Too often, Hollywood prefers a retread to a risk-taker

Believing something is true when nobody else does is a rare skill for new tech or for Hollywood, writes Rob Long.

What do you think is true that no one else thinks is true?

This is the question at the heart of Peter Thiel’s new book, Zero to One. Mr Thiel is an entrepreneur and an investor – he was one of the founders of PayPal, an early investor in Facebook, runs a venture capital fund, a hedge fund and still has a hand in the management of Palantir, an enormous data-mining company. He’s rich, smart and accomplished.

In other words, he’s about the closest thing we have to a true-life James Bond-style villain these days, except for the villain part.

The book is terrific – chock-full of insights into business and entrepreneurship, philosophical and far-ranging, often witty and breezy to read – but like all books of this kind, it has a central theme, embodied in the question Mr Thiel asks all of his prospective hires about what they might believe to be true that no one else does.

It’s a difficult question, apparently, because most jobseekers deliver an uninteresting answer safely in the I’m-just-an-order-taker zone, things blandly anodyne or simplistically iconoclastic. Those are the interviews he cuts short. Anyone can pose as a contrarian thinker – all you have to do is say the opposite of the current wisdom.

The few who say something that’s original, different, interesting, brave and possibly true – those are the young people he wants to hire to help him make investing decisions and manage his billions.

I thought of his question recently when I was talking to a couple of writers about a script we’re developing together.

What I like so much about the project is that it’s close to their hearts – it’s rooted in the family legends they’ve heard for years, it’s got crime and family drama and a hugely interesting central character you’ve never seen before. And it’s true.

“You know what I love about this story?” I asked them. “I love that there’s nothing like it on television. It’s totally original.”

We all nodded enthusiastically. When you’re developing a project and really getting into it, there’s lots of enthusiastic nodding.

“It’s like, a female Breaking Bad with a little Sopranos thrown in,” I said. Immediately, their faces dropped. How original and fresh could it be, they asked, if it’s so easily summarised?

Which was a good question. And the truth is, I failed the Peter Thiel interview test by reducing a truly original story into what I (probably mistakenly) thought was a more sellable mix of familiar past hits. I was already sanding off the interesting edges of the story, pre-softening the character and the world for the eventual meetings with the buyers – studio and network executives, sitting across a conference room table, poker faces firmly in place – by telling them that this wasn’t something new. Don’t worry about this one! I was saying, essentially. This is just a version of what you already know works. Nothing original here, I promise.

I was planning to tell them something that I thought was true that they also thought was true. Which may be a good way to sell a script, but a script is only the first step in a long road to the real goal, which is a big fat hit television show. Real hits, when they come, usually come as a surprise.

If you ask the producers of the biggest movie of the summer, Guardians of the Galaxy, what they thought was true that no one else did, they’d probably say something like: “We thought a fun, half-serious superhero movie with no stars in it would be a gigantic hit as long as the tone and the spirit of the movie was spot on.”

If you ask the writers and producers in Hollywood, sitting in lobby waiting areas in studio and television network offices, what they think is true that no one else thinks is true, the answer – one hopes – will be something similar: that the show or movie they’re about to pitch to a glum-faced and expressionless executive is just the thing the audience wants, despite its newness or unique tone, or revolutionary spin.

Entertainment industry executives, of course, spend most of their time listening to pitches and thinking to themselves, “What’s this similar to?” Which is another way of saying: “If I buy this and it doesn’t work, what will I tell my bosses so that they don’t fire me?” So it’s only natural that the creative types waiting nervously for the big pitch meeting might start coming up with ways to sell their project in the safest way possible. Safe sells, of course – we all see how many sequels and “reboots” and cookie-cutter romantic comedies get produced every year. But if what you’re looking for is that surprising and original idea that produces a hundred-fold return – what Mr Thiel looks for in a prospective investment, like Facebook, or a potential young employee, or for that matter what a seen-it-all and easily distracted audience looks for in a movie or television show – then it’s probably smarter to keep looking for that thing that you believe that no one else believes.

And hope that you can convince at least someone in an office, across a conference room table, to take a chance.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood. His two books, Conversations with My Agent and Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke were published in July as one volume by Bloomsbury

On Twitter: @rcbl