Why this story? Why now?

it's a bit of a cliche. it's also unavoidable.

Every studio wants their version of this.

When you get to the stage of your career where you’re pitching feature ideas and TV shows to producers and executives and other industry folk, there’s a classic question that you’ll find yourself having to answer: “Why now?”

There are different ways of interpreting this question. But in most cases, what this question of “why now” is asking — whether it’s actually uttered or is just implicitly expected to be answered — is: “what pressing, larger, recent social or political concern is this story addressing?”

Now, that’s not necessarily always the case. If you’re angling your way to get hired to adapt an intellectual property into a vehicle for a big time actor who already controls that property and wants to star in a movie version of it, then you don’t really have to answer “why now?” At least not in the same way.

Why? The mere fact that a financially-viable star wants to do this project answers “why now”? In my experience, the “why now” question about a story’s social relevance usually steps to the forefront when it isn’t pre-answered by a story’s perceived lucrative nature.

A big star’s desire to do a project can be the “why now?” Likewise, a studio’s desire to do a spinoff of a successful franchise, or reboot a beloved title.

To get hired for these gigs, what you mostly have to answer then is “why you?” And that’s probably some mix between your track record, your biography, and your specific take on the material. (Though a little a perceived social relevance will probably always help.)

But in most cases, to sell a script or get hired to write one, you’re probably going to have to make your case — explicitly or implicitly — about why your script, or your pitch, or your take on an intellectual property, is socially relevant at this moment.

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In fact, I’d argue that this classic industry question of "why this story now?" is so prominent in the decision-making in our current era that it can be tempting as a working screenwriter to service that question to such a degree that telling a great story feels secondary.

The pitch stage is a unique beast. And to be honest, I don’t think it’s where I thrive. Just by temperament, I’m not much of a salesman. It’s not that I’m too shy or introverted to pitch. I’m just more of a low-key personality, with very little razzle dazzle to me.

I like to think my workmanlike persona grows on you when we’re a hundred days into a project and I’ve been showing up every day with pretty much the same calm temperament, ready and able to solve problems and make adjustments and put in the extra hours to make something work. Ever since I first got hired as a freelancer on Longmire in 2011, my personal professional motto has been “high performance, low maintenance.”

But that sort of sure-and-steady personality is less likely to impress over a twenty minute pitch or sixty minute meeting. I’m not out there performing scenes or using different voices or doing high energy shit. I’m usually calmly — maybe borderline monotonously — laying out my vision for a project.

So although pitching isn’t my strongest talent, I still have to do it. And I do get hired enough through pitches to pretty much always be working on paid gigs while also writing my spec passion projects.

When I’m pitching, I’m always trying to convince my audience that I have the most compelling insight to their property, or that my project has undeniable urgency and needs to be made ASAP. And very often, I do this by connecting my pitch to something going on right now in the real world.

I would argue that most executives and producers — whether consciously or unconsciously — desperately want writers to connect a story to some recent social issue or political headline. Pretty understandable in the current climate.

But this also presents storytelling dangers. Just giving lip service to actual real social issues, or presenting half-digested platitudes regarding them, is a pretty cynical and shitty thing to do. It’s unlikely to be persuasive, and it’s also likely to produce shoddy writing.

So my clever screenwriting hack is this: if you’re going to bring a sociopolitical angle to your pitch, make sure it’s one that you actually believe in. Or even better: make sure it’s a sociopolitical angle you’re sincerely curious about and want to explore dramatically.

Now, I may be an outlier in this: I always want my inner dramatist to trump my inner polemicist. That is, my dramatic goal isn’t to advertise my political values through my scripts or characters or dialogue. My goal is to dramatize interesting sociopolitical fault lines, oftentimes through characters who don’t believe the same things I believe.

Which means I’m not trying to do political activism in my writing. Whenever I’m writing a character with a political opinion I don’t agree with, my goal is to present the best possible version of that opinion because doing so usually leads to more interesting drama.

But perhaps you have a different approach, one that’s more focused on favoring a specific mode of political thought or action. Obviously, that’s also fine. It’d be boring if we all wrote the same shit in the same way with the same intentions.

Either way, if you’re connecting your pitch to, say, issues of police violence or creeping authoritarianism but you’re not invested enough in these issues to move beyond the boilerplate easy stances available regarding them, it’s probably going to result in a shallow, boring story — if not in the pitch stage, then at the script stage.

And what kind of victory is that?

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It’s a different era, pilgrim.

One way of addressing the “why now” question is by putting a protagonist at the center of a story who isn’t the straight white dude who has more or less been the default hero of most Hollywood films up to now.

So, the “why now” of a new movie in the world of the Rocky franchise is this: the lead character is now Apollo Creed’s son, and placing the spinoff on the shoulders of a young black man brings a whole new perspective on a franchise that had previously felt played out.

And Creed worked out exceptionally well, in every way. This identity shift at the center of Creed felt organic and inevitable. It built off of a beloved part of the franchise’s preexisting mythology and used Apollo Creed’s son to relaunch that franchise — which had seemed completely played out — as an exciting new franchise with an identity that was both a continuation of the beloved previous version and it’s own new thing.

You can see why studios would want their own version of this. And of course a diversity of representations is a noble goal. But changing the default identity of a franchise or IP protagonist without making it feel organic to that franchise/IP and without working through how a change of identity is going to effect the story itself isn’t exactly progress in my book. It’s just exploiting the current political moment in a shallow manner. It’s replicating the identity shift in Creed on the most surface level without understanding what made it work.

So pitching, say, a spinoff on Indiana Jones with a young female lead character in the Indy role replicating all of the old Indy’s traits would strike me as highly unlikely to produce an interesting take on the story. But if you pitched a take on Indiana Jones with some genuine insight or curiosity about how this sort of story could be told from a new POV, and you construct a story that organically connects this new POV to the beloved franchise but that can also only be told with this new character at the center, then I think you have a pretty good chance at having a dramatically interesting take.

But that’s hard, uncertain work. And not every franchise will lend itself to such a re-imagining.

I think viewers can feel when a movie or TV show is doing diversity cynically, just to make the creators and brands involved look good and progressive. When done in a half-ass manner, such a move usually feels more like PR than storytelling.

Again, it’s not that I think films and TV shows shouldn’t expand in terms of who’s represented on screen. I actually think greater diversity in terms of protagonists and storytellers is probably the number one way to make old, well-worn genres feel fresh and relevant again.

I just think writers need to do it well, just like they have to do any key storytelling decision well (including placing the same old straight white guy at the center of a story).

This is how you do it.

Another good example would be Mad Max: Fury Road. In essence, this reboot shifted the main focus from the familiar Max (Mel Gibson previously, Tom Hardy here) to the unfamiliar Furiosa (Charlize Theron).

At the concept and pitch stage, the bad version of this would’ve been casting Ms. Theron as a woman named Max and simply having her assume the traits of Mel Gibson’s original character and putting her at the center of a story that could’ve just as easily been built around that previous version of the character.

Instead, George Miller constructed an entire story around Furiosa that only makes sense with her character at the center. Furiosa’s past, who she’s helping, what she’s seeking — they’re all connected and make the shift in the protagonist’s gender feel organic and inevitable.

Of course Furiosa should be the central character of Fury Road because it’s impossible to imagine the movie with any other character in her place. And even better: the entire Mad Max story universe and mythos are so much more interesting now that we have Furiosa and her story taking place within them.

The bad version of bringing 2023 social relevance to an existing franchise or intellectual property is simply hitting “find/replace” regarding the social identity of the lead character, patting yourself on the back for doing so, and then going ahead and telling the same old story you were gonna tell with the white guy at the center.

The good version is conceiving of a story in the universe of a franchise that can only be told with this new character at the center, then having this character and story be so strong and interesting and organic-feeling that the franchise itself feels richer and more interesting with this new addition.

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Most of my pitches are fifteen minutes, give or take. The opening minute or two is usually spent emphasizing either my personal connection to the material via my autobiography, or emphasizing the pressing social relevance of my story/pitch.

These opening minutes then are focused on some combo of “why now?” and “why me?” Which one I emphasize depends on the pitch. But these opening minutes not only openly address these industry questions, they also contextualize the rest of my pitch, which is always focused on the particulars of whatever story I want to be paid to tell.

So, let’s say I’m doing more of a “why now?” pitch. How to make my case succinctly? One way is turning myself briefly into an Aaron Sorkin character. Which doesn’t mean (in this case) talking like a coked-out, speed-walking, hyper-competent white collar professional.

In this case, it means leading off with some uncommon yet intriguing statistic. Like the opening dialogue from The Social Network:

Or the opening voice-over from Molly’s Game:

MOLLY (V.O): A survey was taken a few years ago that asked 300 professionals one question: “What’s the worst thing that can happen in sports?” Some people answered losing a Game 7 and other people said getting swept in 4. Some people said it was missing the World Cup and some Brazilians said it was losing to Argentina. Not just in the World Cup--anytime, ever, in any contest. But one person answered that the worst thing that can happen in sports was 4th-place at the Olympics.

You probably get the idea.

Once you know what your angle is for answering “why now?”, you may want to find the telling statistic or quote or anecdote that hooks your listener. That could be a statistic about arrest rates in a certain municipality, or an anecdote about something that happened to you personally.

Or, it could be a statistic about how many working cowboys in the Old West were in fact black — by most accounts, at least 1 in 4 — contrasted with how many Hollywood westerns portray Old West cowboys as exclusively white.

However you lead off, if you find the right hook, you’re not only presenting a bit of data that’s both intriguing and thematically relevant to the story you want to tell, you’re also positioning yourself as being as whipsmart and in-the-know as any good Sorkin character. And that’s often exactly the sort of writer executives like to hire.

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As with any screenwriting topic, there’s no formula or shortcuts here.

Since I finished up directing my first movie last year, I’ve been on a steady tour of general meetings, meeting with more executives and producers in the last three months than I’ve probably met with over the prior ten years.

A lot of this is just me poking my head back out of my bunker after a couple of busy years to take in the landscape and figure out how I want the next five years of my career to go. But some of it is also just trying to understand what industry people are looking for right now, what they’re not interested in, and how working executives perceive the industry to be shifting.

One thing that’s come up multiple times in meetings: hearing about a project with a script that promised a new, fresh perspective on a story — usually a reboot of a preexisting title that replaced the original’s straight white protagonist with a different type of character — but in execution didn’t follow through with a compelling story.

When I hear about scripts like this, what I imagine are writers who pitched a knee jerk answer to “why now?” without truly embracing or thinking through their proposed answer.

Does this mean that executives and producers will be a little less fixated on “why now?” going forward? I have no idea. I’d guess probably not.

Which means “why now?” is going to be a practical question screenwriters will have to keep answering for the foreseeable future — unless you’re a big shot, maybe.

For the rest of us, we’re probably always gonna have to answer for our projects’ social relevance in order to get those projects made. With that as the case, we can fight that “why now?” question, or ignore it, or shallowly answer it according to the perceived whims of the moment, or…we could use that question as a way to dig a little deeper and get a little more original in our storytelling.

Whatever we choose, the results are gonna be mostly out of our hands. But how we approach the issue is absolutely in our control.