A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 11

This is the seventh year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Last week I provided a daily explanation about why you should make it a habit to be generating story ideas. This week, I’ll give you some tips on how to come up with stories.

Tip: Halliwell’s Film Guide.

This is based on the anecdote I heard about Woody Guthrie. Having written 4,000 songs in his life, he was asked how he came up with so many melodies. His answer: “Well, I take a melody I like, and I change it a lil’ here, and change it a lil’ there, and I make it my own.”

Same thing with Halliwell’s. You can read a post I wrote about it all the way back in November 2008, how you can read through the 24,000 movie listings — each with a logline — then gender and genre-bend your life to creative bliss.

Today’s story: Put The Girl in Danger! The Radical Courage of Silent Movie Stuntwomen.

Helen Gibson’s strong, handsome face and dark hair gave her the look of someone who would try anything. In 1915, while in her early twenties, she was doubling for the star of the hit serial The Hazards of Helen. In one stunt she was supposed to leap from the roof of the station to the top of a moving train. Years later, she called it her most dangerous stunt. “The distance between the station and the train was accurately measured,” she said, and she had practiced the jump several times while the train was standing still. But for the shot, the train would be picking up speed for about a quarter of a mile. “I was not nervous as it approached and I leaped without hesitation,” she recalled. She landed safely, but the rocking motion of the train rolled her straight toward the end of the car. Just before being pitched off, “I caught hold of an air vent and hung on.” Then, with a sense of the dramatic, Gibson let her body “dangle over the edge to increase the effect on the screen.” She brought the same strength and flair to scores of other action scenes.

Silent movie actresses like Helen Gibson were the first stuntwomen. They were actresses who could ride horses, drive cars, and do high dives. From about 1910 to the early 1920s, they proved that the “weaker sex” could perform surprising physical feats. During that time, the overlapping advent of movies, automobiles, and airplanes, as well as the possibility of women’s suffrage, set in motion a major cultural transformation in America and around the world. Before they worked in movies, many stuntmen had been boxers, carnival performers, cowboys, or soldiers. Their female counterparts were actresses, dancers, and singers, but most of them had no training or experience in physically demanding performance skills. For women who, up to this time, had been restrained by limited opportunities, these brief, innovative, exuberant years must have felt liberating.

Talk about acting without a net. Check this out!

If you go to YouTube and search for “Helen Gibson stunts,” there are literally dozens of examples of her work in silent films. Go to her Wikipedia page. She had an amazing career doing stunts like this:

Traveling at full speed on a motorcycle chasing after a runaway freight train, Gibson rode through a wooden gate, shattering it completely, up a station platform, and through the open doors of a boxcar on a siding, with her machine traveling through the air until it landed on a flatcar in a passing train.

We are talking total bad ass!

You could try a traditional biopic, but those are a tough sell nowadays. Another option would be to approach it as a ‘snapshot bio,’ focusing on a particular compressed period in Gibson’s life.

Or what if the story included two fictionalized female stuntwomen: A veteran a la Gibson and a younger woman. A competition ensues. The stunts keep getting crazier. By the way, this is in keeping with the wild wild west approach to filmmaking at the time in which studios pushed for more dangerous and elaborate action on screen.

Another option: Contemporize the story. A famed stuntwoman April whose body is wracked with injuries. Getting out of bed each morning requires all sorts of stretching, back cracks, and pain relievers. She’s had a psychic reading or astrologer tell her not to take this next movie gig — bad juju on the horizon — but April needs the money. Let’s say she has an estranged daughter from a failed marriage and she’s hoping to put the finishing touches on some savings to help pay her daughter’s way through college in hopes of buying the girl’s affection. A desperate plan.

The story covers a few weeks on the set, a series of stunts in which April doubles for the star of the movie, a famous actress. Addicted to pain killers, struggling to avoid falling off the wagon and drinking again, facing all sorts of pressure during the movie shoot, April fights her inner demons while managing to pull off one stunt after another… barely. All leading up to the most insane stunt of her life, one which keeps getting more dangerous due to the creative ‘vision’ of the movie’s egomaniacal director. It’s a potential death-trap, but the producers offers a substantial bonus if April will take it on. And now it’s the day of the big shoot…

There you go: Three versions of my eleventh story idea for the month. And they’re yours. Free! What would you do with the story concept?

Each day this month, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Gender bend, genre bend, what if. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments (hit Reply to join the conversation). And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.