How to Generate and Critique Story Ideas (Part 2): Halliwell’s Film Guide

What can a writer do with a resource containing 24,000 loglines?

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” Those are the words of Dr. Linus Pauling, the only person to ever win two Nobel Prize Awards. This is sage advice, especially for writers. A strong story concept is one key to the commercial viability of a novel, short story, or screenplay.

Over the next two weeks, I will run a ten-part series: How to Generate and Critique Story Ideas.

Part 1: Halliwell’s Film Guide

For those unfamiliar with the annual, Halliwell’s is a long running series often praised for being the biggest and best film guide and a must have for all silver screen buffs. This 30th Anniversary edition, with new editor David Gritten — head of the London Film Critics’ Circle — at the helm, is crammed with more entries than any other guide (over 24,000) and over one hundred years of cinema information.

24,000 movies. But more importantly 24,000 loglines. You can breeze through the book and read one logline after another — and in a ‘similar but different’ world like Hollywood, what better way to generate ideas than spin preexisting ones.

You can take a logline and gender-bend it (make the lead a woman instead of a man or vice versa), age-bend it (make the lead a child instead of an adult), genre-bend it (turn a drama into a comedy, a comedy into a thriller), mix-and-match (take one set of story elements and crash them up against another set of story elements), and so on.

This goes on in Hollywood, all the time. Take the case of a 2008 pitch deal for a project called “Skyscraper”. Variety’s description says it in black-and-white:

The story, like that of “Towering Inferno,” is set in the world’s first mile-high skyscraper, fictionally built in Chicago, and centers on the Donald Trump-style developer as well as on the daring crew that rushes in to save the tower when it starts to falter.

It’s The Towering Inferno only with CGI. (Speaking of Inferno, check out the interview with the movie’s screenwriter Stirling Silliphant).

I’ve been through my 1987 version of Halliwell’s twice every movie from A to Z, rooting around for story ideas. Just now flipping through it, my eyes stopped on a 1937 Columbia Pictures movie And So They Were Married. Here’s the logline:

A widow and a widower try to get married despite the ill-feeling of their children.

Sort of a reverse version of The Parent Trap (1998).

So Halliwell’s Film Guide. Great resource for movie loglines which you can spin into similar but different story ideas.

Part 1: What if…

Tomorrow: Part 3 of the series How to Generate and Critique Story Ideas.