Why movie story types?

This week, I picked up on a series I started awhile back: Movie Story Types. What’s the reasoning behind that? Two things:

* To get you to think like agents, managers, producers, and studio execs think.

* To help you brainstorm story concepts.

Per the former, when an industry insider considers a script, pitch, novel, non-fiction book or any other type of project, invariably one of their considerations will be its story type or genre. Why? Because they are mindful of what types are hot in the current marketplace. Because they know what genres studios need to fill to balance out their development slates. Because they are always looking for a new spin on a familiar story type. In other words, when an agent, manager, producer or studio executive thinks about a story, one way they look at it is through the lens of genre or story type. Therefore from a screenwriting standpoint, it behooves you to grasp that mindset.

But how can movie story types, genres, sub-genres and cross-genres help with developing story concepts? In a word: brainstorming. And how to brainstorm with story types? Here are a few tips:

* Genre-Bend: Take a successful story concept and switch its genre. Tootsie as a revenge. Fatal Attraction as a comedy. Date Night as a thriller.

* Gender-Bend: Shift the gender of a lead character. The Expendables as women. Bridesmaids as men.

* Age Up/Age Down: Moneyball with Little League players = Bad News Bears. Horrible Bosses with high school kids becomes a variation of Teaching Miss Tingle.

* Stereo Types: Take one movie story type (Contained Thriller) and partner it with another story type (Post-Apocalypse), then you have Seth & Jay vs the Apocalypse.

* Mix and Match: Take a genre and match it with a story type. For example, Action with Body Switch and you have Face/Off. Western and Time Travel = Back to the Future 3.

If you do like I do with the annual A Story Idea Each Day for a Month series — you can check out the 2010 list here and the 2011 list here — you can literally take a story idea and go through every permutation of genre, gender, age, and type to come up with dozens of variations. Each becomes the potential starting point to develop a story concept.

It’s the grand old Hollywood tradition of recycling ideas and plays directly into the wheelhouse of the movie studio business ethos: similar but different.

So I will continue to post movie story types for the next few weeks. And if you want add some, please do so in comments.

For the entire list of Movie Story Types, which I am updating weekly with these new posts, you can go here.
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