Okay, now I know you’ve all had your million-dollar idea for a film. We all have dreams of breaking into Hollywood (even those not involved in film) with that one great idea. You sit on it for a while, you might even write a page of dialogue, and then it happens. Some stupid movie-guy stole it from you! Well, not stole, but it was your idea! Right?
What was mine? Well, I had this great idea for a film that was going to make fun of the premises and rules of horror movies. The genius thing was…it was going to be a horror flick itself! A million-dollar idea, for sure.
Well, I thought about this hot little commodity for nearly 3 years. Then, what should come out, but…Scream. Yep, similar idea, only made my a famous movie-guy. Sure, I’d almost forgot about the film by then, but it was my idea!
So come on Dopers, don’t be shy, step on up to the whining booth. What movie did you think of first?
The scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Harrison Ford shoots the guy with the sword. My idea.
Right out of high school, my best fiend was writing a script we were going to shoot on super-8. It was about this kid who plays video games. But his favourite game, the one he was the master at, wasn’t just a game. It was a testing device for an alien civilization, who was looking for warriors to fight it’s battle against an evil coalition of planets. About a year later, before we got around to making it, The Last Starfighter came out. There was another idea he came up with not too long after that, that also was released as a “real” movie; but I don’t remember what it was.
A few years ago, the same guy was writing another script. It was about a Secret Organization that was working to bring about The End of the World. There was one guy, a detective, who could pick up “latent images” of what happened at crime scenes. These crimes were part of the Secret Organization’s plans. It was to be a very dark and creepy film. Then Fox brought out Millennium. We shot it anyway about a year ago, but the script was changed so that it had basically no similarities to Millennium (or the original script, for that matter). It’s still a conspiracy/horror show, but with a different premise and a lot of satire.
[Edited by slythe on 12-23-2000 at 11:53 AM]
Johnny L. A. writes:
> Right out of high school, my best fiend was writing a
> script we were going to shoot on super-8. It was about
> this kid who plays video games. But his favourite game,
> the one he was the master at, wasn’t just a game. It was
> a testing device for an alien civilization, who was
> looking for warriors to fight it’s battle against an evil
> coalition of planets. About a year later, before we got
> around to making it, The Last Starfighter came out.
Doubtlessly many people independently came up with this idea not long after video games became popular. The idea was used in several movies and short stories. As soon as the first couple of these were printed (or released), editors and producers could then say when they saw the idea in a short or script, “That’s a cliche now. Come up with a more original idea.” The same thing has been long true of certain other ideas. See how you would get laughed out of an editorial office if you were to submit a story using the idea of “sub-atomic universes” (the idea that each atom is a solar system with its own inhabitants, and so on downwards and perhaps upwards too). Many, many people have independently come up with this idea, and at least once long, long ago a story using the idea was printed, but there’s nothing original in it anymore.
A mere idea is not a short story, a novel, or a movie or TV script. Nearly all mere ideas are old and any professional gatekeeper for a media (an editor, a producer, a story editor, etc.) will recognize your “clever” idea and ask the real question, which is “O.K., so where does the story go from here?”
I thought this went without saying. I also thought the intended tongue-in-cheek nature of my OP went without saying. I know it’s just an idea, and I know that other people probably thought of the same thing. That’s not what I was asking. I was asking if any of the Dopers out there have had ideas for movies that they thought were great, and then got made by someone else. Like what I said in the OP and what Johnny L. A. said in his post.
I thought Mission Impossible should be a movie before it was.
Now I’m guessing McGyver would be great with a couple dozen “fix the elevator cable with gum wrappers” stuff!