Michael Hauge, the author of Writing Screenplays That Sell and Selling your Story in 60 Seconds, is “not a script doctor".
He is also hesitant to credit himself with the successful careers of the “many major players” he has collaborated with, although his website reveals links to the Academy Award-winning writer Paul Haggis (Crash), along with Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio of Pirates of the Caribbean fame.
Hauge's job is to help writers realise their vision in a format that appeals to a mass audience.
“I’m really on [the writer’s] side. I’m there to help them," he explains – a mission he will be bringing with him this month on his third seminar Australian tour.
Hauge says Australia makes some great movies, but it isn’t all good news.
He senses there's a general feeling that because Australia can't compete in terms of budget, then “we shouldn’t try to compete with Hollywood in terms of story".
Over the course of a 20-year career, which started as a script reader, he has developed a pattern of what consistently works.
The result is high-concept, and the touchstone of Hauge’s system. Scripts centred on a simple structure; one or two heroes and a lot of conflict to overcome.
It’s a formula easily traced through the history of Hollywood and the work of his more illustrious collaborators, like Shane Black.
Show the audience “what we are rooting for", repeats Hauge.
What is he rooting for? Seeing Australian movies that perform better at the home box office than Hollywood’s output.
As for seeing an Australian high-concept film succeed in the US market he is sceptical.
“Americans simply don’t gravitate to foreign films,” he explains.
"The number one thing I find myself telling writers or producers is 'make it simple'.”
It’s all about story, and not just for writers.
“Will Smith is a guy who has one of the greatest story-senses imaginable,” an attribute that Hauge says saw him becoming one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, “but now I’m just name dropping.”
Hauge will be holding a free Screen Australia lecture at AFTRS in Sydney on March 14 from 6-9 pm.
More details can be found by clicking here.