Executive Vice President of Co-Productions & Distribution/Author Scott Kirkpatrick: If you're
going to spend all the time to write a script and try to build a career you
might as well focus on something that has a higher probability of success.
Film Courage: What is a gold mine genre?
Scott: It's a phrase I'm made. It's not like an industry term but
I call them gold mines because they are just core genres that through good times and bad times
have been and as far as I can possibly see will always be in need year on year in the
entertainment industry. It's just basic buckets of genres that for whatever reason
for the past several hundred years whether in book form stage play and now movies and
TV shows they just hit a certain audience that's large enough to keep momentum moving
so if those genres if if they're seen by a Distribution Company a production company a
studio they always sort of take them a little bit more seriously than something that doesn't fit
easily into that and and budget is sort of doesn't really apply it's they can be extremely low budget
they can be extremely big budget but it's more just what kind of film is it is it a female driven
Thriller is it a Christmas romance is it something along those those categories that just fits
perfectly with what the industry needs year on year how many gold mine genres are there I say six
I mean you can you can dive a little bit deeper than that but I mean it really kind of fits into
six there's Christmas there is female driven Thriller there is tween girl there's sort of
I call it like the aging male action hero film there's creature features and then there are
I'd call it like boy family safe but boy driven adventure story so that'd be like your treasure
Hunters kind of Spy Kids kind of thing creature features those are kind of self-evident and
those range from like Sharknado to like very high budgeted Hollywood films your aging male
action hero film on the extreme low budget these are movies that are shot like for less than a
million and a half or two million dollars but they have like Jean-Claude Van Damme or Dolph
Lundgren for like one day on set and they're like The Mastermind boss at a desk and they edit it so
it appears scattered throughout the film but the key thing is that they get to be on the poster
Christmas movies they're self-evident if you can throw in a dog that's great the tween girl films
I really like them when they have a horse in them or if they have some kind of animal a
part of it those also work with Christmas I think Christmas dog movies work well
Christmas and a horse that absolutely fits the season if you have a nice snowy background and all
and then yeah it's they just work consistently and you'll see them like once you kind of categorize
it like that you'll see them every year big Studio films down to like microscopic microscopic
budgetedly titles like you'll see them those are the ones that just Hollywood consistently needs
you see lots of comedies you see lots of horror that stuff is usually developed the
other way around which means that a studio is trying to promote a big comedy Talent
and The Comedy Central worked like this for a long time so if you have somebody like an
Amy Schumer they start they identified her and they sort of started they kind of dabbled a bit
by testing with like well let's do some one-hour specials and see how that does okay the audience
is there it works let's maybe put them in a movie or something and you see that with a lot of Comedy
Talent it follows that kind of pattern so they're not like it's not like somebody wrote the script
and then the studio executives just went wow this is great let's get this talent to put
it's the opposite way around they're trying to build a giant brand around a talent and promote
that talent in their career and horror is very different horror is such a fickle genre it's
you need to nail it and it's the audience is so specific with horror and the attributes that that
will land a horror film are very different than other genres like who the director is
is is critical in horror and sometimes so it kind of comes since the the director or some
key aspect of the genre is actually what keeps the audience engaged or interested some of the
creative ideas actually have to come from that source out and then it maps out so those are
I think those are just really hard ones to enter into and then just like standard issue dramas like
they're just boring they they require so much talent to sell it and that Talent is
so expensive it just makes it really complicated when you're talking about some of the movies that
most screenwriters would be sort of hired for it would be like just sort of one protagonist
correct yeah it's you got to think of it like barriers to entry not to use too much
like business jargon in this kind of setting but I mean I think screenwriters if you're if
you're going to be starting a career you need to think about it as a career in an industry
and I think that the easiest point of entry is yeah focusing on the one protagonist story you
can have your B plot you should but it's really got to follow that one protagonist on his or her
journey usually her it's I think I think there's a much larger female audience in general or a much
larger need of content for female audiences so I think having a protagonist be female is is pretty
critical in whatever genre you focus on take the movie with Rob Lowe the dog movie that's
done really well on Netflix but there's also the Channing Tatum one that's it's a dog movie too
it's a it's a great vehicle yeah but women like they are they it is it is an attractive story
to have a guy with a dog that combo can actually be quite appealing they've done a lot of dating
studies on this apparently sure sure absolutely what about a guy with a cat this is quite it
doesn't quite nail it the same way I mean what if it's an exotic cat okay yeah and then we've I
think I've definitely seen the cat film Christmas movie let's say I've seen like the cat film tried
a few times it just doesn't land it unless the cat because cats have such a unique character why is
it important for writers to understand these genres it's important just to step back and
understand how the industry works and since these are the genres that are just consistently in need
focusing a lot of attention on theirs is I think pretty critical like it's
if you're gonna spend all the time to write a script and try to build a career you might as
well focus on something that has like a higher probability of success than something that has a
lot more barriers of restriction against you so if you're just focusing on these genres understanding
and being realistic that like hey this is what real people want to watch and choosing to write
that just makes a little bit more logical sense in terms of like opening your doors of opportunity
and one shouldn't think that these genres are just overly cliched or or not important enough it's
there's so many stories you can tell within them and it's you can dive really deep into character
and really convey some amazing ideas even with these sort of like tried and tested genres
so I don't think they should be dismissed I think there's a lot of really good opportunity for
writers in them and you're talking about working writers writers that are not on a TV show that
have a career that that make money that support themselves from their scripts to churn out these
things it's not just like a a one-off art film that they're going to win a contest these are
people that are building a career off this yeah yeah and these are these are definitely career
writers who like the writers we work with we work with them consistently and they churn out scripts
I mean I don't need to undercut it but I mean like they can write fast and they can deliver quickly
and they're writing a new script every month maybe every two months and they're getting paid
on them and so it's like that is a career they built that slowly it took time to build but they
got to a point where they said like look I can deliver tween girl movies like really really well
I can write them very fast I can write them in in really strong detail I can convey some very solid
wonderful ideas within them I mean think about what you can do with that you can explore so many
ideas about complications and adolescence stress you feel with adolescence you can dive into mental
health issues you can dive into body positivity you can dive into so many facets all within like
one cliched idea and if you're going to be writing these deep experiences or if you're going to be
writing meaningful stories and you just put it inside the bright shiny box of a gold mine genre
like you're gonna get noticed I'm not saying you're gonna get the deal it's like like you
might as well do the thing that's going to open more doors of opportunity for you so if you do
some deep overwhelming coming-of-age story that's just gonna like disappear in somebody's inbox or
if you say it's a tween girl film and it follows it's about so and so doing XYZ and it talks
about these themes because it's a tween girl film it's going to get opened at least by more people
where would you put Wednesday Addams that's complicated because it is a piece of known
IP [intellectual property], it's a derivative of something we've known through a lot of different
variations the original show the movie variations in the 90s they've had a couple of animated
versions of it so there already comes a bit of like a cult identity with it so that falls into
what we talked about before in terms of verifiable audience there's always been a subgroup of people
that respond well to the sort of quirky dark comedies or just films that dive deep into that
and then they just I guess it's maybe a reboot slash spin-off because you're focused on her it's
sort of a weird hybrid and Netflix gets to do this because they have so much money they can really
take interesting chances but it's talent-led meaning the creative Talent led somebody very
high up in in some big agencies basically came to them with the concept and because
it's a known piece of IP you've got a really good recipe for something there to play with
but it is a tween girl film at the end of the day it's following her and going through a journey so.