Story Ideas: Obituaries
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: Obituaries.
Sounds morbid, right? I guess it is… a little. But you’d be amazed at the inspiration you can find in the details of people’s lives. You can come up with great names. You can stumble across interesting jobs. And occasionally you can find a compelling story. Like this one I found back in 2000:
Maj. Ivan Hirst, the British Army officer responsible for getting the Volkswagen factory running again after World War II in what is now Wolfsburg, Germany, died March 10 at his home near Marsden, in Yorkshire, England. He was 84.
Without his efforts, Volkswagen probably could never have shifted from its failed dream of producing a people’s car for the Third Reich into the economic powerhouse that built the Beetle, the symbol of German recovery.
”Anyone who drives a VW owes a lot to Major Hirst,” said Ryan Lee Price, editor of VW Trends magazine, a publication for Beetle owners.
I think this is a remarkable story. You’ve got the FOOW (Fish-Out-Of-Water) element: A British soldier in post-war Germany. There’s a fascinating historical period that has rarely been explored on film — the experience of German civilians after World War II. And there is this iconic automobile, the VW Beetle (I drove one as a teenager in southern California).
At the heart of the story, the evolving connection between this British soldier and what I imagine being a poor, starving, and broken community of civilians in Wolfsburg, Germany. After the war, the Allies essentially did little to assist Germany in its efforts to rebuild. Indeed, during 1945–1947, it’s estimated that over 1 million Germans died due to starvation, sickness, and bitter cold winters.
Against this backdrop you have Maj. Ivan Hirst who singlehandedly found a way to raised up a community and in so doing, paved a path for Germany to rebuild its economy.
That’s the plotline. But it’s the themeline that interests me most, the emotional journey of Hirst and the core group of German civilians with whom he worked, coming from such polar opposite positions — after all, they had been arch enemies during WWII — to what I can only imagine were deeply forged friendships.
So to help you generate story ideas, you might make it a habit to check out the obits.
Tomorrow: The key ingredient to success with story concepts.
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