "banana". Could the divorce drama told in a restaurant be retold as a thriller? A romantic comedy?

There are tens of thousands of books and scripts being written each year. The competition is fierce. We would do ourselves well to get the bananas to the monkeys.