Winning Time: How To Adapt a True-Life Story

Winning Time: How To Adapt a True-Life Story This week, we’re going to be looking at Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty by Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht, and how to adapt a true story into a TV show or feature film. We’ll be building on our conversation from my podcast about TV Bible writing, to help you understand how to translate some of those concepts into the structure of your TV Series. And most importantly, we’ll be learning how to develop your TV series structure around the hook that is most important to you.  There are a million places online where you can read about exactly what is true and what is not true in the adaptation of Winning Time. In fact, there are sites that break down every episode into truth and fiction. So we are not going to focus our inquiry there. Instead, we’re going to be looking at how you, as a writer, take this giant beast of a true-life story, with all this plot, and squeeze it down into a form that you can actually structure and sell.  A lot of writers make the mistake when adapting a true-life story like Winning Time into a TV show or feature film, of believing that the hook of their adaptation exists in the true-life story itself.  A pitch from one of these well-meaning writers often sounds a little bit like this.  “It’s this incredible story that’s never been told! It takes place over multiple years. It’s got the most amazing characters, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Jerry Buss, it’s got political stuff like HIV, Islam, it’s got basketball, drug addiction… so much awesome stuff, the story practically tells itself!”  But the truth is, the story does not tell itself. And while the frenetic pace and structure of Winning Time might make it seem like it just threw all this stuff together, underneath all that is a really simple take on the material: a strong drumbeat that tells these two very talented writers and their writing team exactly what to focus on, exactly what the real story is, and what is just extraneous plot and noise.  The biggest problem in adapting a true-life story into a TV show or feature film is that there is just so much noise.  And where does that noise come from? It comes from the very process of writing a show like Winning Time. You see, as part of that process, you are going to do a ton of research. In fact, if you’re really doing your job, you’re going to turn yourself into an expert on the Lakers. You are going to know every little micro detail about what happened during the period of time that you’re trying to capture in your TV show or in your feature film.  And the result of all that research, if you don’t have a really strong central premise, a really strong structure to hang that all on, is you can get distracted by all those details you’ve discovered, and lose track of the forest for the trees.    When you discover an incredible true-life story to adapt, it’s easy to imagine that you are the first person to ever think of telling this story as a TV show or movie. Chances are, you’re wrong.  Chances are, there are dozens of people who are pitching the exact same idea you are pitching. There are just so many people pitching show ideas and movie ideas every single day.  In fact, if you’ve targeted the right producer, there’s a good chance that they have already heard this exact project pitched many times before! They’ve been looking to tell this story, and they’ve maybe heard 10 different takes on this material over the years. They’ve just never found the one that made them want to move forward.    This is the most important thing when it comes to adapting a true-life story into a screenplay or pilot, finding the hook that makes your take on the material uniq...