Twitter Rant: Daniel Kunka on the Importance of Ideas

Tweetstorm: Daniel Kunka on the Importance of Ideas

A series of tweets on the inestimable value of ideas.

Yesterday screenwriter Daniel Kunka (@unikunka) posted a series of tweets on a subject near and dear to my heart: The importance of ideas. Reprinted here by permission.

And not just ideas for entire movies or TV shows — these pieces are made up of hundreds of little ideas that make the whole.

What’s always interesting to me is how some 100% Great Ideas didn’t start that way. One of the most famous is in BACK TO THE FUTURE…

They literally have one of the coolest, iconic time machines ever and it almost wasn’t.

Even character stuff — ideas that make the movie, stuff you would think “of course this has been here the whole time”, sometimes isn’t…

And you read it and you’re like — “Man, he should just be his son so this is awesome.” But it isn’t quite there yet….

And then someone had the idea. And then the entire thing works.

Speaking of the importance of ideas, here is how Bob Gale, co-writer of Back to the Future, first came up with the central concept for the movie:

The inspiration for coming up with the story is that I was visiting my parents in the summer of 1980, from St. Louis Missouri, and I found my father’s high-school yearbook in the basement. I’m thumbing through it and I find out that my father was the president of his graduating class, which I was completely unaware of. So there’s a picture of my dad, 18-years-old… The question came up in my head, ‘gee, what if I had gone to school with my dad, would I have been friends with him?’ That was where the light bulb went off.

In 2011, Daniel Kunka sold the spec script “Agent Ox”, in 2013 he sold the spec script “Bermuda Triangle”, and in 2014 he sold the spec script “Yellowstone Park” which went on to make the Black List.

To read my June 2013 interview with Daniel, go here.

To read all of the screenwriting tweetstorms I’ve aggregated on GITS, go here.