THURSDAY'S SCRIPT TIP:

HIGH CONCEPT OR HIGH STAKES?

What is high concept? Is it the same as high stakes? If your villain plants a bomb in Los Angeles, is it a high concept movie if it's a nuclear bomb and a non-high concept movie if it's just TNT?

You can tell if a script is high concept if you pitch the logline to friends and they all want to see the movie (or wish they'd thought of that idea). The idea is unusual, unexpected, maybe even a little strange. In the Jim Carrey film BRUCE ALMIGHTY a guy is given God's job for a week... and you thought people wanted favors from you at work! Don't you wish you'd thought of that one? It's an idea that's easy to understand, is something we've probably all fantasized about, yet would be really weird if it happened in real life. A high concept is both unique and universal. The idea itself will not only be so strong that we can imagine the rest of the script, it will be interesting and unusual. "There's something you don't see every day!"

The great story part of "A great story, well told".

The IDEA is what makes a high concept story interesting - not the great characters or story or dialogue or anything else. The script may have great characters (etc), but we don't even have to explain them to interest an audience - the idea does it all! "Man plays God for a day" is an interesting idea. I don't need to know anything else about the story, and I'm already willing to fork over the $10 to see what happens. Our imaginations can run with that idea and see a million fun possibilities. It's a great jumping off point. I don't know what kind of character Jim Carrey is playing, or anything about the story itself... but the idea is intriguing. If you were temping for God, what would you do? Try to make the world a better place? Smite your enemies? Arrange the world so that life made sense? So, the first test of a high concept - is your idea interesting on its own? When we are pitching our script or sending a producer a logline, it's all about concept. The concept is what gets them to read our screenplay. Dull concept = Few reads.

Turning that idea into a sophisticated and well structured screenplay is something else. The sophisticated part entirely depends on the idea and how deep into the characters and conflict you dig... and your skills and talent as a storyteller. That's partially true with the well-structured part as well - some stories are big unfocused messes and have no protagonist and no central conflict. They really aren't good ideas to begin with. "A year in the life of a suburban family" has no central conflict, no protagonist... it's a bad idea because it's too vague. If you change it to "A 40 year old man with one year to live, decides to live like a 17 year old, despite the objections of his family." You have a story - we have a protagonist, a situation, and a conflict.

If he PHYSICALLY goes back to being 17, you have a high concept.

If he just acts like a 17 year old, you have an idea that isn't high concept, but has all of the elements required for an entertaining full-length script... let's call it AMERICAN BEAUTY.

AMERICAN BEAUTY isn't high concept, Francis Ford Coppola's PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED is high concept. (PEGGY SUE also has Jim Carrey in a small role - coincidence?) The IDEA of acting like a 17 year old isn't unique, the idea of bouncing back in time to relive your senior year of high school knowing everything you know now is unusual - I don't know anybody who has bounced back in time, do you? A good high concept is fantastic and at least a little weird.

HIGH STAKES

You can raise the stakes in a story, but that doesn't make it high concept. It may make it more exciting and more commercial, though. In my BLACK THUNDER script I had a pair of rival Air Force pilots fighting for the love of their commander (Steinbeck's EAST OF EDEN in jet fighter planes) who must work together on a mission to recover a stolen warplane that uses "active stealth" technology - it can bend light to outside the human visual spectrum so that it becomes invisible. It does that Predator-thing and chameleons with its surroundings.

That sounds high concept... but the story isn't high concept at all - only the plane is. The story requires these two guys to work together and go behind enemy lines to a rogue nation where terrorists train... pretty normal stuff. You've seen a dozen films where people go behind enemy lines on some secret mission. That's a pretty boring idea. So I made the device they were going after interesting and made the stakes high - the guys who stole our plane are going to use it to nerve gas Paris while the President is there to meet with World Leaders to discuss the very rogue nation that swiped our plane. (Written and filmed in the mid-90s, topical today.)

So, the fate of the world is kind of hanging in the balance - if they blow the mission these terrorists will take out Paris and the leaders of the free world. Those are high stakes and make for an exciting story, and the plane (at least in the script) is pretty cool - but the idea is still rather bland. The idea is still NOT high concept even with the plane and the stakes. But if you have a non-high-con idea that calls to you, raising the stakes is something to consider. Stakes can be personal (your protagonist is going to die, as in AMERICAN BEAUTY) or global (if the two "brothers" can not learn to work together, all of the world's leaders will be killed, as in my BLUE THUNDER). You want a conflict with consequences!

I think if you come up with a great idea, it's easier to turn it into a good script. It doesn't have to be a high concept idea, it just needs to be an interesting idea. A great idea has the central conflict and protagonist built in - it has the fuel for drama built in. Ideas that are difficult to turn into sophisticated and well structured scripts (no matter how skilled the writer) are ideas that are too vague or all over the place or have no protagonist or no clearly defined central conflict. They are bad ideas. If you marry a witch who wants to help you get ahead at work... that's not only high concept, it has all of the elements necessary to write a good script. It can be a clever, sophisticated script like Rene Clair's I MARRIED A WITCH (1942) or silly (but entertaining) TV junk like BEWITCHED... that's up to the writer (and their skills and talent). The idea is only one part, you still must have writing skills and the writer's talent. Once you have a great idea you still have to write the script...

But do you have a great idea?

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