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Extra Credit 020 - High Concept: What Is It? (Patreon)

Published:
2024-02-29 15:10:20
Edited:
2024-02-29 15:11:56
Imported:
2024-02
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We're talking about our time doing rounds of pitches to studios on "high concept" movies. But what the heck does "high concept" even mean?

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Steve

That's why Sixth Sense sucked. If you happened to work out the concept after 15 minutes, there really wasn't enough in the rest of the film to maintain interest.

Jamie Allinson

Great episode. I wonder if ‘concept driven’ is a better term? Take ‘Star Wars’ out of a Galaxy Far Far Away and you still have a film: in fact, put it in a fantasy setting and you have ‘Lord of the Rings’, ‘Willow’, ‘Legend’ etc. Take ‘time flows backwards’ out of ‘Tenet’ (pitch: ‘spy film where time flows backwards’) and you just have ‘spy film’.

Bugberry

Boy was this discussion a rollercoaster for me. I kept on disagreeing then agreeing back and forth as yall tried to nail down these terms. I really don't think "high concept" means that the concept has to be good, just that it's concept stands out strongly. You can have a bad concept that is still the central focus of a movie's premise. Kindergarten Cop is a high concept movie because the concept is the focus, as evident by the title being the concept "cop goes undercover as kindergarten teacher". And a lot of the movies yall read either were high concept, as in they didn't focus on character or world intricacies. Star Wars has a lot of worldbuilding that we now associate it with, but when summarizing the concept of the first movie that is largely irrelevant. I'm also surprised the terms "High Fantasy/Low Fantasy" weren't brought up, because they are based on similar terminology. High Fantasy doesn't mean the Magic is done better, just that it's a more prominent part of the setting where as Low Fantasy is defined by fictional settings that still have Magic but in a very subtle or sparse way. And just like these, Low Concept movies still have concepts, they just aren't a big part of what the movie is built and advertised around.

Bugberry

Also, for another comparison point, Magic the Gathering designer Mark Rosewater talks about game design being Top-Down or Bottom-Up. Top-Down design involves starting with the flavor/story of a game and building mechanics to support that, while Bottom-Up are games that start with the mechanics that then have flavor/story built around that. Just like with Concept in films, many games have both Top-Down and Bottom-Up qualities.

David Halstead

Adding to what you guys are talking about, I think "High Concept" is a story in which the audience is thinking about the central concept of the plot throughout the story. You watch the movie Liar Liar, you're thinking about the concept of a lawyer not being able to lie and how it will play out in different situations for the entire movie. You watch The Matrix, you're thinking about what the Matrix is and how it works the whole time. "High Concept" stories keep reminding you to think about the concept.

Jason Thompson

Y’all should do an episode about various film/tv pitches you made back in the day. Unless, and I say this as an artist with many abandoned projects, you still want to do them and/or, it’s just too much of a bummer

David Halstead

BTW, I thought this was an excellent Extra Credit. I would like more of this type dealing with story elements. I would include your episode on "What is Sci-Fi?" as an example.

MJonascu

A high-concept idea doesn't have to be a log line with characters or plot. It can be just a few words that inordinately delight or intrigue. Ideally, both. For example (in the very best kind of self-plagiary), Jurassic Park is Westworld with dinosaurs. When I was making the pitching rounds in Hollywood in the mid-nineties, the ultimate example of high-concept was seven words long: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Devito are twins. Like Chad, I spent about 20 years writing and pitching screenplays, and living in that rarified hell where I had agents and options and friends who blew up. I even sold and developed a script at Universal. But in my case, I never had anything produced. The story I sold to Universal was a high-concept supernatural thriller. Given their Machiavellian professions, it delighted and intrigued agents and producers and REALLY got them thinking. I'd start with, "How would you like to live forever? Now, what if you had to choose who died your death for you?" I'd wait a beat, and then say, "For the sake of argument, I'd like us all to pretend this poses some kind of ethical dilemma." Got a laugh every, single, time. I think it was that joke that got me and my partner signed with CAA for a year.

ESTY

To me, High Concept determines how the poster is going to look, it is what gets you green-lit. The final product, however needs both those character low-concepts and high level execution to elevate it above the more generic genre stuff. I’d submit the Tom Hanks movie BIG as a good example of High Concept.

Rafe Ball

In terms of the formal definition, I think Jamie has a good way of thinking about it above as "X-driven" - so a high concept film is one where the concept drives the movie, and as you guys said that's what gets you excited. "Low concept" is most commonly character-driven movies where there's not much of a concept (maybe not even much of a plot), it's about who the characters are and how they interact with each other and the situation - so when asked to describe what the movie's about you tend to get 'wooly' stuff like "friendship" or "the ennui at the heart of the human condition". You might even get rarer things like cinematography-driven where it's more about experimenting with the form and the images on screen. Collider has an article called "No Plot? No Problem" with some good examples (https://collider.com/great-movies-with-no-plot/).

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

As a side note, I'd say there are still mythic elements in "Andor": You've got your Hero's-Journey call to adventure, initial refusal of the call, meeting of mentors, descent into the abyss, transformation, and all that Cambellian stuff that explains our contemporary pop culture better than it does ancient mythology--especially since the original Star Wars made it cool. At this point, I don't know if this stuff is in Andor because it's Star Wars, or because that's what people expect hero stories to be like now, even gritty ones without so many space wizards.

Patrick W

All this did was solidify my opinion on what a circle jerk word salad Hollywood has become. Explains a lot of its current downslide.

CarcharodonMegs

...I'd like to hear the dissertation on if Baywatch Nights is considered high concept because people look at me like I'm high when I explain it. And as a therapist, I appreciate a peek into your psyches

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

I've always assumed that high concept just meant that the story requires a major buy-in from the audience. I wouldn't identify Jaws as high concept because it requires very little of the audience. The idea that a wild animal might start killing people and need to be hunted down is an old one and easy for most folks to believe. We're interested in the characters and how they go about doing the thing. Star Wars is high concept because of the Force. Without Force powers, Star Wars is just a war set in space. When we're asked to buy in to a universal field that some folks can take information from and manipulate, well, that isn't something the audience is likely to believe. If the audience believes it, then the standard war movie is elevated. Groundhog Day is just a story about a guy who learns to be a better person. What makes it high concept is the notion that this takes place over one day repeated instead of over many days/weeks/months/years. Halloween is a movie about a stalker. It doesn't really become high concept until very near the end when we learn that he is a supernatural stalker. Pretty much every HPL story is high concept. Ditto Steven King - with some very notable (and popular) exceptions. The high concept pitch generally comes down to: standard story + wild element

MortalGlare

This episode totally blew my mind. For whatever reason I always assumed that 'High Concept' meant 'High-brow concept'. Like it was something complex and philosophical and thought-provoking, so this has changed everything for me

The Lonely Sand Person

I think that listen to the director and then do whatever you want" thing is kind of a mental trick -- the director has a specific performance in mind already, and any tiny deviation from it is going to read as "wrong". By ignoring that and giving your own performance, the director has to reset their expectations and watch your performance fresh.

Ethan Cordray

I think a good way to see the difference is to look at two shows/movies that are in the same genre, but one is high concept and the other isn't. Take 1980s sitcoms: "Alf" is high concept -- a normal suburban family, plus an alien. "Cheers" is not high concept -- a bunch of characters in a bar. In "Alf," most of the comedy comes from the concept -- it's pretty much all about Alf being an alien. In "Cheers," the comedy comes from the specific personalities and relationships between the characters. That's the difference.

Pete Williams

Right towards the end of college, around about 2009, me and my other unemployed buddies used to play Burnout 3 on the X box a lot. The loading screens have you tips one of which was "have you tried winning a goad medal?". That phrase became an in joke after any of our failures.

Long time hater

My favourite part of this episode was where Chris said something to the effect of 'spoiler alert, i didn't become a successful film maker, they didn't hire me' and Chris says 'neither did I'. Does this mean this is just Chris's show and Chad's crashed it every week.. for like 12 year..?

Long time hater

I think you missed the high concept aspect of Back to the future: Crisping Glover is in a film...and he's not the character who travels through time to nearly sleep with his mon

Corey Wittig

Been meaning to respond to this episode. Chad, thank you for your monologue about realizing that what you like to do most is maybe what you’re best suited for (a simplification of what you said). I left my career as a librarian to open a book store—a few weeks from grand opening now and it’s stressful and wild but it also feels so natural and right and I now see all of my trying to please bosses and advance as such a wrong move (it helped me get here so I don’t really regret it but still). Anyway, thanks! You guys are really an inspiration. Sincerely. Let’s please have a Strange Studies live event at my shop sometime! Chris can lead a Chris’ Reality Tour of Pittsburgh for fans in attendance. Haha

Forrest Rush

While the call sheet for The Eternals may have looked like a touchdown/homerun/3 point slam dunk/eagle etc on paper, I and many other marvel fans were saying from the first announcement that introducing 10 characters in a single movie was not going to work and lo and behold we were right. Blame can be assigned to superhero movie fatigue and/or marvel messing up the release schedule, but it should have been a mini-series or a different storyline should have been adapted. My favorite would have been the Neil Gaiman arc in which Sprite is the villain, the story begins in media res where the eternals are living "normal" lives without knowing who/what they are due to Sprite's manipulations and focuses on Ikaris figuring it out. It would have been a mystery/detective story in a superhero universe (high concept). It could have easily tied into the Blip event. I really like Kumail and have followed his career from the days of the Indoor kids with his wife, and I know he is a full on nerd, so I don't really understand why he didn't see past the typical Hollywood producer "It's gotta work 'cause Jolie! Zhao! It's GOG meets The Sopranos!" blah blah blah. No, it's an overstuffed wandering monstrosity trying to entice a general audience to pay attention to a huge cast of characters that come out of more than left field, and very very skimpy bones thrown out to the geeks with Black Knight and Blade stopping by. And let's not even touch on the Celestials and what that's supposed to mean. I can only imagine the poor non-nerd casual movie-goer wondering, "So the big ass transformer made earth as an egg for a baby transformer that's just sticking out of the planet now? And Richard Madsen is an android like Vision?" Sorry Kumail, but I knew in the first 15 minutes that this was going to be a late season CW arrowverse episode, ie not good. However, listening to him talk about how he had no idea it wasn't going to work reminded me of an interview with Tom Hanks on NPR in 1991. He was riding high on the success of Sleepless in Seattle and was being asked about Philadelphia which was getting Oscar buzz and about a little movie that was starting production called Forrest Gump. Prior to this many thought his career was over due to what was at that time considered to be the biggest flop in Hollywood history, Bonfire of the Vanities from 1990, his first leading man's role in a drama. I forget the question, but Hanks said that making Bonfires was exactly like making Sleepless or Philadelphia, that he thought it was and would be a great film from what he saw every day. Of course, it is unfair that an individual actor (or director or writer) is held responsible for a film's failure as I think (but correct me if I'm wrong Chad, Chris et al) that it is those producers demanding a high concept while really just wanting to be higher than they already are.

Dan Pratt

mumbles “…50 First Dates…” blushes