Talk to Me Part 1: The Vital Role of Your First 10 Pages

This week, we are going to be discussing Talk to Me, a sweet little independent horror movie written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman based on an idea by Daley Pearson. There is so much that we're going to learn from Talk to Me and not just about making horror movies.  We're going to be using Talk to Me as a model to understand the vital role of the first image of your screenplay, the first page of your screenplay, and the first 10 pages of your screenplay on both a commercial and creative level. We’re going to talk about what your first 10 pages need to accomplish to get you better coverage, more festival wins, and greater commercial success, and also how to build from those first 10 pages to find theme, expand character development, find exciting twists on genre tropes and clichés, and to create the dramatic story underneath your genre film. If you have not yet seen Talk to Me, the first half of this podcast will just be about the first 10 minutes of the film, so I won't spoil anything beyond the first 10 minutes. Then, as we get to Part 2, we're going to start to get deeper into the structure of the film. At that point there will be some spoilers, so make sure to watch Talk to Me before Part 2 of this podcast comes out in 2 weeks.  These three ideas – first image, first page, first 10 pages – are the most important elements of your screenplay, not only on the commercial level but also on the creative level.  On a purely commercial level, here’s the reality: the first 10 pages of your screenplay are so important because producers don't like to read. Agents don't like to read. Nobody likes to read.  I'm not talking about their personalities or their predilections. There are some agents and producers who love reading a great novel or even a great screenplay. But every moment that a producer, a manager, an agent spends reading is a moment that they are not selling. And their job is to sell.  Just like a pro football player gets paid to score touchdowns, not to do bench presses, agents and producers get paid to sell, not to read. Reading is something that they have to do. But it's not something that they want to do, because it's not where they make their big money. It's not where they feel their biggest sense of accomplishment. They feel accomplishment when they sell something.  So there’s a reasonable business reason why producers and agents are so resistant to reading. There's also just a physical reason that they're resistant to reading: they have more submissions every single week than they could read in an entire lifetime. Which means that, most likely, your script’s not even getting read by a producer, agent or manager. Most likely your script is actually getting read by an assistant, by a junior level development executive.  Or even more likely than that, because those people also have more scripts than they can read and more calls than they can handle and more networking than any human being could possibly do, it's probably actually getting read by a coverage reader.  Who are these coverage readers? And how do you draw them into your writing to get better script coverage? A coverage reader is sometimes a brilliant writer who in the future will go on to be a great writer. A coverage reader is sometimes a terrible writer who will not end up going on to be a writer. A coverage reader is sometimes an intern.  But regardless, a coverage reader is most likely somebody who is reading scripts for $50 or less per script. Just think about that for a moment.