CS Daily Archive > Son of a Pitch > 05/13/04

How Many Screenwriters Does it Take
to Screw in a Light Bulb?

By David Michael Wharton

So you think you've got a great idea for a movie. Now what?

If there's one thing writers are good at, it's coming up with ideas. Even the least productive writer has got a shoebox or note pad or bulletin board crammed with ideas. In my case, it's a Word file titled "Id," filled with everything from titles with no stories to nigh- unintelligible brainstorming sessions typed frantically over my lunch break. In the parlance of the cartoon world, we've constantly got light bulbs popping into existence above our respective noggins -- but that's only the beginning of the job. The real trick is to know what to do with that shiny, new bulb once it appears. Not every idea is a good idea; not every good idea is a good screenplay idea; and not every good screenplay idea survives the writing process and gives birth to a good screenplay. Does your bulb have what it takes to shine all the way to the end of the story, or will it flicker and die 60 pages into your script, leaving you with nothing but frustration for your trouble?

There's a long-standing tradition that some writers start from plot and some from character: in talking to working screenwriters, I think it's rarely that simple -- I know it's not in my life. But while writers are rarely 100% plot people or 100% character people, ideas do usually fall into one of those camps, and the way we develop them into a complete story will differ depending on where we start. Writer Stuart Hazeldine (Riverworld) thinks of it in musical terms. "It's like coming up with a great guitar lick. It says something to you and you think, "I would pay to go and see that." It's either a big idea, a spectacular 'What would happen if...?' kind of thing -- that's if it's a structural or plot kind of idea. Or it's an emotional character hook. A huge, spectacular 'what-if' will never really sing on its own if it's lacking the emotional character hook. It doesn't have to start with that; you can add character later. As long as I'm emotionally turned on by something, or I can see big scenes from the movie (where you can see a couple of cornerstone scenes in your mind), then I know there's something there for me."

So let's presume that our idea is plot-based, that you've got one of those great what-ifs that Hazeldine described. Then our most immediate job is to figure out if we think it can be expanded from a one-line hook into two satisfying hours. Think of some movies that might have begun as a plot hook (and take note, I don't know for a fact that they began this way… but they could have, and they make for good examples). One of my favorite underrated flicks is David Twohy's Below. (Spoilers for the next two paragraphs if you haven't seen these flicks.) If you dig down to the core of this story, the hook is, "What if you couldn't leave the haunted house?" The problem with so many haunted house tales is that the characters end up coming off as either stupid or suicidal. Sure, you can claim that they want to stay in the house so they can get the million-dollar prize or win a victory for science or whatever, but after two or three of your companions either vanish or get mysteriously eviscerated, there's not a one of us reading this that wouldn't head for the hills. Below solves this problem by placing the haunting aboard a World War II American submarine. It's as claustrophobic a setting as you can get, and the crew can't get away from the haunting, because if they surface, German destroyers will blow them out of the water. That's a great little plot hook that's been expanded into a fun, unique movie.

Minority Report: what if the perfect crime-predicting system predicted that one of its staunchest champions was going to commit murder? Both The Sixth Sense and The Others: what if the ghost of the ghost story didn't know he/she was dead? All of these have great kernel ideas that have been lovingly expanded into entertaining movies. Can you expand your idea from a good hook to a good story? My first published short story, Those Who Forget (and I provide a link because I'm a masochist, and I figure if I can share the pain of cancer with you, I can share the pain of sampling my early writing) was spun off the simple idea of "What if you could erase your problems with a thought, but you didn't realize you were doing it?" It made for a fun little Twilight Zone-esque short story, but as-is it would never sustain two hours worth of movie.

Or maybe you've got a character with no story to call his own. One of the moments in Syd Field's Screenplay that I particularly enjoyed was his description of a class he'd taught where they first came up with a character, then gradually, systematically spun an entire movie's worth of story off her. Working from the theory that everybody's got a story to tell, once you've got a memorable character in mind, it's just a matter of exploring that character's world and seeing what their story is. Returning again to the Pillars (introduced when I was but a wee columnist), it ties into number one: conflict. Once you figure out what your character wants, you can figure out what stands in his way of getting it, then you've got the beginnings of a narrative thruline and you're halfway home. In the Indiana Jones series, it's the character of Indy that is the richest and most memorable aspect of the series. You could tell a story about trying to find the Ark of the Covenant without Indy, but it wouldn't be Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it probably wouldn't be nearly as good. Or, to borrow again from David Twohy, by far the most memorable part of the movie Pitch Black was the antihero character Richard B. Riddick. So much so that this summer's sequel became all about him, as opposed to just trying to redo Pitch Black on a different planet. These are characters that are rich and interesting enough that hundreds of potential stories could come from them: it's just a matter of picking the best one and running with it.

Regardless of which camp your idea falls into, writer Tim Metcalfe (44 Minutes: The North Hollywood Shoot-Out) gives us a pretty good acid test: "[Your idea should be] one that makes you want to rush to the computer every morning. That makes you dream about it at night, and daydream about it when you're awake." Does your idea excite you enough to sustain you through all the brainstorming and prewriting and writing and rewriting that will be necessary to make it the very best you can make it? If the answer is no, then maybe it's best to set it aside for now. To dip a toe into a woefully cliched truism: set it free, and if it's meant to be, it'll return to you. If it's a great idea, then time will eventually grant you the perspective to see the angle you need to approach it from.

Or maybe it will never stand on its own -- maybe it won't really click until it combines with some other, seemingly unrelated idea. J. Michael Straczynski's space opera Babylon 5 was born of just such a union: Straczynski was trying to decide whether he wanted to tell a sprawling, political tale or a more intimate story about the crew of an isolated space station. Neither idea got anywhere until he realized that they were actually two aspects of the same story. I've experienced the same sort of thing, and you probably have, too: you have a great idea that doesn't look so great a week later, then you realize that the really interesting idea is something that seemed inconsequential before. Some secondary character steps forward and reveals that his story is much more fascinating than what you'd initially thought.

The point here isn't that there's some secret formula to what makes a good idea good (though there's arguably more formula in a screenplay than in, say, a novel); it's to recognize the wisdom of looking before you leap. As J.T. Allen (Redemption) told me, "I like to think, in the best possible world, if you were an engaging enough writer and you figured out the driving mechanism to the story, you could almost do a story on anything. It's just finding something that's going to drive it from beginning to end."

Once you find that, that light bulb of your will shine that much brighter once it's in place.
Oh, and lest I forget --

Q: How many screenwriters does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: The bulb's IN and it's STAYING in.

Now, go write.

Outlines, beat sheets, 3x5 cards -- next week we'll talk about the mechanics of breaking the story.

David Michael Wharton is a regular contributor to Creative Screenwriting magazine. When not watching DVDs or otherwise procrastinating when he should be working on his screenplay, he has been known to write for the likes of UGO Screenwriter's Voice and Comic Book Resources. You can email him, especially if you're deposed African royalty looking to secretly transfer millions of dollars into an American bank account.

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