I’ve been getting a ton of logline consultations lately and it’s clearly thanks to you guys. A lot of you are referring me to others and I thank you for that (you can get a logline consult for $25 – just e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com). And it’s made me think a lot about concepts lately because I’ve noticed a few things in these consultations.
By the way, the Fabulous First Act Contest is coming soon. It’s going to take over the site in March. I’m going to guide you through writing a first act. And I want you to have the greatest idea you’ve ever written before for the contest. Because, after you’re done, you’re going to submit the first act to me. Which is why today’s post is so important. We need your idea to be awesome if it’s going to have a chance.
A great movie idea is still the best way to get script reads and script purchases. It’s the ultimate hack to the system because if a producer likes your idea enough, they will overlook weaknesses in the script itself. They won’t do that for average ideas. I have seen so many “lesser” writers break into the industry with a great idea while better writers continue to toil in obscurity because they prefer the low-concept route.
But what I’m finding is that it’s much harder to come up with a good idea than it looks. I receive a lot of ideas that are “high-concept adjacent.” They look like a high concept. They smell like a high concept. But they’re missing that “unique factor” that elevates the idea to something special.
For example, I might get pitched a movie about a ghost who petitions God to come back to life for a week. Technically, this is a high concept idea. But it feels too familiar. It’s not very exciting. It doesn’t feel like the writer put a lot of thought into it. Garden variety high concept isn’t going to cut it because it’s highly likely that someone has already come up with a similar idea.
So I wanted to do something different today. While I can’t come up with a great idea for you. I can share with you many of the constants (I call them “high concept multipliers”) I see in high concept ideas. These multipliers do not make great movie ideas on their own. You have to combine them in interesting ways and then harmoniously incorporate characters into the mix.
But, at least this way, you’ll have a list you can go back to whenever you’re struggling to come up with that next script idea. Hopefully this sparks a few huge ideas for those of you wanting to participate in the Fabulous First Act Contest. Because I’m going to be putting a priority on high concept when judging. Okay, here we go.
MONSTERS AND BEASTS – An easy one. Monsters and beasts sell tickets. Godzilla, vampires, dinosaurs, Frankenstein, whatever that thing was in The Ritual. You’re either going to want to find a fresh take on these monsters or give us something entirely new.
AS FAR AWAY FROM THE PRESENT AS POSSIBLE – Come up with an idea that takes place a long long time ago (i.e. during the caveman times) or a long time from now (i.e. a thousand years in the future). The further away you go from the present, the more unique the situation will be. Which is why it will feel high concept.
TIME – This is one of the biggies. You’ve got time distortion (recent spec sale “Time Zone” about special cops who can slow down time to battle terrorist attacks), time loops (Edge of Tomorrow, Source Code), time travel (Back to the Future), telling stories out of order or backwards (500 Days of Summer, Shimmer Lake). This option has the most leeway to get inventive. So it’s a good one to incorporate.
MEMORY – Memory is another big one because it’s such a malleable concept. You can do so much with it. Everything from Christopher Nolan’s 8-minute memory main character in Memento to purposeful memory erasure in Eternal Sunshine. Roshomon is a famous high concept because we experience the same event through several different memories. Even movies like The Notebook, which don’t have any supernatural or sci-fi slant, are able to get that high concept label because the memory component in them is so powerful. That movie jumps between the past and present to explore the devastating affects of Alzheimer’s.
DEATH – Death is the final frontier. Or is it? That’s what’s so great about death (in a movie sense). There’s so much unknown about it that you can go crazy with your ideas. Flatliners famously explored death in a unique way. The Lovely Bones. The Sixth Sense. Meet Joe Black. You can go to town with this one.
ALIENS – The possibilities are endless with aliens. You can explore an alien invasion (Independence Day), an alien visitation (Arrival), the underworld of alien policing (Men in Black), a mysterious alien organism (Alien), an alien killing machine (Predator), humans invading an alien planet (Avatar), an alien signal (The Vast of Night). One of my favorite topics!
GHOSTS – The haunted house movie is probably one of the most reliable formulas in literary history. I just saw a good one recently in The Night House. Dan Akroyd thought up one of the best ghost concepts ever with Ghostbusters. But with any of these high profile subjects, you need to dig a lot deeper than usual to find the fresh idea. Don’t think that you can slap together a ghost concept overnight and it will fly. Go five, six, seven layers deep to find an original ghost take.
ISLANDS – Tons of high concept ideas happen on islands. From Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None to the girl stuck on an island with a monster movie, Beast, to the best TV show of all time, Lost. This one is timeless and it will remain timeless. Throw some characters on an island, build some conflict into their situation (murder, monsters, the supernatural), and it’s often a slam dunk.
POWERS – This should be obvious in 2022. Powers are what make all the money at the box office. But just because you don’t have IP doesn’t mean you can’t write powers into your story. There was a recent spec sale about a group of criminals that steal money from a mansion only to find out it’s the home of a supervillain. Or you could do something as simple as Limitless – a guy finds a pill that makes him super-duper smart.
ROBOTS – I-Robot, The Terminator, Finch, Pacific Rim, Robocop. By the way, one of the tricks you can use is to take an everyday job and combine it with one of these high concept multipliers. For example, you have an exterminator. Well, what if you created an exterminator… who exterminated ghosts (Ghostbusters). You have a cop. What if you had a cop… that was part robot (Robocop).
MURDER – Murder may not seem as high concept as some of these other suggestions. But let me tell you. It’s VERY high concept. It’s one of the most reliable ways to take an idea and spruce it up. Murder gave us all those cool serial killer flicks (Lambs, Seven). But it also gave us cool little scenarios such as Rear Window. There’s so much leeway with what you can do with murder. For example, I recently saw an awesome little movie called The Clovehitch Killer about a kid who starts to suspect his dad is a serial killer. Bonus – this is one of the cheapest high concept options.
DREAMS – This one is dangerous because if you go too fast and loose with dream ideas, they don’t make any sense, like dreams themselves. But there are tons of cool ideas to mine from dreams. I mean, we got Inception out of it. We got The Cell (great idea, bad execution). Vanilla Sky.
MEDICAL AND EXPERIMENTS – Think about medicine and then think in extremes. Sure, someone who’s blind could be the centerpiece of a high concept idea. But you usually want to think bigger for this category. Two kids who have a rare medical condition whereby they can’t be subjected to sunlight (The Others). Or, more recently, we got the medical experiment movie of the decade in Malignant. Maybe you have an idea where the government is secretly carrying out mass experiments on its population without them knowing it. Lots of fun to be had here.
MAGIC – I’m not that into magic but I can’t deny 5 billion dollars worth of cinematic success in Harry Potter. I read a high concept pilot several years ago about a magic world that ran in parallel to our own and then, one day, the two started to overlap. That’s pretty darn high concept. I’m sure you magic lovers can find plenty of cool ideas here. It’s pretty wide open.
IRONY – This is one of the secret ways to create high concept ideas without having to use giant subject matter. A janitor at Harvard who’s a math genius. An 11 year old girl who’s a contract killer (Hanna). An alcoholic who becomes a superhero (Hancock). A couple of years ago, a big idea sold about two ice cream truck owners who entered into a war with one another. Irony should be one of your best friends when it comes to concept creation, and just with writing in general.
SIZE – High concept likes things that are really really big (King Kong) and also really really small (Honey I Shrunk The Kids). Hell, HBO once had a show about a guy with a gigantic male reproductive organ. Really really big and really really small can easily make a stale idea exciting.
A FUN SCENARIO WITH A SET OF STRICT RULES – As a writer, you are God. So come up with fun scenarios and add one or two strict rules that govern the scenario. A lawyer can only tell the truth for one day (Liar Liar). A bus has a bomb on it and it can’t go below 50 mph or the bus blows up (Speed).
WISH-FULFILLMENT – This is one of my favorite ones because it’s the classic “What if…?” question that leads to so many fun ideas. What if a kid wakes up one day in the body of an adult (Big)? What if you could kill your boss and get away with it (Horrible Bosses)? What if you were a musician and became the only person in the world who remembered The Beatles (Yesterday)?
BODY INVASION – This is another popular one. Lots of movies explore what happens when one’s body is not their own. The Exorcist is a classic one. Freaky Friday is another classic – body switching. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Thing. The concept of your body being hijacked is fertile ground for so many cool ideas. I would put this multiplier near the top of the ‘come up with a cool idea’ list. It’s that potent.
VIRTUAL REALITY – I would take this one step further and say, “What is reality?” We got The Matrix out of this. We got The Truman Show, one of the most famous spec scripts of all time. We see virtual reality and ‘what is reality’ being explored in Black Mirror episodes. This is going to be a popular topic for the foreseeable future because technology keeps advancing exponentially, allowing for a steady stream of new ideas.
One final thing when it comes to high concept idea generation. You can use these modules to supersize low-concept ideas. For example, let’s say you want to write a drama about the pain one endures after ending a relationship. So many writers will write these boring predictable on-the-nose explorations of characters trying to get over someone.
Why would you write that when you could take that subject matter and combine it with one of the high concept multipliers I listed above? That way, you still get to explore the story you want to explore. But you also make it entertaining for the reader, not just yourself. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind uses memory and technology to explore a break-up in a compelling way. 500 Days of Summer uses an out-of-order storytelling style to explore a break-up in a compelling way. Yes, it is hard to come up with a great idea. But it’s fairly easy to take a weak idea and make it a lot better by using one of the multipliers above.
Have at it!
