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Before I say anything, I just want you to know, I swear black and blue that I have never watched True Romance in my life until just now. I have never read the script or anything.
About a year ago I wrote down a full summary for a screenplay and wrote about 25 pages of the script before I started on something new. I don't know why I dropped it, I just did. Anyway.
It starts off with a bit of a, kind of rebel boy, who meets a girl. They fall in love and stumble across something very valuable. With people after them, they travel to Hollywood to a friends place to sell that valuble thing. The friend, then sets them up with someone he knows. Yadda, yadda, yadda. They eventually find the rich guy to buy it and it ends up a blood bath at his apartment. Everyone gets fucked up and the boy and girl escape with the money and live happily ever after.
For fuck sakes, I even had the boy talk to the girl about PIES in part of their dialogue!
Has this ever happened to you guys? Have you ever written something and then seen it just afterwards?
Heck, variations on a theme happen all the time. No big- just don't be influenced by what's come before... except to the extent that it's purposely meant as an 'homage.'
Actually - since you haven't finished your script - *try* to make sure bits of True Romance don't leak into your version, if/when you revisit it. Kind of a shame you saw it before finishing first draft. Then again, depending on how detailed your summary/treatment is, I'd just stick to that if I were you. And of course, let it evolve independently as scripts almost always do.
I can't remember exactly what my idea was, but it was pretty close to what "The Visit" was. Not exactly the same, but included a twist where someone breaks out of a psychiatric ward and is pretending to be someone else close to the protagonist. Even thought it'd be a handheld thing...
Then I watched "The Visit", and while I enjoyed it, I was disappointed I'd have to leave my idea behind or change it up quite a bit. In the end I left it behind.
I can't remember exactly what my idea was, but it was pretty close to what "The Visit" was. Not exactly the same, but included a twist where someone breaks out of a psychiatric ward and is pretending to be someone else close to the protagonist. Even thought it'd be a handheld thing...
Then I watched "The Visit", and while I enjoyed it, I was disappointed I'd have to leave my idea behind or change it up quite a bit. In the end I left it behind.
For now..
Yeah, that's how I feel. I dropped it last year and actually threw out the rough draft of it. Just didn't really like the story when I looked back on it..
I spent a few months, more off than on, piddling about with a brain transplant idea. Oh dear. Yes I know. I should get out more.
I figured it might work, but I could never quite manage it. The problems always outweighed the good stuff. I ended up on tangent stories and in all sorts of a mess.
I finally gave up when Ben Kingsley and Ryan Reynolds did 'Self/Less'. The thieving barstards.
On top of completely stealing my idea, the film was rubbish! I think this is technically known as totally taking the piss.
After watching the film I realised my idea was a little bit better than theirs, but frankly not much. The fact is they also spectacularly failed to make it work.
Oh well, at least I didn't spend $26 million finding out. Ho hum.
I was getting ready to write my first script, almost two years ago. I thought, what would be a good idea for a thriller? Doppelgangers haven't been really used in films, I thought. I could only think of that British movie Broken and the one with Drew Barrymore.
So I started writing. Ten pages in and some google searches, I found out that two doppelganger movies were coming out that year. Enemy and The Double. So I gave up on the idea.
Demento, let's not forget Cronenberg's: Dead Ringers...
Brandon, there will only ever be one True Romance.
Seriously though, cross hatching of ideas is bound to happen. Always disappointing when you think you've got that one great (original) idea and you find out you're wrong.
Brandon, there will only ever be one True Romance.
Seriously though, cross hatching of ideas is bound to happen. Always disappointing when you think you've got that one great (original) idea and you find out you're wrong.
If anyone remembers, I wrote a 3-page script called The Doll a few years back, and Adam Gambrel filmed it and shopped it around the festival circuit. It performed pretty well, and we started thinking of how to expand it into a feature.
We both agreed we wanted to keep the idea of misdirecting the audience -- make them believe the doll is alive, then blindside them with something even scarier. So we came up with the idea of a family moving into a house with a murderous past, the young daughter discovering a doll in the basement, then believing the doll to be alive after creepy hi-jinks ensue.
The twist? The doll's not alive. Its owner -- a girl they believed died in the house -- is actually alive and living in the walls, and she's the one who killed her whole family.
You can imagine my frustration after completing full character and story outlines when The Boy came out. And while I really enjoyed the movie, all I could think was, "Damn."
Happened to me a few times. Nowadays I find it comforting. Great minds think alike. Besides, interpretation trumps ideas every time. It's also infinitely less likely to be emulated by someone else by sheer chance.
I remember doing some research on this phenomenon after I read a set of screenplays all pointing at the same inherent concept of man/machine integration:
… which I believe quickly spawned 2 other scripts almost identical in their approach to a virtual mindscape, and being ‘Jacked’ into a digital realm. Both have serious overtones of William Gibson's Neoromancer, were written the same year and, both released just in time for the new millennium.
eXistenZ – Written by David Cronenberg in 1996 and released in 1999… (Cronenberg already had a similar theme of a human/digital hybrid with his 1983 Videodrome, and thus his concept took on a more organic approach when 'Jacking' into a digital matrix)
What I found (in my research) is, some believe it has to do with the collective (mind) being easily imprinted with thought patterns. Alchemists might call it an ‘Egregore’, while others, such as Rupert Sheldrake, have termed it a ‘Morphic Resonance’.
Perhaps, our minds are always in a perpetual state of somnambulism, constantly searching the ether of the collective for ideas floating about and, when one (idea) lands, we feel certain to claim it as something dredged from the depths of our own thought form, not realizing it may have been a transmission from some unknown source trying to create ideology patterns within society.
Has this ever happened to you guys? Have you ever written something and then seen it just afterwards?
I remember scripting a black ops creature I called ‘Intrepid’ who would transfer and archive (peoples) altar memories into a digital matrix called ‘The Hydra’ (which I based on an archaic computer from the CIA’s ‘Camp X’), months later I saw it fully realized as a 'NAZI Maschine' in ‘The Winter Soldier’. That was a serious WTF moment…
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No shit!
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