To me Mini’s First Time is a good example of a high concept idea that didn’t get a high concept execution.

The idea “Middle Aged Man is seduced by his step daughter, posing as a hooker, into murdering his wife” — could have been an interesting movie.

But, when you look at the trailer, it falls short of the “wide audience appeal” element. It has so-so movie written all over it.

Like the old saying goes — “You can make a bad movie from a good script, but you can’t do it the other way round.”

At least internationally this seemed to be the equation for generating interest: Attachments, genre, target audience and concept.

Another lesson learned is there are a lot of completed films out there looking for distribution, and a hell of a lot more looking for funding.

and for every MEMENTO there are at least ten films like MIMI’S FIRST TIME. MFT has a high concept, produced on a budget of $6 million, produced by Kevin Spacey, recognizable names in the cast like Alec Baldwin, Luke Wilson and Jeff Goldblum…

To date, it’s grossed something like $70k.

And to add insult to injury, I also made one major structural error, which makes the first act drag.

It’s good — it just isn’t good enough to make a “no name” drama economically viable.

For me, No Place was my equivalent of spending three years at UCLA — it probably cost me about the same! LOL — from it I learned an incredible amount about story telling, the film market and also the practical process of running a professional feature film shoot.

I don’t have any regrets about it, at all. In fact, just the opposite — because if I hadn’t failed in such a spectacular way, I never would have been motivated to do the stuff I do now.

Believe me I’ve learned more from that film’s failure than I ever would had it been successful.

That’s the reason I get so passionate about structure and high concept — it’s because I know the price of getting it wrong.

(By the way — the same thing happened with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels — most of the major distributors passed on that as well)

I actually have that download and read it awhile back, but thanks for reminding me!

Get some rest, war-horse, I have battles I want to fight with you in the future and it’s no fun if you’re not at peak condition!

Clive,

Regarding your film, if it’s good, it’s marketable. Remember MEMENTO? A friend told me that it was the talk of Sundance, everyone loved it but they couldn’t get a distributor because not one person could figure out how to market it.

Same situation. They thought it was great but didn’t know how to sell it.

The producers ended up pooling some money and starting their own distribution company and it MEMENTO made 29 million at the BO . . .

If your movie is good, really good, it’s marketable, I believe that.

Crawling back into my hole now…

Four years ago I started work on my first feature film “No Place,” which wasn’t high concept.

It was a labour of love and I not only wrote the best script I could at the time — I also borrowed $40,000 against my house to fund part of it. The total budget was $700,000.

Now, having completed this beautiful, well written, well acted film, it now gathers dust on a shelf in the Producer’s house — because no distributor or Producer’s Rep will touch it.

Why not, well — every single rejection letter reads exactly the same “This is a beautiful film, we really liked the story, but we don’t see how we can sell it.”

And the reason they can’t sell it — it can’t be explained easily in one sentence that evokes the entire film, it doesn’t have mass appeal and it’s not a unique story idea.

In other words, it’s not high concept.

It is all well and good encouraging people to disregard high concept, but my very real experience of doing that cost me my house and put me through a rather nasty insolvency.

Now, my experience since then, is working on exclusively high concept movie ideas, has landed me five option offers in the last eighteen months — three of which I declined, one I took and one is still pending.

There is no rule saying that everyone should use high concept — and applying it is by no means a guaranteed formula to success — but let’s face it — what is?

(1) Star Wars was not a unique, original story. It’s arguable there a few, if any “unique, original” stories, but even if we say they are, Star Wars borrowed heavily from Hidden Fortress and other Kurosawa films which in turn were based on earlier works by others. The screenplay underwent huge changes (60 year old Skywalker and green-skinned Han Solo) and Wikipedia details many of the direct influences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Episode_IV:_A_New_Hope

(2) My goof on Star Wars box office – I meant to say “within weeks of release”. I meant to refer to the difficulty booking the film in theaters i.e. they did not see the success coming nor did most at Fox etc. That’s clearly not what you mean by high concept.

Per Jaws, Casablanca, Great Escape etc. You are writing about high concept for people writing original screenplays. Citing examples of adaptations of what you believe are high concept books is probably only helpful to those with deep pockets to acquire rights/options to those works. How does this help original screenwriters?

Furthermore, you don’t cite evidence that those books/sources were “high concept” either.

Finally you state that point of your post is that the high concept is not a new concept. But if it’s not a concept at all (and just as I argue, a pitching technique not an indicator of great cinema), then your post has a internal logic problem ie.

High concept is valid concept for aspiring screenwriters because all these previous classic films are high concept yet you don’t have solid evidence that any of the cited films follow your high concept model and most are adaptations or remakes involving costly rights.

If you really want to sell high concept, concrete examples of great films (or at least great box office) written and pitched of the high concept model would far better make your case. Unfortunately, many cited examples of “high concept” I’ve seen elsewhere are just post-mortem summaries that often miss much of what made a film memorable.

I think there’s good evidence of connection between “high concept” and “great pitch”. Having a idea/script that you can pitch as high concept will get your script read, get your meetings and enhance your ability to get a script sold/movie made (again, see The Player).

But I still don’t see much if any connection between great cinema and high concept, mostly because getting people to agree on what is great cinema is an exercise in futility and even if you settle on “great box office” or “the most awards”, the I find the concept of high concept is ephemeral at best, meaningless at worst.

I think passion and authenticity are better base for screenwriters to write compelling stories than high concept.

I think I might have been a little too harsh with my reply… Let me restate:

If you’re trying to sit there and tell me that there are NO actual examples of the connection between “high concept” and great cinema – then I’ll just have to go on record and tell you that I THINK you’re full of SHIT.

Nuff said.

Josh,

Whew… I’ve been up for 3 days and I’m so full of coffee that I’m just going to brush my teeth and hit the rack for the next 4 or 5 hours…

But before I do… LOL.

Read my post on Georges Polti’s 36 Dramatic Situations… There’s even a little handy dandy PDF document you can download here:

Georges Polti’s 36 Dramatic Situations PDF document

True… In reality, there are probably no more than 36 dramatic situations but that’s simply the overall general concept. It’s how you ARRIVE at the overall dramatic situation that counts. It’s the changing of the structure, events, characters, dialog, locations, etc. and in so doing, trying your damndest not to be so much like another film that has a similar overall general concept.

For instance, when I saw 8MM years ago, I immediately drew comparisons to HARDCORE. I then studied both films in depth and took a hard look at both screenplays…

What 8MM had going for it was a CURRENT AUDIENCE that probably had never even seen HARDCORE but let’s face it, the two are so close it almost feels like cheating to me irregardless of how well it did at the boxoffice. For me, there were just too many similar scenes that reminded me of HARDCORE but even so, I walked away liking the movie. Having said that, I would have tried like hell to make those similar scenes even more different than they are.

By the way, I read that article a while back actually. I agree with some — some I don’t.

Rack time.

Unk