For years, I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with an effective premise for the next great Hollywood action movie. Now, with the cnclusion of the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change - and with the help of a website I've just discovered - I think I may finally have it.
The website's called http://www.moviepitch.com/. And it's a great source for all us wannabe film writers and producers out there. It purports to teach you how to boil down your story into a short, punchy paragraph-length summary called the "pitch"and get the ear of powerful Hollywood producers. Here are a couple of recognizable examples:
PITCH #1 A cranky, rude man has to relive the worst day of his life over and over again until he gets it right. When he does, he finds true love.
PITCH #2 An irresponsible father loses his marriage and custody of his children, whom he loves dearly. Desperate to be near them, he disguises himself as an English nanny.
Sound familiar? Of course they do. Those embryonic paragraphs eventually became Groundhog Day and Mrs. Doubtfire, both hugely successful movies.
So, how about this one:
A peaceful but boring nation decides to finally get the international attention it deserves by going rogue and threatening to destroy the world ... forcing the international community to declare war to save the planet.
My working title is The Ugly Canadian. I'm hoping Prime Minister Stephen Harper will accept the starring role as the man who takes over the formerly peaceable kingdom and turns it to the pursuit of pure evil.
Goodness knows, after our embarrassing performance at the just-concluded Climate Change Summit, all the traditional villains - Nazis, Communist dictators, Islamist terrorists - pale in comparison to the Ugly Canadian.
After my movie gets made, no more will Canadians be dismissed in Hollywood as boring do-gooders. Nope, we'll be known far and wide as seal-clubbing, climate-change denying, dirty-oil peddling, Afghan detainee-torturing hockey hooligans. No longer will movie villains be seen in SS uniforms, Russian Red Army fatigues, or burnooses and dishdashas. Instead, get ready to see Hollywood evildoers dressed in parkas, lumberjack shirts, snowboots and toques, brandishing ice-hockey sticks and windshield scrapers as weapons of mass destruction.
OK, so maybe we'll have to sacrifice our reputation as global nice guys to do it. But admit it; all that helpful-fixing, honest-brokering, soft-power-projecting, peacekeeping boy scout shit was always kinda nerdy, wasn't it? Stephen Harper and his Conservatives certainly think so.
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