what can I do to make my story more marketable?

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Have you watched 1917.

When I first saw the trailer I thought it was some boring fighty, we are the victors, let's blow everything up war film.

But it's not. It's one of the best films I've ever seen. It's a buddy adventure that just happens to be set during the first world war. There's hardly any fighting, but it still holds your interest.

Oh okay. Yes I saw it. What about it though in pertinence to me?

I brought it up in relation to this question

Oh sorry for misunderstanding. Are you saying 1917 is similar because the protagonist also has to get his hands dirty?

Hurtloam meant tgat in 1917, the protagonist isn't getting his gands dirty at all, even thought it's set during ww1, and it's an extremely suspenseful film.

The question of suspense is a but like watching sports: the audience has to know the rules, so they know what is possible. If your cop suddenly gained access to an NSA data storage and found the suspect's surveillance data, that would be technically possible, but so unlikely, and if it was a twist coming out of nowhere, it would ruin your story.
If your audience knows roughly what's possible, it can place its bets.
That's what's interesting, not whether or not people get raped or shot or whatever.

So, you could start off a police procedural, super smart criminals - elite college students.
Policeman does hard investigative work, manages to catch them - but their daddies are donors to the college and the college decides to pressure the whitnesses/victims.
The rich parents get the cop fired.
Now it's about the truth and about re-establishing his reputation and getting his job back, but he's up against a corrupt system where the really bad people are rich, powerful people who do as they please because they are well connected. And the otgers- the college, the police etc. - they are all financially dependent on the rich people, and to stay afloat, they are sacrificing the truth (and the victims). They are nit st fault per se, but they are accepting of the situation, they think the victims are acceptable, if they get funding for their college/policestation and can help some other people with that money. They are helpless.
But our ex-cop refuses to sacrifice the truth.
He keeps doing fine policework, albeit without wearing a uniform, to uncover everything.

For example.
It's still a story of corruption, but the hero stays clean. He can be a grumpy nerd who never got very far in life because he refused to keep his mouth shut and just play along. The truth is important to him, and after he gets fired, it's all he has to hold on to.

It's also a story of how a system can be controlled from the top and make individuals act in a bad way, because they are forced to do so.

Oh okay, but I wanted the theme being how the hero is corrupted in his quest though, because thought that would be more interesting. I guess I don't like stories, where the protagonist, has to stay clean throughout all of it.

I mean I wouldn't think a show like 24 would be near as exciting if the protagonist never strayed outside the law, but that's just me. Do I have a wrong way of thinking if that is what I think?

No, you're thinking right when you say 24 was better the way it was.
But Jack Bauer was also torturing and ignoring human rights. In the post 911 climate, audiences were okay with this because it was in the name of war against terror.
15 years later, we see the result: coos rhink they can ignore human rights in irder to do their job.
And people arw all anti-police now.
That's why your story is such ahard sell: it's 15 years too late and the climate has shifted to the opposite.

We're not talking about whether your story is good or not - we're talking about marketability in 2020. And in this respect, it doesn't matter what you like, but what someone else is willing ro pay for. And right now producers aren't willing to risk producing this kind of story, indeoendent if its quality.

Ir's something we as creatives have to kive with: that our audience won't judge our work on its own merits, but will look st it, influenced by currebt socohistorical and personal context. No one in his right mind would produce something like 24 right now either

Oh okay. Well in my story, if the villains are guilty of several kidnapping and rape crimes, and they keep getting away with it, to the point where the main character kills them to stop them, would today's audience have that much sympathy for a group of serial mass rapists though, in today's climate even?

Is this going to be the tag line?
Because, to know that, I would have had to have seen the film. Marketability.
Think what it looks like to someone who hasn't seen the film. You can't argue by citing the intricacies of the actual plot, you need to imagine what the trailer could look like.

But also: yeah, in my country, none of these warrant capital punishment.
Police illegally using excessive force, you could say.

Last edited by shlaifu on 20 Jun 2020, 4:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

You asked what you could do to make your story more marketable, but the problem is eith the core of the story and public perception.

You can either wait for public perception to change, or you must reconsider the core of your story. Again, this is not really about whether your story is good or not.
It's about what a producer thinks it looks like to someone who has to decide whether he wants to pay to see it.

Oh okay. There are other works of fiction where you see rapist villains being killed out of revenge though, so when they happens in other works, does the audience, usually think it's over-punishing?

Depends on culture. And the movie, I guess.
But, you know: it's the character's choice to do that. As an audience, I'm free to form a negative opinion of the character.
But if it's portrayed by th author as a morally redemptive moment in which good triumphs over evil, then I will form a negative opinion of the author instead.

A distanced and nuanced look at the morality of revenge might be interesting.
Also: the character may be considered morally right by some members of the audience to kill these guys, but legally, he's a murderer.
Will he get a trial, and face capital punishment (assuming the story is set in a country that still has capital punishment)?

Or will he get away with it? If so, what will it do to him? He killed people and got away with it. Will he kill other people he thinks are guilty of crimes? What crimes?

Oh okay. Well I did write an alternate ending a while before, where he takes them alive with evidence, but I was told it was underwhelming and that their needs to be physical danger and physical life and death for a climax, in order to make things exciting enough, if that's true?

Well... I once watched 'the turin horse' in which almist nithing happens, then the farmer's horse dies and the light goes off and he's left there, in darkness. It was rivetting.
It's maybe a question of how you're telling it.
If you summarize it like you did just now, it doesn't sound exciting, but who knows what a great director could make out if it.
I've been working on a film for some time, but I wasn't directing nor editing. I did get to see numerous cuts of the film (a documentary) Always the same story. Some cuts were awfully boring. Some were good. And thankfully, the final one was great. (The penultimate one was horrendously boring. The producer and I were quite desperate, and the editor quite exhausted, at that point.)


So here's a climax for you: maybe he catches the guys, he's angry, he's broken the law himself to catch them.
There's nothing holding him back.
It's life or death, but he manages to wrestle the gun away from his opponents. They're jumping at him -
he realizes, killing them would make him a murderer, no better than them, and he shoots them in the feet.

You know: non-lethal force.
We kind forgot about that, didn't we?

It's still the story if a cop crossing a line, you get your intense life or death situation, but you can redeem the cop by returning to the law, rather than going all the way for a morally questionable tale.

However: that only makes the film marginally more marketable, because without revealing the ending, it still looks like a Dirty-harry kind of vigilante justice story. A story we don't really need right now.

Oh okay. I don't know if mine is that comparable to Dirty Harry, even though the premise sounds way. In fact, Dirty Harry didn't even kill the villain in the end, because he gave the villain a chance to surrender and the villain decided to try to shoot Harry, so Harry shot back in self defense.

So isn't Dirty Harry, not that dark therefore, then?

I wonder how law and order, all if the franchise's will fare in this climate?

Oliva Benson had to decide whether to lie in court about how she handled her own kidnapping. Can't remember if she killed the guy or seriously injured him.

Make your cop a woman.