How to come up with a "take"

Answering a reader submitted question!

Hello Hollyweirdos. Almost every week I put a little blurb at the bottom asking you all a question and yet I very rarely get asked any questions back! Well… earlier this week someone messaged me on here asking that I write about something specific and… I loved it. It told me that a) someone out there was reading this and b) gave me an immediate way to make the newsletter more of service to you, the readers. Which is the whole point of this endeavor. So… if you have things you’d like to hear about, questions about the business, questions about the craft, questions about the state of the industry, questions about tariffs, feel free to leave them below in the comments, and/or message me and I will do my best to answer!

Here’s the question, from Kseniya. “I would love to hear your approach on coming up with a “take” for features and/or TV. Thank you!”

Great question! I have written previously about “10 steps to coming up with a movie idea,” and “A good pitch is not good writing” both of which I think are useful and related, but aren’t exactly the answer to this question. So… what even is a take? And how do you come up with one when you’re asked for it?

More on that after this.

So the one thing I would definitely not do is say it’s about nothing.

Everyone in Hollywood is looking for a “sure thing,” especially as the economy currently craters, and what many studios and companies consider to be the safest is something with an underlying intellectual property that has already been proven to work. Part of the safety of that is that there is a built in audience for massively popular IP. But, even the less popular or well-known IP tends to have proven that it works from a creative or storytelling standpoint. If a book is telling a sound story that you could then adapt, it has already done 85% of the work, making it a “safer bet.”

We could argue about the truth to any of this (I don’t personally buy it) but that’s the thought process that much of the business is living within, and we can’t always go against the grain, sometimes we must simply do our best within a broken system (capitalism).

So… when a company has identified material that they would like someone to adapt — be it a book, a graphic novel, a short story from reddit — they will ask agents and managers for writers who can pitch “a take.” This is what we consider an Open Writing Assignment. I’ve talked about these plenty, so loyal readers are probably like “yeah yeah we know.”

We’ll leave aside the “how do I get into a position to be asked for my take,” which is a longer, more nebulous conversation about agents/managers and career positioning, although I did once write the “how did you get a manger/agent” summary which varies person to person but I think can be a helpful reminder that there is no real “way.”

Let’s say you’re in the position to be asked for a take. Usually your agent/manager will forward you an email with whatever the material is and say “Whaddaya think? This might be cool for x,y,z reasons.”

How do you actually come up with a take on the 12 page short story?

Well… first, read it.

Second, read what they think they want.

Third, I would go through their previous credits on IMDb and see whether they’ve done anything like what this story suggests it could be. If they have, you may notice a pattern as to what kinds of things they tend to make. Every company and producer tends to have some sort of “brand” to what they end up doing. That will suggest the tone / approach that you should be taking with the material.

[You can do any of these steps in order by the way — going through past credits is a great way to pre-screen whether you want to even take a look at something, as you may see that they’ve only ever made the kind of stuff you would never want to do.]

Your personal ratio of Want to do it vs. Need to do it will always be in flux, so I would consider where those two things stand for you in relation to the IP you’ve been sent. You will almost certainly never be more excited about something than at the very beginning, so keep that in mind as you’re potentially signing up for work that could take 3-5 years of your life.

Assuming you do want/need to do it… how do you come up with your take?

1. Think about what you have to offer that you’re particularly good at. Pitching is like auditioning, and there’s a certain chemistry to the process that doesn’t actually have very much to do with skill. You either do or don’t intrinsically have the thing they want, and learning to own that and lean into it will save you massive amounts of work trying to fit yourself to someone else’s mold. If you are primarily known for twisty thrillers, you probably want to be sure you are coming up with a way to make this twisty. If you are known for sweeping romance, get that love story in there. Know your own brand and lean into it — it will save you time, and save everyone a lot of energy trying to imagine something new, when they can instead imagine you’re going to do the thing they already know you’re good at.

2. Think about what would actually make this a movie/TV show. Adapting material from another medium is a bit like translating from another language. What works in Spanish may not even exist in Icelandic. So you have to consider early on what about the material you’ve been sent is good for film, and what about it is bad for film. Fiction novels often provide a ton of insight into the character’s thought process, which is usually not something that’s great for film. Instead, things that are great for film are unique settings, fantastical moments, compelling action… you know what you like in movies. What about the book has that, and what about the book doesn’t have that? Often with a pitch you should be able to say “Here’s what I love about this material and so we’ve gotta use that” AS WELL AS “I don’t love this thing about it so much, and we may not want to use that, but instead change it to be _________.” Being able to say this is what works in the original, and this is how we’ll make it work in OUR version shows you can be trusted with adaptation.

3. Figure out the hero’s journey. Look. I am personally very over the hero’s journey. And I think a case could be made that our incessant “one man alone can solve things” media landscape of the last 40 years is partially to blame for culture’s shift to the extreme right… but… we exist within the world we exist within. And executives and studio bosses are going to want to know what the hero’s journey is. If you are crafting an original screenplay, you can do whatever you want. If you are trying to get hired to write something, you should probably at least make it sound like you are going to do something your bosses think they want. So I would think about who the hero of the story is… and what their journey is. Most material has a built in protagonist, but, literature/radio/comics don’t all abide by the same structural demands as film and may not be giving you an active protagonist who begins the story one way and ends another. Try to identify whether you can use the protagonist of the underlying material as written, or if you’re going to need to invent a new emotional/narrative arc for a protagonist if it were to be a film. Some material you get is just an idea. Your job in coming up with a take is to crack a propulsive fifteen minute presentation of a film — and that is easiest if you can succinctly tell people “here is our hero, and here is how they are changed through the course of their actions in the film.” Frankly, I think it’s reductive and doesn’t lead to the most interesting storytelling, but, while interviewing for a job isn’t the ideal moment to argue with HR about the ethics of capitalism.

4. Figure out some setpieces. Again, pitching a take on a movie is all about clarity, and all about conveying how this can be a good movie. You should come up with a couple points in the movie that are the most heightened / most fun / most scary / most action-packed. Pick your adjective based on your genre, but you should definitely be able to say “here’s this crazy thing that will kick the movie off” and “here’s this other crazy thing that will be our kick-ass climactic moments.” Apologies for sounding entirely phony, but… that’s the job.

5. Get it all down on paper. Once you have an overarching idea of what your take is, you should be able to clearly state all of the following: genre, tone, comparisons to a couple great (and financially successful films), the main character and their whole deal, what the movie is thematically about, as well as a basic book report level synopsis of the story. This wants to be approximately 2500 words as written, which would make it somewhere around 15 minutes spoken. There’s your take.

A note: this is more accurate for coming up with a feature film take. TV takes are the same basic principle, but you also need to be thinking about "the engine” of the series, ie the thing that will continue to propel us through hours and hours of storytelling. As well as a whole wide ensemble of characters, storylines for the first season, potential storylines beyond the first season, and on and on. Pitching for TV is much more involved, and honestly much harder. I can break it down even more in a future post if that’s of interest to folks.

So… that’s the basics of coming up with a take. Do you guys have any good tips or tricks for Kseniya and each other (and me)? I’d love to see those in the comments if you have them!

And if you have other questions I can / should be addressing for you all (including TV pitching) in coming weeks, I would be happy to oblige, just drop a line in the comments below.

Happy pitching!