You're Leading With the Wrong Script.

Most writers pick their lead project with their heart.Buyers don't work that way. Here's my advice on positioning yourself in the feature market right now.

Welcome to New Story, the Newsletter. I’m Raquelle David — a Hollywood literary manager with nearly twenty years inside the industry. Every week I pull back the curtain on how this business actually works. If you’re new here, subscribe below.

Photo by jules a. on Unsplash

When I am consulting, the writers and filmmakers I talk to don’t have an idea problem. If anything, they have too many ideas. They come to me with pretty full slates — five or so projects all of them “solid,” all of them loved. To be honest they’re completely bogged down by the volume. They can’t see which of their projects is actually distinctive, because they’re looking at their slate through the lens of what they like and not really what the market is going to respond to.

And I get it. They’re your babies. But here’s the uncomfortable truth about the business we work in: your most commercial idea might not be the one you genuinely love the most. Part of your job — the professional part, the part nobody romanticizes — is knowing the difference.

That’s genuinely where I come in. Let me tell you a story about how this plays out at the highest level.

Let’s take a look at writer/director Ari Aster. I remember talking to one of his agents years ago, who told me a story from when they first started working together. The film Ari wanted to make first — the passion project, the one burning a hole in him — was Beau Is Afraid. And then they read Hereditary and said no, no, no. This is the one. They pushed him to concentrate on Hereditary first. It was not only an exceptional script but it was genre, contained, high concept, genuinely scary and castable. There was and is a strong market for it.

And we know how this ends. Hereditary became a phenomenon - it launched his filmmaking career in the biggest way possible. And then he got to make Midsommar, and then eventually he got to make Beau Is Afraid — a strange, sprawling passion project that only exists because Hereditary bought him the right to make it.

The passion project didn’t die. But I guess it came a distant second. And that’s not compromise — its smart sequencing.

So the question you should be asking about your own slate isn’t “which of these do I love most?” It’s “which one of these opens the door?” And to answer that, you need to understand what a project is actually worth in this market — not to you, but to a buyer.