80s Movies and Story Concept: Part 2
I want to thank each of the members of the GITS community who contributed a guest post to the Classic 80s Movies series (you can find links to all of the entries here).
I was inspired to run the Classic 80s Movies series because that decade, perhaps more than any other, embraced the idea of high concept. Let’s be clear: A high concept does not guarantee a great story idea. Nor does it necessarily make the basis for a great movie. Some writers will never traffic in high concepts and if it’s a foreign way of thinking for them, they shouldn’t.
But the reality is high concept has been a part of Hollywood’s filmmaking business since the industry’s inception, even if the phrase didn’t come into use decades later. What is the essence of the story? Can you distill it into one or two lines?
I mean check out the plot summary for the 1932 movie It Happened One Night which won 5 Oscars: “A spoiled heiress, running away from her family, is helped by a man who’s actually a reporter looking for a story.”
As noted in this post:
We can even go more granular by talking about story-conceit, which I would define as the “central premise of the story.” With the movie K-9, it was the premise of a human cop teamed up with a dog cop. With Inception, it’s the premise that people can enter into other people’s dream states. With Groundhog Day, it’s the premise that someone has to relive a day over and over again.
In Part 1 of my analysis of 80s movies in this series, the big takeaway was that oftentimes, the best story ideas are simple ones, concepts that have at their core a strong story-conceit. Now consider all 33 movies members of the GITS community selected to write guest posts about:
Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back
Note how many of these would qualify as high concept. A lot.
Here’s another takeaway: A strong story concept will almost always have a strong tagline. Let’s consider some of these 33 movies:
Back to the Future: Marty McFly just broke the time barrier. He’s only got one week to get it fixed.
Die Hard: Forty Stories. Twelve Terrorists. One Cop.
Real Genius: Who ELSE can turn lasers into light shows, aircraft into armchairs, and high-tech into hijinks?
RoboCop: Part man. Part machine. All cop. The future of law enforcement.
The Breakfast Club: Five strangers with nothing in common, except each other.
The Karate Kid: He taught him the secret to Karate lies in the mind and heart. Not in the hands.
Tron: A world inside the computer where man has never been. Never before now.
Note: Both Die Hard (Forty Stories. Twelve Terrorists. One Cop.) and RoboCop (Part man. Part machine. All cop.) get an A+ in the six word challenge.
So one thing you can do when assessing potential story ideas is try your hand at writing some taglines for it. If they’re good and come easily, you’re probably onto something. If not, it’s worth putting that particular story concept under more scrutiny.
Let me repeat something from the previous post:
I am not saying you have to think in terms of high concepts. However they are a big part of the Hollywood movie business. Thus if you are capable of thinking in those terms and you do find a high concept story that has a unique spin to it, and you feel passionate about writing it, good for you.
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Frankly most spec scripts do not even get past Hollywood’s starting gate precisely because they do not have a strong enough story concept. Therefore whether you think in terms of mainstream, commercial high concepts or not, I can virtually guarantee you would be doing yourself a big favor by devoting more time generating and developing story concepts.
80s movies serve as a reminder to the importance of having a strong story concept. Push yourself to come up with the very best story idea you can when writing your next spec script.
Did you learn anything from the series on Classic 80s Movies?
Would any of you be up to do another series with your guest posts? If so, what decade should we do next?
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