Day 05 – Where Do Good Script Ideas Come From?

Welcome to Day #5!  Where do good script ideas come from?

You want the short answer?  Anywhere and everywhere.  Anything from plastic grocery bags to LSD trips have inspired films.

Many times someone will come up to me and tell me they’ve got a movie idea of epic awesome-sauce.  At times like that I wish I’d taken that Ninjutsu class with the smoke-bomb vanishing Ninja Turtle strategery.  It would come in handy.

Them: “Hey, David, I accidentally overfed my pet Komodo dragon and suddenly had this movie idea of epic awesome-sauce!”

Me: “Ninja!  Vanish!” Bamf!

Them: “…”

The reality is most of these movie ideas of epic awesome-sauce rarely add up to more than maybe decent movie scene mediocre-gravy.  The idea might sustain a scene.  Maybe.  Perhaps a short film.  But it will NOT fuel an entire movie.  Not saying that those movies would never get made.  I’m 96% positive that some MGM and United Artist executives and directors were chilling in their hot tubs after a liquid power lunch and one of them says:

Them: “Hey, dudes, what if this Hot tub…(pause for effect)….were a Time Machine to the 80s!”

Robert Redford: “Ninja! Vanish!” Bamf!

Them: “…”

Have you ever stopped to think about where Hollywood gets their movie ideas?  Well here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of their more regular mental fishing ponds:

01) Books – “Harry Potter”, “The Passion”, “Hunt for Red October”, “Mean Girls”, “Twilight”, “Mars Needs Moms”, “The Lincoln Lawyer”, “Water for Elephants”, “Mr. Popper’s Penguins”, “Winnie-the-Pooh”, “Sherlock Holmes” etc. etc. etc.

02) Urban Legends – “Ghost in the Darkness” – William Goldman was inspired to write the screenplay after a trip to Kenya where the Tsavo Maneater story was told to him at a camp in the Masai Mara.  Intrigued, Goldman wrote that it was one of only two outstanding true stories he has come upon in his 40+ years of writing.  The other was “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”.  It can also be argued that “The Blair Witch” film stemmed from Urban legends as well.

03) Family History – “Braveheart” – Randall Wallace was researching his own family history when he came across this amazing hero…great great great great great great grand-pappy, William Wallace.

04) Comic books – “Superman”, “Spiderman”, “Sin City”, “Thor”, “Dark Knight”, “Suckerpunch”, “300″, “Garfield”, “Kickass”, etc etc.

05) Video games – “Resident Evil”, “Final Fantasy”, “Doom”, “Hitman”, “Max Payne”, “Street Fighter”, “Prince of Persia”, etc. etc.

06) Spitballing ideas like ‘What if…”? For example, what if Indian Jones were a woman = “Tomb Raider”; or what if the earth were directly in the path of a killer comet = “Armaggedon”; what if robots took over the earth = Matrix or Terminator or iRobot etc etc etc

07)  Personal history with a twist – “Napolean Dynamite” or “Almost Famous” were similar but different to the screenwriters’ actual stories growing up…only embellished for the big screen.

08) Fantasies & Daydreams – “Agent Cody Banks” – a teen boy’s fantasy of being a super spy in high school

09) Current trends – “Dodgeball” (a middle school P.E. game is reborn in sports clubs/gyms across the U.S.), “Duet” (Karoake fanatics), “Fast and the Furious” (street racing), “Wedding Crashers” (self-explanatory), “Step Up” (underground street dance-offs)

10)  Bedtime stories  – “The Princess Bride” – William Goldman made up this story as a bedtime tale for his daughters which later got expanded into a Screenplay…and arguably one of the Top Most Quotable films of all time!

11) Previous Film Remakes – “Sabrina”, “Ocean’s 11”, “The Thomas Crown Affair”, “The Great Gatsby”, “Cleopatra”, “Excalibur”, “Three Musketeers”

12) TV Shows – “The Dukes of Hazzard”, “Mission Impossible”, “Charlie’s Angels”, “Smurfs”, “Serenity”, “Brady Bunch”, “Scooby Doo”, any of the SNL films like “Waynes World”, “Blues Brothers”, “Coneheads”, etc)

13) Jokes/Standup Comedy – “Mr. Saturday Night”, “Funny People”, any early Woody Allen film

14) Sports – “Dreamer”, “Bagger Vance”, “Coach Carter”, “Angels in the Outfield”, “Secretariat”, “Hoosiers”, “Remember the Titans”, “Blades of Glory”, “Balls of Fury”, etc etc etc

15) Toys & Games – “Transformers”, “Battleship”, “Clue”, “Viewmaster” (not kidding…it’s coming!)

16) Cross-Pollenation of two existing ideas – “Fast & Furious” meets James Bond = “XXX” with Vin Diesel; “Die Hard” on a Bus = “Speed”

17) Movie ideas sparked by drug use – “The Doors”, the last 1/3 of “Apocalypse Now”, “Friday”, “Fantasia”, “Inception”, and most films by Charlie Kauffman

And on and on and on and on.  It takes some time to develop the movie muscle in your mind which can help you sort through the decent movie ideas from the garbage ideas that won’t get anywhere.  With time and practice and education, you can hopefully learn to discount a bad idea long before you’ve written an entire script and 4 drafts of it.  That comes with experience though.

One day you’ll be overfeeding your Komodo dragon and think:

SELF: “This would make a hilarious movie of epic awesome-sauce…”

OTHER SELF: “Ninja!  Vanish!” Bamf!

SELF: “…”

Trust me, it may lead to some self-existential drama, but it’ll save a lot of time wasted at the keyboard.

You’re welcome!

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Ninjas, Cyborgs, Crazy Russian Killers and Hard-boiled Detectives

Animation phenom Chuck Jones tells the story of an art class he took where the professor gravely informed the students that they each had 100,000 bad drawings inside themselves.  And that the sooner they got those out and on paper, the sooner they would get to the good drawings.

I’ve always wondered how that applies to scripts and stories and films.  How much bad dialogue do I have to write before I get to HIS GIRL FRIDAY or PRINCESS BRIDE?  How many sub-par plots do I have to wrestle to paper before I strike gold, like GOOD WILL HUNTING?

Did you know that some highly experienced Hollywood writers will write out 100 new loglines to get to one that might hold promise?

Consider your own film evolution.  With any luck and due diligence, your work is improving.  10% Inspiration.  90% Perspiration, that’s what they say.  I look back, amused, at some of my first short films about such important topics as Ninjas, Cyborgs, Crazy Russian serial killers and Hard-boiled Detectives.  Although I’m a huge proponent of adding Ninjas to spruce up any film plot (maybe FIREPROOF 2?  Hopefully?)  I am happy to report I have broadened my horizons.

But I had to learn an important lesson about creative juices:  we are the sum total of the films we watch.  Where did my ideas come from?  From the film diet I was ingesting.  Sci-fi, Action-Adventure, Chop-socky, Detective stories.

There’s an informed line from LITTLE WOMEN where grown up Teddy is talking with grown up Amy March and tells her “my ‘music’ is no better than your ‘art’…mediocre copies of another man’s genius.”

We have to understand that our greatest, most original stories inside of us are buried right now under heaps and piles of yesterday’s movies.  Go to any student film festival out there and you will not see a lot of truly original work.  What you will see are a bunch of THE OFFICE-like mockumentaries, or little Quentin Tarantino clones or horror knock-offs — mini-renditions of whatever is playing the theaters or TV at the time.

This is your first and most basic instinct as a filmmaker — to duplicate what you have seen.  And that’s an important first step in learning.  To mimic.  It’s how we learn to talk.  It’s how we learn most things.  But we have to go further.  What Chuck Jones’ surly professor knew was that we had to dig past all of that junk to get to the good stuff.  The ORIGINAL stuff.

Have you heard about the 10,000 hour rule?  It comes from a book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell who writes:

“The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

10K hours — what that amounts to is about 5 years of 40 hours/week.  Practicing.  Perfecting.  Honing.

Perhaps you’ve spent 10,000 hours watching movies.  Well, that won’t make you a filmmaker.  That makes you a professional audience.  To become an expert filmmaker you simply have to accumulate 10,000 hours making movies.

So what are you waiting for?  Start digging past all the junk and get to the good stuff.

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