Before You Write The Screenplay, Write The Trailer.

  The great detective fiction writer Mickey Spillane came back to me several years ago when

   I thought back long ago to when guys like Mickey Spillane used to be interviewed on TV shows hosted by guys like Mike Douglas. Mike asked Mickey how he came up with his ingenious plots and Mickey said, “Mike, I go fishing.” After some appreciative laughter, Mickey said, “I put my line in the water, and the first thing I wonder - even before I know what the book is about – is ‘how does it end?’”

  Mike Douglas, a gently perceptive host, asked, “After you write your ending, do you then work backward until you have a book to go with your ending?” Mickey, that famous tough guy twinkle in his eye, said, “By the time the fish bites, I have my dinner – an ending - and a book to write!”

  I envied Mickey Spillane because he had worked out a simple scheme to create his fiction – and he sold millions of books. More so, you could tell Mickey Spillane was a guy who had fun doing what he did.

  Jump cut to a few years ago. I was asked to rewrite a screenplay with no beginning, a lame middle and an ending so patently stupid, it pretty much guaranteed the movie would never get made. Needless to say, I wasn’t having any fun. Which brought me back to Mr. Spillane, sitting at the beachfront with his line in the water. At which point, it came to me that there was a way to have more fun writing a movie. A way I could structure the movie so I knew it would appeal to audiences.

Write The Trailer First!

  I perked up, an extremely rare occurrence in those days. I thought back to my first job; a film editor cutting low-budget trailers. And I asked myself: “What would the trailer for this movie look like?”

  Unlike Mickey, I knew I needed more than simply an ending I could work backward from. I knew I had to figure out the many key elements that make a screenplay – and a movie trailer – work for an audience.

  I sat back for a second, and imagined I was in the theatre. The 64 minutes of commercials had just ended and the audience was informed the feature would begin after a few previews. I then actually heard a voice. The voice. Not from above. It was that guy you hear in almost every trailer. With that unique sonorous tone, he boomed: “In a world where men were men and women wished men were scarce…” 

  I then wrote down a few lines of narration for the trailer and described a visual I figured was key to getting people to want to actually see the movie.

  I remembered a line of dialogue in the script that sounded great (there weren’t a whole lot to choose from) and I used it for the next scene.

  I knew I had something I could work with when I laughed out loud at a sequence I had written for the trailer – the good news being that the screenplay was supposed to be a comedy.

  More importantly, by the time I was done, I had a five page document that a director could use to make a pretty nice trailer – for a pretty good movie.

  I then used that document to help me structure the entire movie – as well as provide me with specific ideas as to how to get from one point to the next. In other words, I knew the guts of the story that led to all those fun high points a trailer uses to get an audience excited.
  Of course, it’s not a perfect or be-all-end-all solution. The magic of great screenplays is in figuring out all the little moments we remember when we watch great movies – and creating characters we need to get involved with and stay with for a couple of hours.

  None of that hard work changes a bit. What The Trailer Method, as I’ve taken to calling it, does is help you figure out what this movie is going to be. It tells you why you should be excited about it and best of all, it serves as a great guide. Outlines and treatments tend to talk about the movie. Trailers are the movie. They give you the guts and the reality of the movie and they tell you if it’s working and why it’s working.

  You’d be surprised to learn that most of the rewrites I’ve ever been handed were screenplays that had no idea of what they were really trying to be.

  If you’ve read this far, you deserve to know how the screenplay turned out. The producer loved the draft and gave me some notes for another rewrite. He then got fired, which of course meant that I got fired, after which another writer was brought in and told to change the script back to the draft I was originally handed. The film never got made, but I’m still proud of the way my version turned out – and I knew I had a figured out a way to work that actually made writing a fun experience.

  The days of Mickey Spillane fishing for his dinner while concocting a million copy bestseller are long gone. But I can assure you, dinner (surf, turf or even both) the night after you first try The Trailer Method is going to be a whole lot more productive. Most of all, I believe you’re going to actually enjoy yourself!