Gender Bending

If I said “gender bending movies,” you’d probably think of this, films with cross-dressing characters. But for a screenwriter engaged in a daily effort to generate story ideas, gender bending takes on a whole new meaning:

Take a movie genre or conceit and switch the gender of a key character.

We’ve got two prime examples of this at work in the marketplace right now, one on the acquisition & development side, and one a movie just about to hit theaters.

Per for the former, yesterday I noted this $2.5M pitch sale. Its premise:

In the romantic comedy, Julia [Roberts] will play a working woman married to a stay-at-home husband. She loses her job, their roles are reversed, and she has to adjust to motherhood.

“Roles are reversed.” What Mr. Mom did in the 80s — a man assuming the role of a stay-at-home mother — this comedy reverses the roles again — a woman assuming the role of a stay-at-home father. Each project is a reflection of current cultural trends with this newest project hitting home because almost 50% of working men are attracted to the idea of at-home fatherhood, and 59% of women work outside the home. So you can see why Amy Pascal at Sony plunked down several million dollars for this project. Well, that and Julia Roberts attached to star!

Then there’s the movie Salt:

The National Organization for Women should send Angelina Jolie a nice cheese basket (or vice versa).

The world’s most famous actress-humanitarian might not have single-handedly erased gender inequality in the movie industry, but she sure has struck a major blow for actresses. How else to explain her $20 million payout for Sony’s next big summer release, “Salt,” an action project that originally was written to star a man — no less than Tom Cruise?

Then someone had the idea to gender bend the story and voila — we get this:

So as you brainstorm story concepts, play around with switching genders. Could be your Protagonist. Maybe your Nemesis. Even as you develop your story’s supporting characters — Mentors, Attractors, Tricksters — why not do the opposite of your instinct and reverse the gender that you had originally imagined.

You can “what if” gender bend all day long.

What if Snow White was a man?

What if Rocky was a woman?

What if the Protagonist in Working Girl was a man?

What ifthe killer in Psycho was a woman?

What if the lead in Bring It On was a guy?

What if the Protagonist in The Verdict was a woman?

And so on…

Your turn!

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