A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 7

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:

The story idea is how everyone in Hollywood short-hands your script.

From the first moment your script enters into submission process, where it’s covered and at the very top there is a logline, through the marketing of your movie, where posters, newsprint, radio, TV spots, and web content all derive from it, your story idea is the touchstone for everything that happens.

So over time, I think it is fair to say that story ideas have become the lifeblood of Hollywood, what people traffic in all day long. The more you can think like that, play to the way Hollywood people interact with stories, the better your chances of success in the business.

Today’s story idea: A scandalous, two-piece history of the bikini.

The summer of 1946 was a season of freedom in Paris. Europe had just emerged from World War II, the beaches were clear and the liberated French were ready to carry liberation a bit further — an itsy bitsy, teeny weeny bit further, in the form of a women’s bathing costume that could just about fit into a shot glass.

The bikini was born at a Paris poolside photo shoot on July 5, 1946, a week before Bastille Day and in the midst a global textile shortage. The designer, former engineer Louis Réard, hired the only model willing to expose so much model, a 19-year-old nude dancer from the Casino de Paris named Micheline Bernardini. She put on the four small patches he had strung together and showed the fashion world the female belly button.

— —

By 1946, Réard had left automotive engineering to work in his mother’s lingerie business. In the heady months after the armistice, he was in an arms race with another designer to create the world’s smallest swimsuit.

The rival, Jacques Heim, claimed success with a design he called “the Atom.” But Reard, stitching together a napkin’s worth of newsprint-patterned fabric, achieved something smaller than Heim’s Atom, which he named after the Bikini Atoll, the remote island where atoms were being split in atomic bomb tests that very week.

“We’ve seen it after many wars,” Bensimon said. “In the safer time to follow, we get these celebrations of freedom and the human body.”

Historical dramas are hot in Hollywood. This one has a rivalry… conflict… and lots of bodies wearing bikinis.

I don’t think you need much more than that to justify doing a lot of research into these two central characters — Réard and Heim — and that becoming the basis of your narrative.

There you go, my seventh story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6

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.