Real Life Story Concepts: They’re Everywhere
I just started my one-week Core II: Concept class today. Lecture 1 is entitled “The Concept of High Concept” and in it, I make this point:
Most people in Hollywood would probably define ‘high concept’ this way: A story that can be summed up in 1–2 lines. However just because you can summarize a story in a few lines does not necessarily mean it’s a high concept. For example the description, “A manipulative woman and a roguish man carry on a turbulent love affair in the American South during the Civil War and Reconstruction” does not make Gone With The Wind a high concept movie. It isn’t. In fact the film is in some ways the antithesis of high concept because it is a sprawling epoch featuring dozens of characters, numerous semi-independent subplots, and a multitude of themes. It’s also proof a movie does not have to be a high concept to be both great and successful.
No, in defining ‘high concept,’ we need to be more specific: A story idea that can be summed up in 1–2 lines. A high concept movie must have a clean, simple, and basic idea.
We can even go more granular by talking about the idea of a story-conceit, which we would define as the “central premise of the story.” With the movie K-9, it was the premise of a human cop teamed up with a dog cop. With Inception, it’s the premise that people can enter into other people’s dream states. With Groundhog Day, it’s the premise that someone has to relive a day over and over again.
So here’s the real world all around us. Story concepts everywhere. Once you’ve found one, a great way to assess it is to ask, “What is its story-conceit?” To this point, I posted this in the Core II: Concept course site today:
Here is a great example of how something that happened in real life inspired a movie project: Ice Cream Truck Driver War Getting Movie Treatment.
Oh, fudge, get ready for sundae bloody sundae.
New Line has picked up the film rights to The Cold War, a magazine article based on the true-life battle between rival ice cream truck drivers in Salem, Ore.
Andrew Lazar of Mad Chance and Joshuah Bearman and Joshua Davis of Epic Magazine are producing. The article, written by David Wolman and Julian Smith, was originally published on the Epic website and later featured on Radiolab.
The Cold War article centered on feuding ice cream vendors: Dennis Roeper, considered an all-American family man, and Efrain Escobar, a Mexican immigrant and aspiring entrepreneur. What began as a simple turf war escalated into an all-out ice cream offensive with price slashing, tailgating and even arson. The two men found themselves on the verge of destroying the thing they loved the most: the joy of ice cream.
In its own way, the article looked at the modern job market, immigration and even the meaning of the American Dream.
It’s a movie. You can see the story-conceit right away: Ice Cream War. And it was right there in real life. Hell, here’s a video of one such ice cream war in the U.K.:
I did a blog post yesterday about a movie which opened this weekend: Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. Same thing, movie based on a real life story, only in this case, two guys actually created the story-conceit themselves.
One day some years ago, I was walking in L.A. to a lunch meeting with a writer friend and he stopped me to say, “Smell that?” He took a deep breath, then said, “That’s the aroma of a million dollar story idea… it’s around here somewhere.”
His point: We have to keep our senses open at all times because you never know when something we see, hear, touch, or even smell in the world around us can inspire a great story concept. Then drill down and ask: What is its story-conceit? If you can find that special core thing, that hook… then you may have found yourself a winning idea.
Now more than ever the quality of a story concept is key to the marketability of a spec script. It’s not too late to sign up for my one-week Core II: Concept class, which covers everything you need to learn about generating, developing, and assessing story ideas. To enroll, go here.