THE MORAL CASE FOR “SELLING OUT”

Why the widest door leads to the highest art

“A popular movie has to be full of true emotion, even if it's frivolous. The entrance should be low and wide so that anyone can be invited in, but the exit should be high and purified. It shouldn't be something that admits, emphasizes, or enlarges the lowness.”

- Hayao Miyazaki

Larry David would disagree, but I think this is probably the last day I can reasonably wish everyone a Happy New Year. Anyway, eight days in and it already feels like a year.

I’ve never been much for New Year’s resolutions, but I did make one this time: Tell the truth as I see it, no matter how small or large the room, digital or otherwise.

Because here’s a truth about me: I’ve been pulling punches.

Because professional self-preservation. Because social self-preservation. Because fear. Because cowardice.

And one of the truths I keep circling is simple: attention has become the scarcest resource in culture, and in film it’s now the whole game.

THE CRISIS OF ATTENTION

So here’s something I know to be true:

If you’re an aspiring professional screenwriter and you want this to be your job, write a commercial spec script.

If you’re working on something else, good. Truly. I’m not saying don’t ever write that, but I am saying that if your goal is to make screenwriting your job and not a hobby, put that aside for now and write something commercial first. You can always come back to the other thing after you’ve shown you can bring an audience with you.

I’ll say it again: Write a commercial spec script. Please write a commercial spec script.

A script with a clear premise, one you can pitch in a single sentence. A script with a genre engine that creates momentum. A script with escalating stakes and a protagonist who has something to lose. A script that will make a large audience want to pay their money to see it in a movie theater.

A script that when it lands on a desk at 11:48 pm makes the reader finish it, not because they’re particularly diligent or virtuous, but because they’re a human being and they absolutely have to find out what happens next, and how it ends, even though their kids are going to wake them up in a few hours and they have a long day tomorrow.

That’s what commercial actually means.

It doesn’t mean making your male protagonist white or making his love interest younger. It doesn’t mean writing to the lowest common denominator. It doesn’t mean sanding off everything you believe about the world because you’re afraid a financier might disagree with you politically.

I understand that many of you think that’s what it means. Someone probably told you that it did. And I want to be very clear:

They lied. Either knowingly or because they confused cynicism with sophistication.

And as a result, we’re all stuck with a false dichotomy that has warped multiple generations of film people: “commercial” movies whose sole, soulless reason for existence is making money, versus “real cinema” that is singular, strange, personal, and devoid of all the elements that might make people without a Letterboxd account actually want to watch.

Somehow, “commercial” became an insult associated with some sort of moral failure when all it really means is what most of us want for our art more than anything:

People actually watching... and then telling other people to watch.

The audience is not your enemy. The audience is the point.

The audience at the inaugural Black List Live! reading. Los Angeles Theater.

And the audience isn’t obligated to care about your interiority or whatever you want to say about the world on command. They have jobs. Children. Bills. Depression. Phones. They are exhausted. They’re not sitting down on a Friday night hoping to be taught a lesson by a stranger with Final Draft.

They want you to take their attention and not give it back. They want to be a little sad when you’ve decided that you’ve reached the end of the story you wanted to tell.

And nothing is more valuable than the ability to do that.

THE NEW ECONOMICS OF RISK

You may have heard that something called Covid-19 accelerated the forces that were already making the theatrical film business’s economics... well... not great going into this decade. Studios are still figuring out how to build slates for audiences that are more selective and event-driven than they were pre-2020. And the streaming revolution has slid into its mature-growth phase where engagement and churn drive most decisions, putting further downward pressure on budgets, deal terms, and production volume.

Like it or not, the most reliable way for the film industry to make money at the scale necessary to justify its infrastructure, marketing, and corporate debt is still the big, globally legible movie with a low entrance and a wide door. The kind you can pitch in one sentence in any language that an audience in Seoul, São Paulo, and suburban Ohio can understand in five seconds and want to pay their money to see.

Without a steady supply of scripts to make into those movies, the business will make less money. When the money shrinks, the industry’s appetite for risk shrinks. And when the industry gets (even) less brave, it’ll get even more reliant on recycling whatever brands it can still reboot one last time. And as a result, we’ll lose one of the few remaining shared spaces we all still walk into together in the 21st century.

The film industry doesn’t just want commercial spec scripts right now. It needs them, desperately.

It’s existential, whether anyone wants to admit it on the record or not.

THE STRATEGIC SPEC

What this means for you, aspiring professional screenwriter, is that you actually can change your life overnight - or at least over a few weeks - if you can write something big and impossible to put down.

Maybe that script sells. Maybe it doesn’t. But if it feels like the kind of movie a studio can market globally without explanation, you’re immediately known as a writer who can deliver the one thing the business most needs.

Once you’re one of those writers, you get the general meetings, the assignments, the OWA work, the rewrite calls. You actually get paid to do the job. And once you’ve done that, it’s far more likely that the industry will back and protect the weirder idea you’ve been telling yourself is “real cinema.”

In other words, earn the industry’s trust on its terms, and you buy yourself the freedom to make whatever you think your best work actually is. The audience works the same way: If you build that entrance low and wide and make them want to pay to cross the threshold, you can lead them almost anywhere.

The movies that actually shape culture don’t do it by lecturing to a small group of the already converted. They do it by welcoming everyone in and then changing what those people are capable of feeling on the way out, whether they realize it or not.

THE MYTH OF THE NOBLE FAILURE

Unfortunately, most aspiring professional screenwriters don’t even try to do this. And it’s not because they’re lazy or untalented. It’s because they’ve been told - explicitly and implicitly - that real artists don’t write with the audience in mind, and that caring about a large audience is effectively a confession of bad taste.

And that’s extremely seductive advice if only because it can let failure masquerade as virtue. (Ask me how I know.) If your script doesn’t land, you can tell yourself that the reader wasn’t sophisticated enough to get it, that the industry is too cynical, that the moment isn’t ready for your politics, that the world just isn’t ready yet for your super special brand of genius. Which conveniently means you never have to confront the only questions that matter if you want to do this professionally: Can you convince people to read this script in a sentence? Can you command their attention from moment one? Do they give a fuck what happens next until the end?

If the answer to those three questions isn’t “yes, absolutely,” good luck using that script to break into a laughably competitive, capital-intensive medium where the product costs tens of millions of dollars to make and market. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but you’ve made it orders of magnitude harder for yourself. And it’s already incredibly hard.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE WIDE DOOR

Let me make this even more annoying: if you’re a decent writer, it’s probably not the quality of your writing that’s keeping you from a real chance at a professional career.

You’re losing it before you write “FADE IN.” Most people pick premises that are dead on arrival and then spend months if not years trying to execute their way to a promised land that their premise itself made impossible.

Spare yourself the effort and the heartache. Be honest with yourself. If you can’t answer almost all of these nine questions with a confident ‘yes,’ don’t waste your time opening your screenwriting software.

If you’re working on a premise and want to test how “wide” the door is, share it in the comments below:

I. THE HOOK

1. Can you make a busy person want to read it in a single sentence? Not because executives are dumb, but because time is scarce and clarity is contagious. If you can’t, fix the sentence or fix the idea.

2. Is it in a genre lane with an engine? Horror. Thriller. Action. Comedy. Romantic Comedy. Heist. Sci-Fi. Even a drama can be commercial if it’s structured like a pursuit. Genre is part of your sales pitch to the audience, and it’s also a shorthand that industry folks use to explain what your movie is as it winds its way to production. Don’t have one? (Or a clear hybrid?) Good luck. You’ll need it.

II. THE ENGINE

3. Does your protagonist want something visible and external? Not “healing.” Not “processing.” Not “coming to terms.” Something urgent and external that forces choices. They should want the interior stuff too, but if they don’t desire something concrete, something real, you’ve made your desire to have a professional screenwriting career a lot harder to realize.

4. Do you have a “big bad?” Heroes - and audiences - need villains, or at least concrete antagonistic forces. You can have thematic antagonists like trauma, society, grief, my past, what have you, but you probably also need a material antagonistic force that actually does things to make life harder for the protagonist in a way that the audience can track. Bonus, great actors love playing well-written villains.

5. Do you have a ticking clock? Not literally, but you do need pressure over time: a deadline, a narrowing window, a pursuit, a countdown, a limited opportunity. Something that forces decisions now, not later.

6. Do the stakes escalate? A commercial script puts a protagonist in a difficult situation and then makes it worse for them. Then even worse. Then worse still. If yours doesn’t, you’ve made it a lot worse for yourself. That’s called irony.

III. THE SPECTACLE

7. Do you have set pieces? And I don’t mean explosions or car chases (though if you’ve got them and they’re good, great.) I mean sequences. Turns. Reversals. Movie Moments that will make the audience lean forward and say “oh shit” without even realizing they’ve done so. They’re the parts of your script that readers will describe to their bosses to make them read the script and that audience members will describe to their groupchats without even realizing they’re selling tickets for you.

8. Do you land the plane? There is nothing more brutal in the script reading game than one hour of raised expectations followed by thirty minutes of crushing disappointment. By the beginning of the third act, I should be wondering how on Earth you’re going to land the plane, and then you should bring it in with skill that makes us forget the name Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger III.

And one more, one that people try to pretend runs counter to the rest. It doesn’t:

IV. THE DNA

9. Is it yours? Would this be flatter, safer, less funny, less scary, less interesting if someone else wrote it? Commercial doesn’t mean generic. It doesn’t mean male or white or straight or Christian. It can be any of those things, and it can be everything else too. Commercial just means that you built the door wide enough that strangers want to pay to walk through it.

Once it is and the premise is saleable, (please) bring everything else you’ve got: your obsessions, your politics, your humor (please bring your humor), your weird little takes about the world and what it means to be human. That’s what takes people higher on the way out. But if you can’t get them in, none of it matters.

THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF POPULAR ART

I’m adamant, bordering on obnoxious, about all of this for one simple reason: I love movies.

Carmike Cinemas, Peachtree 8. Columbus, Georgia.

As a Black nerd growing up in west central Georgia, Carmike Cinemas multiplexes were my happy place. Decades later, there’s still nothing quite like walking into a dark room with a bunch of people I don’t know and spending hours together forgetting the outside world while someone tells us a story projected dozens of feet high.

Earnest as it may be, I still believe that a popular movie, done right, is a small act of care at a global scale. Look around. The world out there is rough right now for almost everyone.

If you can help people set down whatever they’re carrying for two hours and, as Miyazaki puts it, “find unexpected admiration, honesty, or affirmation in themselves, and… return to their daily lives with a bit more energy,” there’s absolutely nothing soulless or frivolous about that.

So yes: write the commercial spec. I hereby release you from whatever moral failure you’ve been taught to associate with wanting an audience. Write the one with the widest possible door. Write the one that makes a tired reader keep turning pages. And once you’ve set the hook, bring your whole entire self with you and take them somewhere they never could have imagined going. Leave them sad that it’s over and with a bit more energy and new eyes on the world.

That’s the work.

That’s the job.

And I can’t promise you a career if you pull it off, but I can promise you a real chance -- one you almost certainly won’t have if you don’t.

P.S. If you’ve made it this far, I’m flattered. Thank you for reading.

Again, if you’re working on a premise and want to test how “wide” the door is, share it in the comments below. I’m stuck on a flight for the next dozen or so hours. Airline wifi permitting, I’ll hang out around here, and offer some thoughts that will hopefully be helpful.

Keep it to a sentence or two. Be kind to each other. And maybe we can collectively help some folks get to FADE IN on something we’ll all be excited to watch in a theater.