HIGH CONCEPT IS MY CONCEPT

by William C. Martell

On a message board a while back, someone said they were tired of those DIE HARD in a blank script. They never wanted to see another DIE HARD IN A BLANK movie for as long as they lived - because the idea had been done to death. I took that as a challenge. I believe that there are a million great ideas in the world, all you have to do is look fir them.

The problem is always when it's 95% DIE HARD and only 5% new material - my problem with both UNDER SIEGE and AIRFORCE ONE.

I did a tip a while back called Challenging The Elements - part of the advice in that tip is to look at each element in your story idea and make sure it's the best "piece of a story" it can be...

That's the trick to DIE HARD IN A ______ - finding the best element.

Probably 99.9% look at that and come up with obvious locations: The White House, A Shopping Mall, A Submarine (oops - that's my HBO World Premiere Movie CRASH DIVE). The other 1% come up with something more creative - because that's what this job is all about.

DIE HARD IN A _____ - the ____ isn't just a location, it's someplace/something you can be trapped. Sure, you can be trapped in a submarine... and HBO will even make that film. But when you set your imagine free to find other ways/places/forms of being trapped, you come up with trapped in a TIME, or trapped in a BEHAVIOR, or trapped in an ALTERNATE SPACE, or trapped in a NIGHTMARE, or trapped in HELL, or even have space ants trapped in your pants.

Let's say we're going to have our hero trapped in a COMA. John McClane's wife has died, he's burned out... has no reason to live. He takes a chance to rescue a hostage, is shot, goes to the hospital where he goes into a coma and is hovering between life and death. He's trapped there. Now, in this limbo, we have the emissaries of death who want to take John all the way into the darkness... and these emissaries have John's wife (she's already dead). Just for fun - to completely rip off DIE HARD - let's have the hostage visit him every day at the hospital and try talking him out of the coma - that will be our Al Powell character! Now John has to fight these emissaries of death - try to rescue his wife, and escape... only one problem: his wife's a bad guy - she's really an emissary of death sent to lure him into the darkness! Now John must decide if he wants to be dead like his wife, or fight and escape the coma and be alive again.

(c 1999 by William C. Martell - originally pitched as a sequel to my GRID RUNNERS flick)

Once you realize that ____ is a place to be trapped - the function of that element - you can find cool places to be trapped. I like the idea of TRAPPED IN A NIGHTMARE, so I've got dibsies on that one.

But you can also change different elements - like time period. How about DIE HARD in the old west? Or DIE HARD at the alien zoo where our hero has just become the latest exhibition? Or DIE HARD in King Arthur's time? Once we change the time element, everything else changes, too. The Nakatomi Tower wasn't around in King Arthur's time - so we're in a castle or a prison or a fortress or some other place where people could have been trapped... or maybe we do ants in my armor!

FLIPPING OFF

You can also flip the whole idea - what if the intruder is the villain and Hans and the terrorist guys from DIE HARD are the heroes? What if our story has our brave knights in armor recapture a castle and round up all of the insurgents... except one. The King arrives at the castle, and this insurgent is going to assassinate him unless out brave knights can find him. We still have our games of hide-and-go-seek, but this time we're SEEKING rather than hiding - we're looking for one man in a thousand men. We're trying to capture the assassin before he can get to the King.

Flipping the hero and villain roles makes it a totally different idea - we can do our DIE HARD IN THE WHITE HOUSE with this scenario and it's a completely different story than the version that the other 99.9% came up with.

ELEMENTS

Let the other guys come up with the obvious ideas. Find the creative ideas - trapped in a minute or trapped in a nightmare or trapped WITH instead of IN....

But what about the "DIE HARD in a blank" challenge?

Let's say we have our protagonist trapped in a "blank" - a blank minute that is part of the future. Instead of a location, we're going to use a time. This "blank" minute of time is sitting on the time launching pad waiting to become reality at exactly 8:30 tonight. That minute is frozen in time and only our hero and the villains can move within it - everyone and everything else is on a 60 second loop in ultra slow motion - like that "bullet time" effect in THE MATRIX. He must resolve the problem before that minute becomes THIS minute (at 8:30). That's an odd ticking clock - minutes that have not become real yet... and the race to change the minute before it becomes real. It's DIE HARD IN A MINUTE! Let's add those DIE HARD elements - our Al Powell character is a scientist in the present minute who communicates with our hero through a special earpiece - when the military wants to pull our guy out of that minute, this is the scientist who argues that he should stay. Let's also give our hero an estranged wife or girlfriend. The villains keep placing her in harms way to keep our hero out of the way. They put her in front of a speeding car, or in front of an assassin's gun. This creates a great decision for our hero - rescue his wife or stop the villains? Would you sacrifice the woman you loved and lost to save the world? High stakes are an important part of any film idea - the bigger the villain's plan the bigger the movie! If it's no big deal, it's not that important for the hero to stop them. So let's come up with something that will effect the world - something that will effect the people sitting in the movie theater watching the film. The villains are going to unleash a biological warfare agent that will kill 95% of the population - everyone except 100% racially pure whites. Okay - I'm dead because I'm 1/8th Yakima Indian. Most of the people watching the movie will be dead... unless our hero can stop these guys! Would you pay to see that movie? I would.

My title would be 59 SECONDS. (copyright 1999 by William C. Martell)

The problem with filling in the blank is that most people don't use enough imagination. They come up with an obvious location instead of thinking about time or space or some different way to fill in the blank.

I have a spy story I'm writing later this year about going behind enemy lines... but the border my spy crosses isn't geographical. We've seen a million spy movies that deal with geographical borders... I came up with borders to cross that I've never seen in a spy movie.

If you're going to take a story and change an element - come up with the BEST new element... not the most obvious one.

If you say "it's WITNESS but with Eskimos" chances are somebody else came up with that idea - it's pretty bland. If you say "it's WITNESS with werewolves" - you're probably one of a few people who came up with that idea. If you say "it's WITNESS with all of the discarded imaginary friends from kids' childhoods" - well, that's downright odd. I think that might be an idea that very few other people came up with. Hey - there's this world were discarded imaginary friends live... when our hero is injured, he runs away to that place. He tries to live among the imaginary friends - learn their ways - but eventually the bad guys find him and come to the imaginary friend world. What happens next? (I don't know, I'm making this up as I go along - but I think the end is our hero reuniting all of those discarded imaginary friends with their now-adult friends). Open your mind to the weird!

You need to think weirder than everybody else - throw away the first ideas you come up with and dig for the really imaginative ones.

HIGH CONCEPT = MY CONCEPT

Some of you are thinking that's a great idea for a Hollywood movie... a soul-less, empty Hollywood movie. Shouldn't we be writing scripts that we are passionate about? When we just artificially come up with some idea, doesn't that lead to hackwork?

Only if you let it. Because you have to remember that I came up with that idea. Out of the billions of ideas floating around, that's the one that jumped out at me - that's the one that connected to me. Subconsciously that idea means something to me, or I wouldn't have come up with it. My job is to find out WHY that idea popped into my head. Give ten writers the same basic idea and they will come up with ten different stories because we will all see that idea differently. We find the ideas we are meant to find - it's fate! Somewhere in that idea is something that I'm passionate about... but what?

No matter what idea you come up with, it's YOUR idea. It came from YOUR mind. Somewhere, you have a personal and emotional connection to that idea.

In fact, the more you dig for the odd idea, the unique idea, the deeper you are digging in your own subconscious - you are coming into contact with idea that are unique to you, more personal that any other idea you could have come up with.

Anyone could have come up with WITNESS WITH ESKIMOS - that's too normal, too obvious, and too BLAND to be unique to you. That's what we are looking for - ideas that have a universal theme but are also unique... and unique to YOU (ie: personal). A screenplay idea has to be something that is not only personal to you - that deals with your emotional world, an idea that you are passionate about - it also has to be something that 600-800 million people would pay to see. Because that's what a movie IS - a mass market medium.

Weird and ironic: WITNESS WITH ESKIMOS not only isn't interesting enough to attract those 600-800 million people (average audience for a movie), it's probably not personal enough for you to write well. It's a surface idea from your conscious mind. We want to dig deeper - find the odd ideas that lurk in your unconscious mind. For that we need to REALLY USE our imagination.

Let's look at WITNESS WITH IMAGINARY FRIENDS. Why did I come up with that idea? Why was that idea buried in my subconscious where I had to dig for it and ESKIMOS was right there on top?

We have our hero injured somehow, in trouble. He returns to his childhood home and hides in the same secret place where his imaginary friend used to "live" when he was a kid... and discovers the secret passage into the world of discarded imaginary friends. He learns about their world, then brings his troubles into their world when the villains who have hurt our hero come looking for him. Along the way he realizes that what helped him cope with problems as a child was his imagination... and he has lost that.

When I look at that idea, I instantly see ME. This script idea is all about ME. Because when I'm in emotional pain I visit imaginary friends - I read a book or go to the movies to escape my pain. I hide out. One of the themes that run through many of my scripts from TREACHEROUS to DARK SALVAGE is guys who get hurt by life and hide out (not found in the film version of TREACHEROUS - it was rewritten into crap). That's my personal pattern as well - I hide out. So this idea explores something personal to me - my big flaw. I'd rather disappear into a book than deal with problems. I'd rather hide out with imaginary friends.

When you go in search of the weird ideas, you are looking INSIDE YOURSELF - those normal ideas like Eskimos are from the world outside. That's the problem with most bad scripts - they are all ideas without imagination - they are retreads. They are PULP FICTION wanna-bes, or stories about screenwriters who make it big in Hollywood, or stories about 20 year old's angst, or stories about unloved women in dead end marriages who meet Mr. Right... these are not personal stories, they are GENERIC stories. No one's digging very deep into themselves for these stories - they are all surface.

One of the imaginary friends was our hero's, and he discarded him when he grew up - he threw away his best friend. Wow! I see some personal issues there. Have I discarded friends? What do I say to those people when I see them again? How do I deal with being the one who turned back on them? I'm carrying around this emotional baggage, and this idea wants me to explore it. Gotta tell you - any good idea should frighten you. That's why people don't use their imaginations and look for the surface ideas - the ones you dig for? The ones from your subconscious? The weird ideas? They are the really personal and painful ones. They cut straight into what makes you tick - and what makes you a monster.

A good writer finds ways to explore those demons, a bad writer writes self-indulgent crap (thinking it's personal because it's all about them, their experiences... but it's their SURFACE experiences). Fiction is the lie we tell to find the truth. Using your imagination to find the weird idea - the odd idea - creates a situation where you can deal with your personal issues in a "safe arena". If you are writing an autobiographical story you may not have the guts to really dig deep into why you are the monster, when you are writing about some strange world you are free to explore those issues because it's obviously not about you.

I could go through more of the WITNESS WITH IMAGINARY FRIENDS idea - show you how it cuts right through the crap on the surface to dig into my personal demons - but I think you have the idea. MY idea is MY idea - it's something that I came up with. And the stranger that idea is, the more personal it is... And ironically enough, the more commercial it is.

DIE HARD IN A MINUTE?

Let's analyze that DIE HARD IN A MINUTE idea. The events that happen at 8:30 already exist somewhere... that's FATE. The concept revolves around the existence of fate. Our hero is trying to change these events - so he's trying to change fate. People have told him that something is going to happen and he can't do a thing about it... and he says "Screw that!" He tries to stop it anyway. I have already written scripts about similar characters - people who are told that they can't change the world but they try to change it anyway. That's a personal theme of mine... which is why I came up with this particular idea. It addresses a personal theme - being told that the world is a particular way and you can't do anything about it, and forging ahead and trying anyway. Part of fate is regret - and I have several scripts about people who made the wrong decision and are now forced to live with it, and are offered a chance to correct their past mistake. Wow - this "hollow Hollywood idea" is jam-packed with my personal themes!

Now that I know why this idea jumped out at me, I can create MY story around the idea. Wow - Estranged wife or girlfriend... where did that come from? Again, that's a FATE idea. A REGRET idea. I know I just tossed it in there so that we could keep up the DIE HARD thing, but it's also thematic. What if you lost the woman you loved, and had a chance to get her back... but in order to save the world you have to lose her again? That's a big dramatic emotional idea! It was right there in the concept that jumped out at me! All I had to do was poke around - find out why that idea jumped out at me - and I keep stumbling on personal themes and emotional situations. This is a script idea that is both commercial AND deals with things that I'm passionate about.

Any time you come up with an idea, remember that YOU came up with it. Something within that idea appeals to you on an emotional basis. You may have to analyze the idea to find out why it speaks to you - our subconscious minds do a great job of hiding things from us - but within any idea you come up with is something that you are passionate about. There was a reason why you came up with that idea in the first place. Use your imagination. Dig for the ideas you have buried deep in your subconscious... the ones so personal that we can only explore them in creative and unusual stories. A big commercial idea may be the most personal story you ever tell.

FADE OUT

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copyright 2009 by William C. Martell