In a recent general meeting an all together nice guy brought out a couple of books that he and the studio were hoping to "crack." I listened politely to the Cliff Notes shorthand for what these books were about but I couldn't shake a thought, why the fuck are we cracking anything?
A common refrain said over and over to lowly screenwriting serfs like myself is, "It's a great story, but we just haven't cracked it yet."
Wrong. It's a terrible, boring that a couple of years ago you invested 10 to 12 minutes of your precious time in, and now you'll spend the next decade shoving down the throat of every poor sap you meet with.
It's vaguely compelling and probably a fine airplane read but in terms of cinematic potential it possesses only the smallest thread of a hook but will still probably get referenced 1,200 times in the next decade as a possibility. Endlessly recycled chum.
Presumably if a story is any good, the only thing that needs to be cracked or solved is condensing all its inherent goodness down into the small confines of a two-hour narrative. However, if a 500 page book needs to be "cracked" and needs your "take" on it that means it doesn't and shouldn't work. Unless you're just trying to strip out all the vampiric and magical bits from the story and don't give a shit about any of the rest of it, then abandon that book, stop being such a little stubborn little packet hoarder and go back to the library. There's fucking 20,000 books already there, plenty already complete with talking animals.
When a story needs to be cracked that is simply code for it's similar to what we know and understand, BUT not similar enough. Crack it means make the robots in the book more like the robots we've watched and liked in the past. Make it all more like the past stuff that we know is easy to market and quantify.
Crack it means make this underwater tale enough like Pirates of the Carribean that I can sell it internationally. It means rip off this kid-doing-magic story enough from Harry Potter that people trust it, but not enough that anyone sues. It means I lost the bidding war for the rights to the new Nicholas Sparks book, please turn the Turkish romance novel into something Amanda Seyfried can sob in.
Do all that and if for some reason we decide not to fire you by time of film's release we'll give you a generous 0.1% of the budget as payment and a healthy set of net points for you to cash in next time you visit Narnia.
