As an intern, your single most important task everyday can often simply become keeping yourself busy while learning new things. In my case, it was trying to hone my skills in one area that an assistant to a development executive or a producer in the motion picture industry will find themselves doing very often and also struggling with- providing feedback on literary material that a production company or a studio is considering for further development. If you enjoy reading scripts, wish to write them yourself or find the process of analyzing story structures challenging and see yourself scouting for new ideas or stories to be made into films, you”ll probably take the development route in the entertainment industry, as I am now hoping to do now. At Mandalay Pictures, new scripts/specs/books would come in every Friday and the assistants would be assigned their weekend reads that day. So starting Monday, the first thing to do for interns was to approach the assistants and ask for any scripts they might need coverage on. Perhaps a bit too early for some TRF 64 students to be familiar with this term, but essentially coverage is an analysis of a script that is in consideration for being picked up by a production company or studio. The first time, I got introduced to this form of exercise was in Professor Evan Smith’s “Script Development” class. Writing good coverage and writing it fast can often be a great way to get noticed while interning, become a freelance coverage writer and also becoming a valuable asset to your boss if s(he) has piles of scripts but no time to evaluate each one of them.
I got lucky at Mandalay with the amount of scripts that were floating around and needed coverage almost immediately. In fact, the very first day within 3 hours of being there, I asked to be assigned a coverage task and got one right away. Reading and providing coverage is probably the closest you can get to understanding what a production company or studio looks for. Also, given that I am still new to the entire Hollywood approach and preference to stories (I was born and raised in India and watched American films since I was a kid but hearing it from the horse’s mouth as they say is a brand new perspective to American filmmaking), I got to see the different genres of scripts, got to understand what character motives and layers make for a more appealing story and of course, most importantly what a company like Mandalay considers a good sell. Even though, Hollywood often gets criticized for developing franchise models, catering mostly to men between 18-25 and staying away from refreshing new stories which will not rake in box office hits, there is something to be learned about story structures, stakes that make a story more exciting and a logic so to speak which storytelling should be guided by. Without wasting any more of your time, here are a few pointers I learned during my internship that one should keep in mind while attempting coverage. They are a sure shot way to impress your boss or even the next person who is paying you a check to write coverage for him:
— Is the script based on IP (Intellectual Property). Can this story have ancillary/commercial values for a studio with merchandising etc as additional revenue making sources
— Can the property be serialized?
— Is it right for the 12-24 year old market?
— Is it fresh?
— Is there a strong core concept
— Would your friends go see it?
— Is there a role for 20-32 male?
— Is the material too convoluted?
— Does much development need to be done to get it to the point of sale?
— Could the material have world wide appeal?
— Are there elements that top filmmakers would find attractive?
— Do you love it?
During my two months at Mandalay, apart from doing the several other things that interns did such as filing, doing availability checks for talent for Mandalay’s projects, covering the front desk, if there’s one thing that I truly enjoyed was coverage and I can confidently say, I’ve got better at it. From “splatter gore” (I passed on this of course ) to action flicks for young teenage boys (Mandalay is developing a action horror called “Horns” and Shia LeBouf is attached to it already, then there’s “Machine Man” to be directed by Darren Aronofsky whose conversation is being transcribed as I sit next to the assistant helping an Exec on this project!) to a sweeping epic film on elephants (this one is a secret but is going to be the best wildlife film made in the last 15 years) and the more unconventional stories for Mandalay’s independent line…I read them all! And even if I didn’t have anything to do on a given day, I asked the one assistant I built up a rapport with to give me scripts of movies that had been made. Today I have close to 15 coverage samples ready on my laptop and not only that, a more informed understanding of how the industry scours for that winning literary material.