…when applied to books/TV shows/movies/etc? Don’t all things have a concept? What makes one concept higher than another? To me, this has always sounded like one of those phrases marketing people use to make themselves sound self-important, but maybe I’m wrong and it does mean something. If someone could list examples of stuff that is high-concept and stuff that is low-concept, that might help illustrate the point.
(I have personal reasons for wanting to know this; someone said my book is high-concept and I am trying to figure out whether it is an insult, compliment, or neither.)
I bet there is an official definition, but to me “high concept” means “based on a premise that stretches credulity - it either sucks you in and you are willing to buy it for the duration of the film, or you are turned off from the first scene”
Like, say, the movie Twins - Danny DeVito and Ah-nold play twins - cute, get it? Funny - ha! Or, if you aren’t willing to suspend a HUGE amount of disbelief, it falls flat.
I’ve always understood it to refer to films (usually featuring Arnie) whose (overblown) premise can be explained in little more than a sentence, which the first hit on Google agrees with (although I wouldn’t agree with quite a few of their examples - The Godfather is high concept?). The idea is that you can pitch the movie in next to no time, making it much easier to sell:
“It’s Die Hard on a plane.”
“It’s big game hunting - but with marines and an alien!”
“They’re stuck on a bus, and if it goes below 50, boom!”
“It’s Arnie - and he’s pregnant!”
But that doesn’t seem right because I’ve never heard Bruce Almighty (“Jim Carrey becomes God.”), American Pie (“An updated Porky’s.”) or Legally Blonde (“Sorority Girl Goes to Harvard.”) described as high concept.
On the other hand, the show with the blind cop, Blind Justice, was described as “high concept” in every article written about it. That seems to fit in with WordMan’s definition nicely.
“High concept” means that the basic premise can be described in very few words.
Once someone asked me what my novel was about. I spent about thirty seconds describing what the character was ("She a syron – someone with extremely strong intuition, so much so that she gets hunches to do things without knowing why. She hires a ship and ends up finding a lost generation ship, . . . " etc.)
Then they asked John Betancourt. “Pirates fighting giant ants,” he said.
That’s what they mean by “high concept.”
Hollywood considers anything that can be easily explained as “high concept.” “Jim Carrey as God” is clearly a high concept idea; once you hear it, you know pretty much all you need to know. Compare it to something like Sideways or Napoleon Dynamite or Mystic River or The Royal Tennenbaums, where a short, punchy, one-sentence description does not do justice to the film.
What aids in describing something as high-concept is quickly encapsulizing big ideas. Familiarity helps. A Christmas Carol was a pretty sensational ghost story when it debuted as a Dickens serial in the late 19th century but possibly a bit too complicated plotwise to be high concept. But because six or seven generations all over the world have been exposed to its basic time travelling/Christmas themed/“what-if” alternate life plot, whole new concepts can be summarized and spun off from it just by evoking the name “Scrooge.”
It’s A Wonderful Life = Jimmy Stewart as a likeable Scrooge, Clarence as the Ghosts.
Scrooged = A contemporary Scrooge meets Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Bill Murray as Scrooge.
Family Man = Contemporary take on Scrooge with Nicholas Cage as the Scrooge character and Don Cheadle as the angel.
I’d never thought of “high concept” as meaning “easily summed up in a single line” (although, in retrospect, that’s obviously part of it).
I took it to mean that the plot was driven by a unique quirk. Hence, regarding the list in Post #4, Speed would absolutely be high concept, but I don’t think Alien fits – it’s just a monster movie, and therefore just plain old “regular concept.”
I’ve always understood “high concept” to mean a work (book, tv show, movie, whatever) that revolves around an elaborate, and probably non-realistic, concept. And I don’t mean non-realistic in any negative way, just that the concept is something that would be very unlikely (if not out-right impossible) for a normal person to encounter.
Low concept works are realistic works, in the sense that they tend to deal exclusively with the normal trial of life stuff that is probably pretty familar to most of the intended audience. Of Human Bondage (crippled boy deals with growing up and becoming a man in turn of the century England) is low concept, while Heart of Darkness (man sails down river in Belgian Congo to meet a mysterious trading post chief and encounters savagery) is high concept.
Or to take the example of TV teen dramas, shows like My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks are low concept. They’re slice of life type shows where normal teens deal with normal problems. While Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars or even The O.C. are high concept. The latter shows may deal with the same type of story lines, but they have to be adapted to the shows’ central conceits, whether that’s “teen life as a horror movie”, “teen life as a noirish detective drama” or “teen life as an overblown soap-opera”.
I’d say that calling something “high concept” is inherently neither complimentary nor uncomplimentary, though it can be used either way, because of the perception that high concept works tend to be more commercial (which can be seen as good or bad).
High concept has nothing to do with fantasy vs. realism.
It’s entirely about how concise the pitch is. A project that can be summed up neatly in a few words is high concept.
This is quite often a good thing because high-concept projects tend to be easier to advertise. With a really tight core idea you don’t have to work very hard to explain what it’s all about to your potential audience.
“*Die Hard * on a boat” (Under Siege) = high concept. Five words and you can pretty much imagine the whole movie from start to finish.
“A man meets his friend for dinner and they talk about a variety of subjects.” (My Dinner with Andre) = not high concept. There’s really no good way to boil that movie down to one pithy sentence.
