A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 6
This is the 10th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Several reasons which I’ll work my…
This is the 10th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Several reasons which I’ll work my through during this series of posts. Here’s another one:
Around 1990, writer Stephen Brill came up with this idea: “A self-centered lawyer is sentenced to community service coaching a rag tag youth hockey team.” That eventually became the movie The Mighty Ducks. That seemingly innocuous family comedy grossed $51M, not bad for a movie with a reported $10M budget.
Then came D2: The Mighty Ducks. Then D3: The Mighty Ducks. Then “Mighty Ducks”, a TV series. Then Mighty Ducks the Movie: The First Face-Off, a DTV animated movie. And then came this:
The Anaheim Ducks [formerly the Anaheim Mighty Ducks]. An NHL franchise. A professional franchise worth an estimated $188M.
All based on the fact that one day, a writer was walking around and came up with a story idea about a youth hockey team named the Mighty Ducks.
As I said… in Hollywood, story ideas are worth gold.
Today’s story idea: Playboy who ‘slept with 6,000 women’ dies while having sex.
A legendary Italian playboy has died at age 63 while having sex with a 23-year-old tourist.
Maurizio Zanfanti, dubbed the Romeo of Rimini, claimed to have slept with more than 6,000 women after becoming famous as a nightclub promoter in the beach-side city in the 1970s.
He was entertaining a tourist from Romania in the back of a car Tuesday night when he suffered a fatal heart attack.
The shocked woman called paramedics, but Zanfanti could not be revived.
Local media said it was the way the man once called “Italy’s most successful lover” would have wanted to go.
“Zanza died after doing what he did best — loving women,” Il Resto Del Carlino, a Bologna newspaper, reported.
The mayor of Rimini said Italy had lost “a legend of the night.”
I had two thoughts about how to approach this story concept, both comedies. The first: What if a guy known as “Italy’s most successful lover” becomes impotent? And this fact sets off a nationwide panic. If Zanfanti could lose his ability to have intercourse, what of other men?
So does the country sponsor a Bachelor type competition to find a woman who can awaken Zanfanti’s listless lizard? A reverse version of Cinderella and the glass slipper: Who among the country’s citizens can arouse Zanfanti’s love pump? And wouldn’t it be interesting if the person who does get a rise out of this lover… is a man.
The second take: We open with Zanfanti making love with a woman and in the middle of their roustabout, this Latin lover has a heart attack. And as he lies there clutching his chest, apparently dying, he has a series of flashbacks which feature one relationship he had which could have been true love.
What went wrong? Why didn’t these two end up together? This woman who could have caused Zanfanti to cease his endless need for casual sex and instead commit to a serious relationship.
There you go, my sixth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!
Each day in April, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are valuable skills for a writer to develop.
See you in RESPONSES to hear YOUR take on this story idea. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.