A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 7
This is the fifth 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:
The story idea is how everyone in Hollywood short-hands your script.
From the first moment your script enters into submission process, where it’s covered and at the very top there is a logline, through the marketing of your movie, where posters, newsprint, radio, TV spots, and web content all derive from it, your story idea is the touchstone for everything that happens.
So over time, I think it is fair to say that story ideas have become the lifeblood of Hollywood, what people traffic in all day long. The more you can think like that, play to the way Hollywood people interact with stories, the better your chances of success in the business.
Today’s story idea: 18 Radically Successful People Who Lived With Their Parents.
This is one of those ideas where it’s just the tiniest sliver of a conceit, but there is something there: Adult child co-habitating with parents. While it seems like a TV concept, and frankly something we’ve seen many times before, I thought what if we could spin this from a domestic comedy into something else?
I go through the list of the 18 “radically successful people” and zero in on this fellow:
Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman is a Russian mathematician best known for solving the Poincaré Conjecture in 2003 (the problem had remained unsolved for 99 years before Perelman came along). Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal for his work, but he declined the award (including the million dollars it came with) and refused to appear in public. From the door of the St. Petersburg apartment he shares with his mother Lubov (also a mathematician), Perelman told a reporter, “I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.” By all accounts, he’s still crashing with his mom at age 46.
I am reminded of three things:
* A nonfiction book I read titled “The Man Who Loved Only Numbers” about another famous mathematician Paul Erdős. It’s a fascinating story about a genius who has many of the basic quirky traits we associate with high IQ people.
* Good Will Hunting which, as legend has it, did not start out as a drama. From Wikipedia:
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon originally wrote the screenplay as a thriller: Young man in the rough-and-tumble streets of South Boston who possesses a superior intelligence is targeted by the FBI to become a G-Man. Castle Rock Entertainment president Rob Reiner later urged them to drop the thriller aspect of the story and to focus on the relationship between Will Hunting (Damon) and his psychiatrist (Williams).
What if we went the path of the original conceit of Good Will Hunting? A thriller featuring a math genius? But how to get into the plot? That led me to my third association:
* Three Days of the Condor: Here is the setup of that thriller via IMDB:
Joe Turner (Robert Redford) is an employee of the CIA. He’s not a secret agent, his job is to read, and he and his co-workers at the American Literary Historical Society read everything; books, comics, magazines, and they scan everything into a database to be cross-checked against real CIA operations. On a rainy December morning it’s business as usual, so no one notices the non-descript man sitting in plain sedan across the street from Joe’s building, checking off names of every employee as they enter.
Inside, Joe looks for an answer to a letter he’d sent to the main CIA office at Langley. He has a theory about connections he’s noticed between operations in Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and other locations around the world, but so far there’s no response. Noon approaches, and it’s his turn to go out for lunch. Since it’s still raining, he ducks out the basement door (which is against regulations) and cuts through several back alleys to the deli. Meanwhile, the sedan out front quietly pulls away after signaling to 3 men waiting in the street. They move in with quiet determination and knock on the front door.
At the deli around the block, Joe picks up lunch for the others and then runs back. Since the rain has stopped, he goes to the front door, and buzzes the security intercom to be let in, but gets no answer. Pushing on the door, he finds it is unlocked, which it never is. Inside he finds a scene of carnage. Everyone has been murdered, shot to death in the few minutes he has been gone. Fighting down his shock and horror, he grabs a pistol from the receptionist’s desk and flees.
So what if our Protagonist is much like Mr. Perelman? He is a genius. Stratospheric IQ. But he has some associated issues — over-excitabilities, social anxiety, perhaps obsessive compulsion disorder. This forces him to live with his mother. And far from leading a withdrawn, sullen lifestyle, what if they actually function quite well together. Indeed, they could be happy, even if essentially restricted to the small apartment in which they have lived for decades.
Perhaps our Protagonist (let’s call him Matt as a nod to his specialty Math) has won a prestigious award by solving a centuries old academic problem which netted him over $1M which means he and his mother (let’s call her Helen) can live in comfort. They listen to classical music. They have groceries and food delivered to the apartment. High speed Internet, Netflix, and Skype allow them to interface with the world beyond their walls. Helen is his personal assistant and source of sage advice. This allows Matt to focus on his passion: Math.
In essence, they have created an idyllic little world and within these walls, everything is pretty much perfect.
That is going to change.
Matt is connected to most of the great math minds throughout the world via Skype. While rarely reaching out himself, he often receives a dozen calls a day from fellow geniuses to commiserate over some theory or equation. His social awkwardness is minimized in this context because he is comfortable with it, both the buffer the computer monitor screen provides, and the fact he knows these people and the subject matter they discuss.
One day, he receives a call from an old friend who blurts out a rather frenzied string of words that make no sense. But Matt’s mother, who often acts as his secretary, jots down the verbiage onto a pad of paper. Suddenly the friend’s line goes dark.
Matt studies the words. He sees a pattern. It’s a message in code.
Late that night, Matt’s mother is asleep, but Matt, as is his habit, is caught up in a blur of mental activity, breaking the code of his friend’s message.
That’s when the noises start. Someone at the door. Matt asks who they are. No response. Now sounds of footsteps on the roof. Matt tries to call the police. The phone lines have been cut. Electricity shut off. He wakes his mother.
Suddenly a hailstorm of bullets…
You get the picture. Matt and his mother manage to escape, now find themselves on the run. The message his friend sent (who has been, as it turns out, killed) contains some secret that some Powers That Be do not want exposed.
But Matt has the mind to figure it out. Unfortunately he and Helen now have to make their way through the real world, one which Matt has not directly interfaced with for years and years. And now, of course, his psychological issues manifest themselves at the worst possible times.
It’s Little Man Tate meets Marathon Man.
And by the way, that could be interesting if Matt was a child genius.
In either case, the mother goes to default mode: Protector. Where they use Matt’s mental skills to help them survive while on the run, Helen discovers heretofore unknown strength (not like a superhero, but like a real live Mother who will do ANYTHING to protect her son) which she uses in any encounter with the string of Bad Guys who chase them.
There you go: My seventh story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!
Now it’s your turn. What would you do with this story setup?
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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