It is hardly a secret that Hollywood has run out of ideas. I’m not against remakes or sequels in general, but they have become a crutch for Hollywood movie executives who apparently qualify for the job only by virtue of being in the right place at the right time. I have no doubt that there are great scripts sitting in Hollywood apartments that would make great movies but never will because there is no opportunity to sell action figures or video games. If you can’t sell your script idea as both a movie and a video game today, chances are it won’t get made or, at best, it will get made but barely distributed.
Screenwriters who are having trouble getting ideas for movies are another story. These men and women may not yet have learned to play the game of rewriting a Jane Austen novel into Grand Theft Auto: Jane Austen’s Revenge yet. More power to them. Remain innocent of the utter lack of creativity that is required to become a movie or television executive as long as possible. And if by chance you are looking for a good idea or just an idea that makes you think of a good idea, consider these. All I ask is that you give me a Based on an Idea by Timothy Sexton credit. I won’t ask for money or sue you for stealing them. Just give a little bit of credit where credit is due. Consider me just one incredibly decent and philanthropic guy who is tired of the idea that lousy CGI and fifteen car crashes makes a movie worth spending 100 million dollar to make.
The True Story of the Piltdown Man Hoax.
This free screenplay idea is based on a true story. You can even put a title after the credits claiming this to be a true story. As we have seen with Oliver Stone’s JFK you don’t even need to be 1% factual or even stick to any known fact to make the claim based on a true story, so feel free to play around with dramatic license when writing this screenplay. Piltdown Man remains the most famous hoax in the short history of paleontology except for the hoax that Sarah Palin was worthy of being Vice-President. Oh wait, that’s palintology. Piltdown Man makes for a great movie idea because it contains one very well known character, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and because it appeals to the fears of both the Left and Right. The Right is fearful of anything that dares calls into question their idea that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and the Left is fearful of how hoaxes like this result in states like Kansas repeatedly trying to force school districts to use the Bible as a history textbook in schools. The story is basically about how some people used the fake discovery of a missing link fossil to fool everybody for forty years. For this one you don’t even need to give me a credit since it’s a public domain story.
Untitled Homosexual Murder Movie.
Three young homophobic men kill a guy they see coming out of a gay bar. It is discovered that the man was not even gay. The twist here is that the men went to the gay bar specifically to enact their rage after an ultra-right wing preacher spent an hour whipping his congregation into a fury over hyped-up ideas about how gay marriage is inevitable and wrong and destroying America. The preacher is tried as an accomplice in the murder for spreading his message of hate. Will he be found guilty or will a Bush appointee once again ignore reality in the legal arena?
Accidents Won’t Happen.
A man begins seeing a pattern in so-called accidents that happen around him. Not little accidents like knocking over a can of soda, but tragic accidents. He has always been taught to attribute the accidents to evil, but slowly rejects the very basis of the idea that a good God would allow evil to run amok in the guise of accidents. He begins to piece together an elaborate conspiracy theory and, what do you know, he latches onto evidence that the accidents are not accidents at all, but actually part of a huge conspiracy.
The Wicked Lady
In 1945 Margaret Lockwood and some other actresses appear in low cut dresses in this kinda true story of a notable female highway robber. The movie was a sumptuous British production and became one of the biggest hits in British cinema history. The screenplay idea here is not so much the making of a largely forgotten film, but the behind the scenes hypocrisy of America in 1945. True story, and I am not kidding: The film had to be reshot with Margaret Lockwood and the other bountiful babes wearing new costumes that covered them up a bit more. If you have ever seen the original British version you absolutely have to just sit back and laugh at the thought that Americans banned this movie. I don’t know a single thing about the actual goings-on that led to the decision to reshoot most of The Wicked Lady, but don’t let the facts stop you. This is a fantastic premise for a satire about the hypocritical Puritanism that makes America what she is.
Dream Attack
A woman is raped. But she only remembers being so in the middle of the night. She wakes up screaming and remembers the attack. She calls the police, is taken in and examined. No physical evidence of a rape or even of any sexual intercourse is apparent, yet she insists she was assaulted. Police and doctors assume she is unbalanced. Arrange for her to see counselor (headshrink). She’s already in therapy. Counselor doesn’t believe her story. THERE’S NO EVIDENCE. She knows, however, she was certainly damn well raped. This girl will not accept the theories that she dreamed it all. She goes to her therapist and tells him of it. He says perhaps it was just a dream. We then find out why this girl is in therapy. She desires to be controlled. She is in control of her life and winds up dating men that she can’t help but think of as wimps. She confesses that she has admitted before of having dreams and fantasies of being controlled sexually to the point that some might call it rape. But not this time. It wasn’t a dream. And then it happens again. And again, there is no evidence. Could it be true, that she really is going crazy? Or is the counselor who is heavily involved in dream research conducting an experiment in hypnotically suggested rape? Could be, except that he winds up dead after another woman makes the same unbelievable claim of being raped despite no evidence.
The Estate
A couple goes to an estate sale. They buy an eerie and bizarre expressionist painting and when they get home they find a note inside. The note is a confession from the woman whose death initiated the estate sale of the murder of her adulterous husband. The wife of the first couple finds the letter and begins talking with her husband about it. She suggests they send it to the police, but the husband says why bother, the woman is dead. There’s no point in expending any effort on it. She decides to investigate herself and as she does so she becomes obsessively fascinated with the strange painting. The husband decides to let her pretend to be Sherlock Holmes. They are having marital trouble and this is one way to get her out of his hair, he tells his buddy at work. Of course, it’s really so he’ll have more time to spend with his mistress. The woman finds out more about the dead murderer’s life and the details begin to correspond to her own. Could she become the murderer of an adulterous husband too?
Rachel Lawless, Bounty Hunter
Rachel Lawless is a bounty hunter in the not too distant future, maybe less than a hundred years. Time travel has been discovered, but outlawed because of the unstable effects it has on the time-space continuum. Anyone caught using the methodology or going back in time is put to death immediately after conviction by trial. Rachel knows someone who knows how to do it though. She’s got a sick kid who needs a lot of money for a transplant. (Maybe we could make a statement about health care reform here). After catching a most wanted criminal to kick off the book she finds that the half million dollar reward has been mysteriously knocked down to just $50,000. She knows that it was knocked down because it was her that did the catching, but what can she do? She decides to go back in time and catch a Ted Bundy-esque killer on the day after his such-and-such murder victim is found and the reward for his capture goes up to a million dollars. She’ll put it in the bank with a codicil or something that it is a trust fund for her granddaughter Rachel–whom she really is of course, not to be entrusted until her 30th birthday, which is soon coming up of course. By then, the interest will have accrued considerably and she’ll be rich beyond all dreams. Perhaps it’s her grandfather who has the time machine and that way he can give her grandmother’s birth certificate and driver’s license or whatever she will need to pass herself off as a person from that time. Naturally, her time travel is discovered and she’s followed by the Future Cops, determined to bring her back and kill her. They are so determined because, naturally, she has consistently embarrassed them by bringing in wanted crooks before them, most especially Public Enemy Number One a few years ago. The leader of the Future Cops never got over this and has sent out his number one guy to go back and get her. So she’s back here in the past looking to catch “Bundy” while evading the future cops.
She manages to catch Bundy and he says he’s innocent. She doesn’t believe him of course, and isn’t immune to his considerable charms. She shows him the trial copy on a CD-type software and when he sees that another murder is supposed to happen in just three days, he convinces her to wait and watch. Three days goes by and, what do you know, the murder takes place. He didn’t commit it after all. By this time, she’s sort of fallen for him. She decides she has to stay and prove him innocent. The ultimate ending–ridiculous thought it may be–would be that the reason Bundy can’t come back with her is because he’s working on the cure for whatever disease it is that Rachel’s kid is afflicted with. He’s only a year or two away. The reason he never discovered it is because he was wrongly jailed by eyewitnesses who made a mistake and because his alibis were always that he was in the lab working on something that he wouldn’t admit to.
The Nurture of Time Travel.
Thirtysomething man full of moral idealism in the most decadent age imaginable falls under the spell of two older men, fighting the good fight for the underground. One is a historian, one is a scientist. The historian shows three different books purporting to account for the “leader’s” childhood and teenaged life. What they know for sure is that his mother was not married when she had the child. There are reports that she married later in life when baby was older. They know where she was living at the time of her conception, but not who she conceptualized with. Scientist shows him time machine he’s built. One can go forward and backward, but cannot reverse once there. They are either stuck in past or must wait for future to arrive. The two men fill our protagonist’s head with ideas of going back in time and changing the past, stepping in front of Oswald’s bullet, so to speak.
They convince him that there is no necessity to kill the “leader” and that all that must be done to correct history is stop his mother from conceiving with whomever she got it on with. If he is capable at all of doing that, then he can be almost singlehandedly responsible for saving America in the 21st and 22nd Century. The historian shows him how to live in America in the 20th Century. He tells him to find bookie and bet several thousand dollars on Buster Douglas against Mike Tyson, (or something else with such outlandish odds that he’d make a killing.) “But gambling is immoral,” he counters. “Is is so if you are saving millions of lives by doing so. Sometimes we have to admit that the means are worth the ends.” He goes back in time, waving goodbye forever to the future and finds the woman. She is not yet pregnant. He finds that they get along swell and develops friendship with her. He cannot, however, keep her from getting pregnant. She does so, much to his chagrin, it goes without saying. Now he is forced to deal with her desire for a termination of the pregnancy. She wants abortion. He does not believe in it. He must come face to face with his conscience. Does he save her baby from murder, as he sees it, or does he save the country from the ravages of who her baby obviously is.
He saves the baby. He takes care of her and eventually they marry. He becomes the father of the child whom he thinks will grow up to destroy everything he believes in. Well, then, what better way to save the country than by being there to teach that child morality? The right way of looking at life? He brings the woman to God and teaches the child the right way of looking at life, only it turns out that the child grows up to resent his narrow, self-righteous view of the right way of life. He becomes smothered by a lifestyle which teaches him not to think for himself and to follow a doctrine without question. In turn he starts to become extremely liberal, growing up to despise all forms censorship, both physical and spirtual. He becomes, in fact, a guru to millions of men and women who are tired of being told what they can and cannot do by faceless government fat cats. They attempt a coup. It is successful and he becomes the leader of a country where God is not outlawed, but it is made to follow all the rules that other businesses follow, including heavy taxation. Religion becomes too expensive to keep up as the huge industry it really is and falls to the inevitable death axe of indifference. Sex becomes an even bigger industry due to the relaxation of morality laws. The original leader passes away and is followed by a second who takes his name like an emperor and soon sex is sold in the malls and next to Burger King and McD’s in sex boutiques, like Enrico’s Erotic Emporium, where a certain idealistic thirtysomething man full of idealism in the most decadent age imaginable finds himself forced to work to make it from day to day.
