Culture Trends and Hollywood: Motherhood
If you’re searching for story ideas, something you should be doing, don’t overlook meta cultural trends. Hollywood certainly doesn’t. Case in point: Until Oz the Great and Powerful came out, the most successful movie of 2013 was Identity Thief, a concept every one of us has been hammered with through fear-mongering commercials for years now. Somebody came along — in this case Jerry Eeten and Craig Mazin (story) and Mazin (screenplay), the credited writers — and said, “Hey, that’s a good idea for a movie.” Voila! The movie is at $125M and counting in terms of B.O. revenue. So see, it pays to pay attention to what’s going on around us.
In a recent NYT article written by Alessandra Stanley, the subject was motherhood in movies and TV. Some excerpts:
For a while Hollywood was into bromance. Now there’s momance.
In her new movie, “Admission,” Tina Fey stars as an unmarried college administrator who belatedly regrets not being a mom. Ms. Fey played a single woman in her late 30s who hires a surrogate in “Baby Mama.” And, of course, on her late, great NBC sitcom, “30 Rock,” her character, Liz Lemon, spends the later part of the series agonizing about whether to have children, and then how.
So it’s pretty clear that for Ms. Fey motherhood is a longstanding preoccupation. But her choices also echo a broader cultural mood swing: pregnancy is an increasingly fertile field for romantic comedy. Heroines used to focus mostly on mating; lately the genre has stretched to include the pursuit — or avoidance — of offspring.
Professional women grappling with choices between career and home is not new territory. As the article notes, the 1987 movie Baby Boom starring Diane Keaton — “The life of super-yuppie J.C. is thrown into turmoil when she inherits a baby from a distant relative” — trafficked in this thematic terrain.
But just as obviously, it is an issue that is unlikely ever to go away. And how does Hollywood tend to treat the subject?
It used to be that women rarely had a first child after the age of 40, and it used to be that actresses were rarely cast as romantic leads after 40. (The exceptions to the rule often pop up in films by Nancy Meyers, who creates postmenopausal fantasies played out by Ms. Keaton and Meryl Streep.) Mass-market romance novels, which are almost entirely written and edited by women for women, tapped into the post-ingénue market decades ago, churning out breathless prose about pregnant women, single mothers, divorcées, widows, lesbians and others. But back when show business was ruled by men, the trajectory from girlfriend to wife to mother was a downward, one-way spiral; now there’s more mobility.
That’s partly thanks to actresses like Tina Fey and Kristen Wiig, who defy expectations that men won’t watch movies or shows geared to a female audience, and also because there is at least one woman running a major studio and lots of female writers, producers and directors who welcome seeing their own concerns — boyfriend, baby, ex-boyfriend — reflected on screen. But Hollywood comedies still color inside the lines of conventionality. Once a woman in her 30s gets her man, or can’t find him, then she has to want a baby — or cope with a baby she didn’t plan on. That’s become so inviolate a rule of comedy than anything else seems abhorrent: a steadfastly single, aging woman who is not grappling with infertility or hidden mommy yearnings is branded a psycho.
So is that it? Every mainstream Hollywood movie starring women in their 30s has by necessity something to do, directly or indirectly, with motherhood? Sure, there are buddy comedies like the upcoming The Heat starring Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock and action thrillers featuring kick-ass women like Gina Carano in Haywire. But otherwise, there’s some sort of inviolate rule that the question of maternity must be put in play in movies featuring female leads in their 30s and even 40s?
Well, you can fight it. Or you can join it. If this is what Hollywood is buying, how can you spin this culture trend in Hollywood — motherhood — into a fresh take on the subject?
What are some options? Girl gets baby. Girl loses baby. Girl gets guy with baby. Girl gets girl with baby. Girl moves in with sister who has baby. Girl adopts baby only it’s the baby from hell. Two girls and a baby. Three girls and a baby. A sorority and a baby.
You have to believe there is the maternal equivalent of Identity Thief just waiting to be mined…
Maybe you can mine it.
This is all just laying groundwork for the 4th annual A Story Idea Each Day for a Month series which begins on April 1st. I have been nabbing articles from online for a year now, sticking them into drafts, and soon I will unleash them upon you. Each one is free for you to take and do with whatever you want. But the main thing is to rev up your story-concept generating machine. The story concept is the single biggest decision you make when writing a spec script. And the best way I know how to come up with a great story concept is to generate a lot of them.
Of course, you could just take my upcoming webinar Story Concepts That Sell. It takes place Wednesday, March 27 at 2PM Pacific / 5PM Eastern. Even if you can’t attend, you will have access to the presentation and all accompanying written material for up to 1 year. Plus I am offering to critique 1 logline per participant. For more information, go here.