A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 6

This is the third year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Several reasons which I’ll work my through during this series of posts. Here’s another one:

Story ideas are worth gold in Hollywood.

I’m just going to give you one example. Around 1990, writer Stephen Brill came up with this idea: “A self-centered lawyer is sentenced to community service coaching a rag tag youth hockey team.” That eventually became the movie The Mighty Ducks. That seemingly innocuous family comedy grossed $51M, not bad for a movie with a reported $10M budget.

Then came D2: The Mighty Ducks. Then D3: The Mighty Ducks. Then “Mighty Ducks”, a TV series. Then Mighty Ducks the Movie: The First Face-Off, a DTV animated movie. And then came this:

The Anaheim Ducks [formerly the Anaheim Mighty Ducks]. An NHL franchise. A professional franchise worth an estimated $188M.

All based on the fact that one day, a writer was walking around and came up with a story idea about a youth hockey team named the Mighty Ducks.

As I said… in Hollywood, story ideas are worth gold.

Today’s story idea: The Ghost Town of New York City:

Just miles from America’s most populous city is a neighborhood that’s almost entirely abandoned, its streets flooding with three feet of water every time it rains, its houses soft with rot, its yards littered with trash and debris. ‘The Hole’ is a five-block ‘border town’ between Brooklyn and Queens, and at thirty feet below sea level, it’s too close to the water table to hook up to the sewer system.

‘The Hole’ was a bit of an open secret before a blog post by urban explorer and photographer Nathan Kensinger piqued the interest of documentary filmmakers Courtney Sell and Billy Feldman, who interviewed the few people still living in the area. Many residents of the surrounding metro area still don’t know it exists. It was a body dumping ground for the Mafia for many years.

Images taken by Kensinger and his friend Jake Dobkin show one eerily still urban scene after another, with very few signs of the bustling city life that flourishes just blocks away. The decaying buildings and out-of-control plant life call to mind the History Channel series ‘Life After People’, which examines what would happen to the remains of our civilizations if humans were to disappear.

Sometimes a story can arise from a location. My movie Alaska began with a fascination with that state, an immense place and to this day largely unexplored.

So here we have The Hole. Images that feel like the rural South. And yet it lies between Brooklyn and Queens.

What to do with this?

I read that article and I zero in on this: Mafia body dumping ground. Allow me to spin a crime thriller.

We open with a pair of mobsters transporting their soon-to-be victim to The Hole. Yet another killing. Yet another burial. Only this time, the good citizens of this five block corner of Hell decide… fuck that shit! We are tired of being a dumping ground.

I’m seeing the pair of mobsters being corralled by the locals. Held captive along with the now-lucky victim. Or maybe not. It seems the locals have gotten in touch with the mobster’s higher-ups. You wanna see your boys alive, we want $1M.

The mob guys: Fuck you.

The locals: Okay, how about we provide this map detailing where every single goddammed body you’ve dumped in our neighborhood to the police?

And did we mention we’ve been videotaping your body dumping exercises?

Here come the mobsters.

And here are the locals.

Both loaded up with guns, ammo and seriously bad attitudes.

Oh, wait. I forgot to mention this. The Hole is home to The Federation of Black Cowboys, a collection of horse wranglers who hold an annual rodeo nearby, tan leather, and show youths the way around town a saddle.

That’s right. We got ourselves a gun blazing, body splattering, shoot ’em up Western right here in NYC.

Welcome to The Hole.

How about you? What would you do with this premise?

Another idea for you. And it’s free!

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. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.

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