Just like you’re not a real comedian unless you’re looking for jokes in every situation you encounter, you’re not a real screenwriter unless you’re always looking for that next movie idea. That skill becomes even more important in times like these, when you know Hollywood is going to be hot on the Pandemic Express over the next few months, gobbling up the best pandemic ideas it can find.
Well I’m going to make sure that Scriptshadow readers are ahead of the game when it comes to pandemic-inspired concepts.
The trick is to not go with a literal interpretation of the idea. If your concept is, essentially, “2012,” but with a pandemic, nobody’s going to give you money for that. Anybody can come up with a literal interpretation of an idea.
If the news covers a missing plane story, like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, writing a movie about a plane that flies out of Malaysia and disappears isn’t going to get you anywhere. By the time you pitch that idea, Hollywood will have already been pitched it ten times already. THAT DAY.
As writers, your job is to come up with THE ANGLE.
This is what good writers bring to the table. They exploit the hot subject matter via an angle that the average person isn’t creative enough to think of. Just like Michael Jordan’s turnaround jumper was the shot that made him the most valuable player in the league, your ability to come up with creative angles to common concepts is what will make you valuable.
That brings us to the deal that 21 Laps (Stranger Things) and Sight Unseen (Bad Education) just teamed up on.
They purchased the rights to a 2018 Medium article titled, “Survival of the Richest.” The article follows a futurist who travels around the world giving speeches about where the future is headed.
One day he flies out to what he believes will be another one of these conferences but when he gets to his hotel, he’s ushered into a private room and greeted by five billionaires. These billionaires want to get his opinion on where he sees the future going.
It makes sense. If you want to keep your billionaire status, you have to know where the markets are going in the future. Is oil still going to be important in 20 years? Or should I invest in hydrogen-powered cars? Except those weren’t the questions these billionaires were asking.
They were more interested in topics like, “If I own a compound in the apocalypse, how do I prevent my security team from turning on me when money is no longer worth anything?” The question turns out to be surprisingly complex, with no one able to come up with a good answer.
Unfortunately, the rest of the article reads like the author forgot what his point was, rambling on about well-tread topics such as whether robots will eventually replace humans in the work force. But when you’re looking for things to adapt, the concept is more important than the execution. That’s because a good screenwriter can take a good concept and run with it.
And the angle here is an intriguing one. It’s not about what you and I do when the resources run out. It’s about what Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg do. These are people who have built impenetrable capitalistic fortresses – the rest of the world desperately clinging to the jobs and products they offer.
But what happens when we no longer need their products or their jobs? What happens when a billion dollars holds less value than a pair of shoes? That’s a movie angle there.
But it isn’t everything and since Deadline’s announcement didn’t provide enough details on the pitch, we’re left to make some fun guesses as to which direction they might go in. The cool thing about this idea is you can go big or you can go small.
There’s a version of this where our futurist is flown out to a general meeting with a controversial billionaire at his remote home. He then learns he’s here to evaluate the billionaire’s compound to see if he’s properly prepared for the apocalypse.
The futurist eventually stumbles upon a giant secret – that the reason he’s being asked to secure this person’s apocaoypse defenses is because a network of billionaires is planning to incite the apocalypse then become the new global government. When our billionaire learns he’s onto him, our hero has to escape. This would be the low-budget “Ex Machina” version of the concept.
Or we can set things in the apocalypse. A billionaire gets word that a mob of 200 people is on its way to his compound. He has two hours to prepare for the onslaught, depending only on his small security team and high-tech defensive equipment (preferably technology that made him all his money in the real world). Sort of like a modern-day medieval castle takeover – barbarians at the gate.
Finally, we have a futurist who’s flown out to what he thinks will be a conference, only to end up at a remote South American billionaire’s home. He meets several billionaires who pose the same questions mentioned in the article.
They offer him a job. They’ve put together a “Stanford Prison” like experiment whereby they’ve hired several hundred people who are located several miles from a compound. Those people have one goal. Get into the compound and into the control room. Our futurist will consult our billionaires in real time on how to stop them.
However, he soon learns these volunteers have been offered a giant monetary reward for succeeding to ensure they will act as desperately as real people in the apocalypse, and that the preventive measures being used to stop them are deadly. This isn’t an experiment. It’s real.
Good concepts are like bountiful rivers. They offer all sorts of possibilities. It will be interesting to see which idea 21 Laps and Sight Unseen go with. What about you? Where would you take this idea?
