In dreaming up a good plot for a screenplay I have had my thinking cap on for a while now, doing research and exploring what works. There are thousands of movies out there and thousands of plots and it has become apparent that the people who specialize in writing movies work off of a standard formula. It resembles something like the old campfire days where a group of people sat around the fire and told stories. The setup, the challenge, the resolution. Kinda like that.
Now everybody has a story, there are things that happen to each person every day that stick out and you rush to tell them to somebody because there is joy in doing that and the joy comes from proclaiming to the world "Something NEW and DIFFERENT happened today!" because, day in and day out, life is pretty damn ordinary.
Not a lot happens that is worth talking about. So, if you're going to grab people's interest, you have to describe, say, or do something out of the box because we're all very familiar with the box. We know its parameters better than we want to admit and so entertainment abounds, it acts as an escape route that leads us away from mundane reality- things like work, the neighborhood, your circle of friends, your life.
Premier Night
Jeff Pierre- Unsplash.com
Rock stars, sports heros, actors and actresses, celebrated people of every genre are our heros. Writers and artists. They bring to us the new so we can experience it. We can live vicariously for a time, go with them on some grand adventure and almost taste the danger, but remain safe in our homes or in the theatre. They bring us the excitement in life that is lacking because, face it, we are extaordinarily tamed, contained, and constrained. Society doesn't like wild things going on, things like miles-long high speed car chases, crazed husbands on searches for vengance, or demented masterminds launching missles from armed compounds on mountaintops. And really, folks- when was the last time you went to a lavish party, were part of a really funny ongoing madcap escapade, or went marching as part of a column containing a mass of people and material? Don't you know that we have to live within our BUDGETS? Politicians will tell you that and right now, many of our elected representatives resemble the damn Fun Police.
The wild life? Not for you! Go to work, go home, and watch something on TV.
Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO, and the rest will bring the drama to you, write the stories, hire the actors, build the sets, and shoot the action in order to keep the diversion flow going. The pickings at the table are always changing and so CONTENT is king these days, there is a ravenous appetite for it, which only reflects what has always been there, underlying in people, an insatiable thirst for adventure, expansion, newness, exploration, and fulfillment.
Any of that being answered out there, in ordinary life? I hear some "Yes!"s but a whole lot more "No, not really"s, because we can dream amazingly big dreams, can't we?
Fortunately for us, not a lot of it CAN be played out, because given the opportunity ......
....we would have Rambos runnning through back yards, choppers like the ones from Apocalypse Now swirling overhead, and/or The Blues Brothers careeening down our residential streets, which ain't cool, even if they ARE on a mission from God.
But I certainly would like to write a screenplay like that! Sounds like fun.
Let's see here.... ....maybe I could work something out.... ...hmm...
....what HASN'T already been done....?