Continuing on yesterday’s theme of IP iteration in entertainment…

Friend and subscriber Chris Julian, a Seattle-based filmmaker/videographer and cinephile, mentioned that M. Night Shyamalan’s first draft of The Sixth Sense was a wildly different story from the iconic 1999 thriller we all know today.

In fact, Bruce Willis’s character wasn’t even a child psychologist until the 5th draft!

Shyamalan told Creative Screenwriting in 2015 about how he kept iterating until he found the story be truly original:

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“The first draft of The Sixth Sense was a serial killer movie.

The film that was sold was the tenth draft.

The first draft was a very powerful movie about a little kid who saw the victims of a serial killer, and the hunt for this serial killer.

But it kept changing; bit by bit, the parts with the ghosts became more and more unique.

I’ve never seen that expressed before.

And then the serial killer parts—which were good—I’d seen before, and they started to go away, and go away, and go away,

Until I said, “That’s not even part of this movie anymore.”

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It seems like Shyamalan and ​yesterday’s Mike Birbiglia​ are touting the same idea regarding IP…

Just get something down.

Get feedback.

Keep revising until you arrive at something that’s your own.

💡

-Wes