Don’t Turn My Book into a TV Series

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It was a regular day in September. Which is to say it was a regular day within the first few months of the pandemic. I’d been going through a particularly long stretch of no’s. Part of being a TV creator and screenwriter is hearing no. You suffer through hundreds of no’s and you make a living from the occasional yes. At this particular moment in 2020, the no’s were abundant, and not limited to the rejection of screenplays. No, you shouldn’t leave your apartment. No, we don’t know when there will be a vaccine. No, we don’t know where Covid came from. But on this September morning, instead of the usual no’s, I started getting emails with people interested in making a TV show based on my manuscript My Dirty California. What was going on? As it turned out, this was the day the sale of my debut novel to Simon & Schuster—which had actually occurred weeks earlier—was announced in Publisher’s Marketplace. These folks were saying yes. And they hadn’t even read my book yet. The same industry that was constantly rejecting me as a screenwriter was welcoming me as a novelist without needing to read the book itself. In fact, I first wrote My Dirty California as a pilot script and I gave it to a producer I knew—let’s call him Bob—a couple years ago. And at the time, Bob said he read the script and it wasn’t for him. A few days after the announcement of the sale of the book My Dirty California to Simon & Schuster, Bob called and said, “I heard you sold a book, what’s it about?” He was interested. And he had no recollection of the script I sent him because he probably didn’t bother to read it. That was just a script. But this? This is a book. This is IP. 

For the average TV viewer without an inside view of the entertainment industry, it probably feels like there are some shows that are based on original ideas and some shows that are based on IP, and that Hollywood seeks both avenues equally. But working in Hollywood, you quickly realize how badly everyone wants IP. Hollywood is obsessed with IP. Intellectual property could be books, short stories, a tweet. IP could be a true story. (When did Tech Bros Gone Wild become a genre?). No one cares about a spec screenplay. But a short story? A toy line? That could be the next big movie. 

Before we get any further, I should say I often enjoy book-to-tv adaptations. In the last few years, some of my favorite shows include Normal People, Mindhunter, Station Eleven, and The Queen’s Gambit—all based on books. This piece is by no means saying I don’t want TV shows based on books. Instead, it’s a rambling way of saying I don’t want exclusively TV shows based on books. 

Probably the biggest indicator of how important IP is to Hollywood is the fact that there are whole companies of book scouts and literary scouts whose entire function is to read every book and article that comes out and write up reports and send them to producers and agents. Somewhere, some literary scout working remotely from their swanky pad in Montana is reading this very article wondering whether or not it could be a TV show. (I’ll do you a favor: no, it should not be a TV show). 

I met with a company a few years ago called Epic Magazine, a company whose entire business model consists of writing articles in hopes they can be optioned for TV and film. This isn’t a dig at Epic. The executive I met with was smart and kind, and the specific article he sent me to possibly adapt was thought provoking and well researched. But I was baffled that this company existed to create articles all to be adapted into possible TV shows and movies. I don’t know whether that says more about the state of the TV industry or the state of journalism. 

I’m not alone in my frustration with the entertainment industry’s obsession with IP. If you were to visit LA and happen to sit next to a few screenwriters at happy hour in Culver City or Silverlake, eventually you’d overhear them making cracks about whatever ridiculous IP had been pitched to them recently. There are only so many books available, so Hollywood has gotten pretty desperate on how to find pre-branded ideas. This is something I learned shortly after I first moved to LA when my best friend started working as an assistant to a movie producer. Like every other production company, they were pursuing IP. Amongst the ideas they explored for movies were the hula hoop and the LaCoste crocodile logo. This isn’t a joke. They actually looked into these as possible source material for films. The saddest part is that multiple producers are probably reading this and wondering if this anecdote is about them.

So why does this trend exist? 

Movies and TV shows are expensive to make. Which brings risk. When a company spends a boatload of money on a show or movie and no one watches it, owners lose money and people get fired. If audiences are already aware of a particular title, they may be more likely to watch it. The first Transformers movie made about $710 million at the box office in 2007 and has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 58%. The sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made about $836 million despite a Rotten Tomatoes score of 20%. People liked the first Transformers, and so there was more built-in awareness for the sequel even it wasn’t as good of a movie. This is the power of IP, which I admit is real.

These are noisy times. Courtesy of the internet, people can watch any movie ever made or read any book ever written, not to mention check out whatever video is trending on TikTok. Everyone is fighting for attention for their show, book, movie, tweet, or Youtube video. We live in a world where writers use hyperbolized headlines to get people to read their articles. It’s not really surprising that these companies want to seek any advantage in helping their movies and shows break out. These are publicly traded companies seeking profits. If they’re sitting on some giant brand, they’re going to make content to make money off that brand. Or if they can buy the rights to a massive book like Fifty Shades of Gray, they’re going to do it, because they stand to make more money with less risk. The logic—even if frustrating—does track, and this is a trend that’s unlikely to change. Two decades from now, no one should be surprised to see a billboard for The Fast and the Furious 20: So Fast, So Furious. 

Hollywood wants IP because they believe that’s the way to build a franchise. The funny part is if you ask studio execs which one they would choose if they could have the rights to any one franchise (not counting the MCU as a single franchise), most of them would pick Star Wars. But the original Star Wars was based on nothing more than George Lucas’s script! Same with Avatar. Same with Stranger Things. Same with The Fast and the Furious. (Again, there are plenty of huge franchises that did come from IP like The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Batman, etc.).

You can imagine why Hollywood’s obsession with IP frustrates a writer trying to break into the business with their original script. But the reality is that writers and filmmakers working at the highest levels of Hollywood have trouble getting their original projects made. I once heard a podcast interview with Christopher McQuarrie talking about how he couldn’t get his original movie made. This is Christopher McQuarrie. The guy who wrote the Usual Suspects and wrote and directed the last seventy-five Mission Impossible movies. If Christopher McQuarrie can’t get his original movie made, what hope does Jane Smith from Missouri have? Are we really encouraging the next class of writers to write their Insecure or their Mad Men or their Chinatown? 

A common question a screenwriter gets when they go back home (for me, Delaware) is why are movies so bad? One answer to this is because of the movie fans. Stay with me. When something isn’t pre-branded with built-in-awareness that will guarantee some viewership, it becomes what folks in the industry call execution dependent. Meaning, the show or movie has to be good to succeed. So the subtext here is that for pre-branded content, it doesn’t have to be good. So all the clamoring for more Star Wars shows and Marvel shows inadvertently nudges the studios and streamers to make less good content. If the demand of the masses was to see good content, Hollywood would do its best to deliver good content. If the demand of the masses is to see another comic book reboot, Hollywood will certainly deliver that reboot. It just may not be good. 

It’s not as simple as saying Hollywood isn’t buying the next Fleabag because they’re making Star Trek shows. There are only so many truly valuable pieces of IP. And while I have conceded the point that built-in-awareness can help a show or movie break out (hello Top Gun: Maverick), Hollywood studios and streamers pursue all kinds of source material. Obscure comic books. Articles in magazines. Manuscripts that haven’t even been published yet. So if we’re not talking about the obvious cash grabs of making sequels to popular movies or adapting bestselling books or rebooting Batman and Spiderman every few years, why is Hollywood so focused on IP even when there isn’t any true built-in audience awareness? Why would Hollywood companies rather buy the rights to an obscure short story or graphic novel than buy a spec script by an established screenwriter?

One reason seems to be that the agents and executives and managers and assistants are lacking confidence in their own ability to judge material. Oh, this is a book that a company published? Then it must be good. But of course that’s not true; many books aren’t good. Scripts—even when written by produced, award winning screenwriters—don’t come with an automatic stamp of approval. And yet an obscure self-published comic book with no fanbase somehow does? Ask anyone if they like a building and they’ll say yes or no. Ask someone if they like a blueprint for a building, and there will be more hesitation. It takes more imagination and more confidence in your own taste to judge a blueprint than it does to judge a building. Screenplays and TV scripts are more analogous to blueprints than buildings. 

Another reason is that much of Hollywood operates on a hierarchal system. Writers pitch executives, who if they like the project, have to run it by their boss. And it’s easier to say look at these dope pictures in this comic book than it is to try to summarize an original script. 

One additional reason may boil down to power dynamics. There was never any confusion about who was in charge of Breaking Bad. It was created by Vince Gilligan. By his account, it was a difficult show to sell. In fact, there were no initial offers and TNT came in and offered to do it if Vince changed it from meth to money counterfeiting. Vince held strong, choosing no deal rather than the wrong deal. Then AMC started making original programming, and the rest is history. When producers and studios are in charge of the initial IP, they hire writers. Sometimes multiple writers give their takes. Suddenly the producers and executives are curating takes, hiring and firing writers. It even opens the door for the director to have more power in television—what has traditionally been a writer’s medium. Screenwriters—versus TV writers—have always been hired guns from the beginning of the movie business. Studios bring the money and the distribution, producers are the entrepreneurial force getting movies made, and directors are the visionaries in charge. And the screenwriters? They’re hired and fired and rehired and refired. But in TV, writers have historically been in charge. And wasn’t that part of the reason why TV was so good? But now, in TV, is writer still king? It seems like IP is king. And TV writers are going in and pitching their take on the latest Marvel spinoff show. It’s a superhero story but I want to infuse some real Mean Streets attitude. At the rate we’re going, TV writers are becoming the same hired guns screenwriters have always been. 

All TV writers complain about this “IP craze.” But maybe it’s our own fault? If the best TV creators take the gigs adapting IP into mediocre television, then we’re ridding the world of the possible original shows those writers would have created. But think about it from a writer’s POV. If a screenwriter or TV writer could spend three months writing an original script on spec that they fear won’t sell or spend those three months getting paid up front to adapt a novel (or reptilian apparel logo), it’s not hard to see why so many folks pick the later. And I’m not passing judgement toward folks who make that choice. People have mortgages and kids. And the cost of living in LA isn’t going down. (That’s why the literary scout works remotely from Montana.)

And now for some optimism. There are still shows and movies that get made based on original ideas coming from the brains of screenwriters and TV creators. In 2008, a couple years after I arrived to LA, I read in the trades about a first time writer named Brad Ingelsby who had sold his feature spec screenplay The Low Dweller with Leonardo DiCaprio and Ridley Scott attached. Brad, it turned out, was from about 20 minutes from where I grew up on the Pennsylvania/Delaware border. This was a life changing moment for Brad. It was a refreshing moment for me too. It made what I moved out to LA to do seem possible. I’ve recently become friendly with Brad. He’s coming off creating the HBO show Mare of Easttown starring Kate Winslet. And it wasn’t based on any book or article or toy that you twirl around your waist. 

Probably the biggest example of someone making original shows today is Taylor Sheridan who seems to have about four hundred shows on Paramount+. However, if you talk to people in the industry about those shows, they’ve almost become like IP, because Taylor himself has evolved into a sort of brand for Paramount’s streaming service. I mentioned Taylor Sheridan’s show Yellowstone to a producer as an example of an original show and they said, yeah but that’s part of the Sheridan-verse. 

This whole IP craze is nothing new. I’d always heard agents and executives talk about IP. But last year, in 2021, there seemed to be even more tunnel vision for source material. I don’t know if it had something to do with the pandemic or not. But that’s all I heard in every corner of Hollywood. Oh the networks are only really looking for IP right now. You know what else my agent kept telling me during the pandemic? Networks don’t want anything dark right now. They want Ted Lasso. While I totally understand folks might prefer something lighter during the dark days of the pandemic, if you look at people’s lists of their top shows of all time, most shows on most lists are dark, and it seemed improbable to me that Hollywood was going to exclusively make lighter fare. It was doubly painful that execs would list Ted Lasso as their go-to example of the light show they wanted because it’s also not based on any IP! Regardless of this hypocrisy, back in 2021 all I heard from every direction of the TV industry is that networks and studios and producers only want light material and material based on IP. And then in September of 2021, what show premiered on Netflix? Squid Game. Probably the darkest show imaginable. And not based on any preexisting IP. And also the biggest TV show of all time. 

Could this be the big change TV writers had been waiting for? Could this shift Hollywood toward original ideas?

No. Because immediately Squid Game was treated as IP. Ted Serandos mentioned it on the next Netflix earnings call as a universe. They’re doing a second season. It was recently announced they’re doing a reality show. Executives and agents and producers don’t see Squid Game as an original script. Somewhere at some point, folks at Netflix greenlit that show based on nothing more than a pitch and script. But now, when it’s mentioned around town, Squid Game isn’t an original script anymore. Now it’s the biggest show ever. It’s a universe. It’s IP. Hollywood once again takes the wrong lesson. Every other company wants their Squid Game. So they go looking for IP like Squid Game. They look for books like Squid Game. And video games like Squid Game. And graphic novels like Squid Game. But Squid Game didn’t start as IP. Like Star Wars and Avatar and Stranger Things and Indiana Jones, it started as an original script. 

So what’s at stake? We’re talking about TV here, not climate change. But for those of us who enjoy television and wonder how we slipped out of the golden age, this is one possible contributing factor.

To sum up, if we only made TV shows based on preexisting IP, we wouldn’t have The Wire, Mad Men, Lost, Insecure, Seinfeld, Twin Peaks, This is Us, True Detective, Friends, Atlanta, The X-Files, The Sopranos, Arrested Development, The Simpsons, Modern Family, The West Wing, Six Feet Under, The Bear, Yellowstone, I May Destroy You, Billions, Succession, Empire, The White Lotus, Fleabag, The Americans, Stranger Things, or Breaking Bad. 

But hey, maybe I’m out of touch with what people want to watch these days. Maybe LaCoste: In a While Crocodile will win best drama series at the Emmys in 2023. 

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