Story Ideas: Images
As it turned out, our collective conversation about “Go Into The Story: The Quest” over the last couple of weeks has, I think, sharpened everyone’s awareness about the importance of working with the strongest story ideas possible.
Let me repeat something I can not verify factually, but I know it in my gut to be true: At least 50% of the value of your screenplay to a Hollywood buyer is the story concept.
And that’s why as you all were busily working up your loglines for “The Quest” — all 4000 of them! — I hammered you with a daily series of posts:
Story Ideas: The two most important words are ‘what if’
Story Ideas: Halliwell’s Film Guide
Story Ideas: Think international
Story Ideas: Test your concept
Story Ideas: Challenge yourself
Story Ideas: Get my [bleeping] attention!
So this week, I propose to round out this subject of generating story ideas with five more posts, thus giving you a myriad number of ways to approach this incredibly important aspect of the screenwriting process.
Today: Images.
What inspired me to continue on with this series is someone on Twitter — and please forgive me, whoever you are, but I did not copy your moniker — suggested that images is a good way to inspire story ideas.
Indeed one of the great Hitchcock thrillers began with an image. Here is an excerpt from a post I did on screenwriter Ernest Lehman:
One day Hitchcock said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a chase across the face of Mount Rushmore.’ Terrific, I thought, and wrote it down. He told me all the ideas he wanted to do, and I wrote them down. Lots and lots of ideas. He wanted to do a sequence with the longest dolly shot in history, taking place at the assembly line of the Ford Motor company. It would start at the beginning of the assembly line. The camera follows a car being put together before it’s driven off the assembly line and they discover there’s a body in the backseat. He always wanted to do a scene in the General Assembly of the United Nations. Somebody is giving a speech to the Assembly and refuses to continue until the delegate from Peru wakes up. So someone taps the delegate from Peru, and he falls over dead. I wrote all these ideas down, but the only idea that is actually in the picture is the chase across Mount Rushmore. I also wrote out a list of possible protagonists, like a Frank Sinatra-type singer, or a famous sports announcer, or a newspaper man or a Madison advertising executive. I decided the easiest thing for me to write was a Madison Avenue advertising executive, not because I knew any, but because I know how to stereotype him.
That’s right. North by Northwest started with an image in Hitchcock’s mind: A chase across the face of Mount Rushmore.
Years ago, I remember reading an article on the Coen brothers in which they said the initial moment of inspiration for their movie Miller’s Crossing was a hat blowing in the wind through a forest. You can see that image in this clip at the :20 mark:
Indeed hats are a sort of motif in Miller’s Crossing tied to theme, witness this dialogue:
Verna: What’re you chewin’ over?
Tom: Dream I had once. I was walkin’ in the woods, I don’t know why. Wind came up and blew me hat off.
Verna: And you chased it, right? You ran and ran, finally caught up to it and you picked it up. But it wasn’t a hat anymore and it changed into something else, something wonderful.
Tom: Nah, it stayed a hat and no, I didn’t chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasin’ his hat.
“Nothing more foolish than a man chasin’ his hat.”
An image may not only inspire a story idea, it can become part of an important narrative theme.
So as you bandy about in search of the Next Great Spec Script Idea, whenever an image pops into your mind, don’t let it escape into the ether. Catch it, play around with it, ponder it.
It may lead you to a great story.
Tomorrow: Titles.
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