Pride and Predator
Readers sometimes ask for a good definition of “high-concept.”
This is what I mean:
Will Clark is set to direct “Pride and Predator,” which veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about.
Not to be confused with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Not every high-concept idea is a mash-up, but every mash-up is inherently high-concept: the premise is the reason it exists. That doesn’t make it good or worthy or successful, but it’s easily summarized.
Articles
February 17th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” sounds remarkably similar to a project I’ve been threatening to do for years, “The Importance of Being Eaten.”
February 17th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Will, do that one! That play has so many references to cucumber sandwiches…
February 17th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
I would see it. Especially if Kira Knightly was eaten by aliens in the first 10 minutes.
February 17th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Shark; jumped.
February 17th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Good synopsis of a high concept idea.
John – I’m curious, when you’re coming up with new ideas to pitch or write on spec how much do you think about this? Do you try to make sure your material has a high concept hook?
Most of my scripts don’t have a good high concept hook and I often wonder if that’s a big problem.
Ashley
February 17th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
So something like Gladiator wouldn’t really be high concept?
And does anyone else think that zombies are one of the most boring things in movies ever? That includes the “fast ones” that aren’t even zombies.
February 17th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
“Easily summarized” is the key. I heard that Jackie Chan sold Shanghi Noon in 45 seconds. Makes sense.
Probably went something like, “It’s the Green Hornet – kung-fu sidekick – but a western and funny.” I’m just guessing.
Thanks again for the great post, John.
February 17th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Take this with the grain of salt it deserves, but I heard that Brian Grazer once paid $1 million for a one-word pitch: “Dot-Compton.”
February 17th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Stardog,
I would say that “Gladiator” isn’t “high concept” because it doesn’t have a hook. The summary is “another gladiator movie.” Sure they hadn’t done one of those in a while, but nothing about the concept immediately screamed “I’ve got to see that.” Put the best gladiators across space and time in a futuristic arena and you’ve got high concept:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117984713.html?categoryid=13&cs=1
Or maybe that was just Quake 3…
February 17th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
So “high-concept” is just a cross-breed of two well-known (and oft quite cliched) genres? That buffet mix-and-match style ends up with nowhere to go, hit by both sides, with a great danger of becoming a self-parody. The haughty “period piece” types won’t bother, and the purist Sci-Fi robot-heads will magnet more in the cultic camp-de-jour mode. Also you can easily summarize anything, if drill-drive to the core, breeding ultra-condensed editions alive.
High-concept is just an industry-loaded term far better re-translated as “can visualize massive revenue potential immediately”.
February 17th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
I think it’s more than “easily summarized”, I think it’s story idea as star. The idea itself is so interesting that you would see a movie with that idea even if it starred no one you’ve ever heard of. The story idea is the star – there is some hook, some imaginative twist.
When I read this logline on Done Deal I wanted to see the film. I have no idea who will be in it, and don’t care – I want to see aliens attacking people in frilly shirts! It reminds me of Sam Peckinpah’s SALAD DAYS from Monty Python.
Twist, hook, high concept – whatever you want to call it, it’s using your imagination and creativity. That’s a basic part of the job.
February 17th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Historical Buddy-Movie Gangster-Police-Heist Action-Adventure Western-Horror-Fantasy Teenage-Sex-Comedy Romantic-Coming-of-Age Ghostly Supernatural cynically-ironic Noir Epic War Drama Musical.
Rearrange as necessary.
February 17th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
It’s not a buffet mix and match – as John says, the key is “easily summarized” and mashups are inherently so.
You have a high concept when it takes two sentences to tell someone what the “whoah, cool!” of the movie is.
“An amusement park filled with cloned dinosaurs.”
Jurassic Park is about parenthood, and the how science is an amoral tool. Those are the themes. It’s the adventure of a con artist turned millionaire, a pair of precocious children with absent parents, a serial monogamist rock star mathematician, a paleontologist with fatherhood issues, and his brilliant wife. Those are it’s characters. And it’s that stuff that makes it a script worth producing.
But the cool is “Yeah, yeah, yeah! Rampaging dinosaurs! Everything goes horribly wrong, and then they have to like, I dunno, claw through raptors and T-Rexes and those guys with the spikes on their backs to get all the amusement park stuff working again, and all those visitors are in danger! And we could have, like, a Brontosaurus attack a ferris wheel, and put children in danger and and and…”
And you want to go see that movie.
And often it sucks because they don’t get that other stuff right.
February 17th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
High concept or not, I’m just pissed I didn’t think of EITHER of these first.
February 18th, 2009 at 2:26 am
High-concept for a courtroom sci-fi extravaganza:
PEOPLE VS. PREDATOR
February 18th, 2009 at 2:34 am
I’m kind of glad my brain doesn’t come up with such a cruddy idea.
February 18th, 2009 at 4:31 am
pride and predator would make a good musical.
February 18th, 2009 at 6:07 am
I have to be honest: “Pride and Predator” is a brilliant idea. Costume dramas are so irrelevant and pretentious – it’s wonderful to see something entertaining happen to the genre.
It would be even better if they hire someone like Jeremy Brock to polish the script and really make the “costume drama” element authentic.
February 18th, 2009 at 9:55 am
I was once witness to a pitch where a writer, after a prolonged build-up, finally revealed his concept… “It’s Charlie’s Angels…with GIRLS!”
Silence. Blank faces. The faint ping of a penny dropping.
Then the guy reloaded, and fired again: “You see, they are ALL girls.”
February 18th, 2009 at 10:08 am
@ Ashley, Not necessarily a problem. I’d argue that David Benioff doesn’t do high-concept, for example — none of his produced original screenplays were and only one of his assignments that I can think of was (Wolverine). There are people who write drama and who are hired for their talent doing that. But it’s absolutely true that it’s easier to sell a high-concept movie than one that isn’t. (Usually those that aren’t are dependent on a producer championing the project, the write talent attachment, etc). Depending on what you want, this isn’t a problem at all. And truth is, not everyone who’s great with high-concept sells (I can think of someone I know who has brilliant concepts who spent ten years without an agent or an opportunity while writers with little high-concept skill were working). I’d say do what you do (it’s always what you’ll be best at) and figure out what that means for how you navigate your career. For example, working in TV is a good avenue for someone who writes well but isn’t a high-concept writer, and that can be a good counterpoint to a film career, especially an early career. Also, if people like your work, you’ll get lots of meetings (whether anyone opts to buy it or not) and that can lead to writing assignments, relationships, etc, all of which are a crucial part of a career. Once you make a name for yourself, it won’t matter whether you do high-concept or not as you’ll be working (witness, say, Eric Roth, who’s resume is mostly not high-concept).
I think it’s worth mastering what you do well and taking it from there. Some people write big, summer tent-pole movies, some don’t. Of late, the industry has been heavily driven by the former, but there’s an interesting article in the March issue of Vanity Fair (written by Variety editor Peter Bart) questioning whether this will change due to the financial climate. Maybe it will and maybe it won’t, but even in the era of the big tentpole movie, other movies got made every year. They’re the films that get honored at the Academy Awards, as well as many that do not.
February 18th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
I was always a fan of Kramer vs. Predator. Whoever wins… The children lose.
February 18th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
I remain skeptical, genre mixing risks cartoonish camp or confusion, steampunk being a rare exception, but then that goes down the extreme niche path, tho noir does butter-meld best, hybrids usually taking that path. And it can’t just be about just “easily summarized”, the concept itself has to be immediately grasped, “a gotcha moment”, and not in a lofty film school way about it, more in a mass-marketish Development Exec formulaic way. You can’t pitch ‘Blue Velvet meets Battleship Potemkin’, but you can go ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic meets Bladerunner’ or the quite easy ‘Masterpiece Theater meets Aliens’.
High-concept is just an easily-understood marketable idea, that isn’t yet a cliche, still fairly unique. Easy to understand, married to easily marketable.
But the reality…anything that can be understood (and remembered), by an Extreme ADD Development Exec who has 50 meetings this week and 5,000 Blackberry contacts, is “high concept”.
February 18th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Colour me confused by the hype over both projects. The two genres have such different fan bases that I can see both crowds be turned off by either zombies or parlour room discussions of social mores with furtive glances a-plenty.
Sure, i like both genres, but I’m damn weird.
I suppose the closest thing that exists so far is Hammer Studio’s 1966 entry “Plague of the Zombies”, though it’s bumped ahead slightly to Victorian Times.
The other thing that confuses me is that this is nothing that ‘Doctor Who’ hasn’t been regularly doing for nigh on 45+ years now. Why two projects now?
‘Zombie Strippers’ didn’t exactly set the world on fire.
February 18th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Snakes on a Plane
February 18th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
How is Gladiator NOT high concept? It’s right there in the tagline: The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied an empire.
Or on one sentence: A Roman General is betrayed and sold into slavery but exacts his revenge against the new Emperor as a gladiator.
If you can encapsulate it in one sentence, it’s usually high concept.
February 19th, 2009 at 7:03 am
@Mike Prince
Funniest comment I’ve read online in a long time! I’d pay ten ducats to see “Kramer vs. Predator.”
February 19th, 2009 at 9:03 am
They both sound TERRIBLE. The alien one reminds me of the Churchill thing with Christian Slater that was so high concept i cant even remember the title, or the concept. As for the zombies – why? What’s the fucking point? What can possibly be achieved by such a pointless amalgam of genres, except one joke which ceases being funny after it’s been told… once.
February 19th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Isn’t high-concept the down side or negative side of the whole spec/pitch business? Aren’t there many professional writers who make a nice living selling pitches but have had very few of their scripts produced? I guess what I’m getting at is the high-concept pitch sounds cool, but in actual script form — ain’t so cool.
February 19th, 2009 at 10:25 am
@ Tim W., Gladiator’s not high-concept because it’s execution-driven. That logline is only interesting because we already know the movie. If you were to pitch the logline alone, most folks would say that they need to see the script.
A sample of a high-concept pitch that sold a few years back was “A bomb in the Mall at Christmas-time”, which automatically suggests some specific scenarios. Sure different writers will do different things with that, but you can sort of imagine a whole movie just off of that. Not so with Gladiator which works not because the concept suggests lots of scenarios, but because the actual script did really exceptional character work and created character-driven scenarios that work.
February 19th, 2009 at 11:10 am
I don’t know if anyone else is experiencing this, but the text of this blog is starting 1/3 of the way across the page and is overlapping the right-hand menus and advertisements.
February 19th, 2009 at 11:13 am
You could pitch Gladiator as Spartacus meets Pearl Jam…
February 19th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
I feel like “high-concept” also implies a lack of character depth and narrative complexity. I mean, almost every movie can be summarized in three sentences–it doesn’t mean almost every movie is “high-concept.”
For me, the classic “high-concept” movie is this:
“Schwarzenegger and Devito are twins.”
February 19th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
“Predator” itself was a mash-up.
“Rambo” vs. “Alien”
February 19th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
There’s too much hate here for “high-concept.” High-concept can be an excellent source of allegory. A knight plays chess with Death personified. There. High-concept. One of the best films and scripts ever.
February 19th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
@Tennyson E. Stead
I’m also experiencing the misaligned text. It’s actually been that way for a few days, but since no one else mentioned it, I thought the problem was on my end.
February 19th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
@Tennyson and @Doug:
Which browser? (You’re probably going to say IE.)
There’s a new section that I’m about to put up, and it might be causing part of your wonkiness.
February 19th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Fixed now (I had the same problem – ie).
An high concept is just the story idea – the characterization and drama and everything else is up to the skills of the writer. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND is completely high concept.
February 19th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Yes, I’m using IE, and it’s fixed now. Thanks!
February 19th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Fixed now. I thought I was alone…
This feels repetitive for some reason…
February 20th, 2009 at 6:32 am
For awhile it seemed every high concept pitch was based on “Die Hard.”
Under Siege – Die Hard on a train.
Executive Decision – Die Hard on a plane.
Air Force One – Die Hard on a plane, but the President is John Mclane!
Paul Blart, Mall Cop – Die Hard with a fat guy.
February 20th, 2009 at 8:21 am
Thanks for the de-wonking, John. Yes, it was IE.
February 20th, 2009 at 8:34 am
I do want to say that when I heard about Pride and Predator, my mind swimmed with this Atonement-like first act about an arranged marriage that was doomed by true, extra-marital love, with Keira Knightley, John Rhys Meyers, and Ralph Feinnes as the impending groom…
Then, something goes horribly, horribly wrong, and Alfred Molina and Jean Reno show up as awesome, Jules-Verne alien hunters!
Just how mannered are these people? Just how rock-solid is Kiera’s ideas about love and romance? Just how much of a man is the Meyers character, or Ralph Feinnes for that matter?
For my money, Keira winds up marrying Fiennes for totally different reasons than she thought she would, and they become part of a secret society of elite Victorian adventurers, sucked in by the combined awesomeness of Molina and Reno.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers winds up just not being up to the alien-stomping rigors of the plot – but his actions have some real consequences. He’s not a dandy, and he never figured himself a coward. All the same, when push came to shove, Feinnes and Meyers both surprise themselves.
The trick is not to lose the period piece in the action. Every idea comes down to execution, and I would be so stoked to watch the movie I just described – so long as it takes its actors seriously.
In fact, I’d love to see the sequel, in which Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Alfred Molina and Jean Reno risk it all on a journey into the dinosaur-infested bowels of the earth to find… umm… something important? Something with real-world Victorian consequences…
February 20th, 2009 at 8:37 am
I have no excuse for hyphenating Jules Verne’s name.
February 20th, 2009 at 8:38 am
Isn’t it time Ralph Fiennes for the girl?
February 20th, 2009 at 8:39 am
Gack. “Got” the girl…
February 20th, 2009 at 10:32 am
@Tennyson E. Stead:
I’m hoping for a tense scene in which a young housekeeper sees a group of bloodsucking aliens coming through the front door but can’t tell the family because it’s not her place to speak.
February 20th, 2009 at 10:54 am
“Pride and Predator”…
man, i wish i could sell all my stoned, haze of smoke, ideas too!
maybe it was the matching jawlines of keira knightly and the predator that sparked the idea
February 20th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
This also reminds me of a game some friends and I used to play when we were trying to avoid doing our jobs. The premise being everything is funny if you add “On Ice!” afterwards.
The Reader – On Ice! Slumdog Millionaire – On Ice! Oprah – On Ice! The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – On Ice!
February 24th, 2009 at 8:43 am
I mentioned Pride & Prejudice & Predator on my Facebook page days before this story appeared in Variety. This is just like the time in high school when I was talking about an Inspector Gadget movie… Lo and behold, it came out a few years later. Spies. Secret, sneaky, movie ninja spies. They’re everywhere, I tell ya!
:)
March 10th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
While this is B movie farce, the entire concept is brilliant. Mr Darcy and Elizabeth united as they walk shoulder to shoulder through the English countryside wielding hi tech futuristic weaponry from a downed alien. This could be the new Shaun of the Dead. Oh I so hope that Colin Firth is approached and agrees to play Darcy for this.