When you’re a creator, you are always hit with three questions:
What are you working on?
Where did you get the idea?
What are you working on next?
Regarding the third question I never know what I’ll be doing next, but the ideas I get always come to me after “linking fancy unto fancy,” kinda like shaking up the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and occasionally a few of them just fall into place. They always start out promising but somewhere along the way I either lose interest, can’t see how to develop them or I sober up. Example:
I was watching this program on “UFOs and the White House”—well, I wasn’t actually “watching” it, I was doing something else, the TV was on and I couldn’t find the remote. (And yes, I know you can change the channels without the remote but do you know what buttons to push? I didn’t think so.) Anyway, in the course of the program they said something that made me stop, actually gave me chills:
In 1967, President Gerald Ford asked two young White House junior staffers to look into what the government knew about UFOs—Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney. At the time of the program they were, respectively, the Secretary of Defense and the Vice‑President. They had started their careers in the White House and thirty years later, they were still there. How much power had they accumulated in that time? After this administration, they would never be in the White House again. How do you walk away from that? Suppose you don’t?
Suppose you have formed a secret network of career civil servants who are loyal to only you and not the current resident of the Oval Office? Suppose, thorough them. You undermine the administration that replaced and started positioning your own person, someone who will give you access or continue your agenda? Then I realized they did something like that in the novel Seven Days in May and the two movies inspired by it.
So, in honor of the Black Science Fiction Society’s fourth b’day, here are four story ideas that burst into my head, like fireworks, then burned out, like fireworks. Develop them if you can. All I ask for is a few points on the back end of the movie deal.
- Osama bin Laden was not killed when his compound was raided. Sure, keeping him alive would have sparked an uprising among radical Islamists and hate crimes against innocent Muslims, so he had to killed and buried somewhere that would not become a shrine. But think of all the intel he could provide, I mean, this was the face of al-Qaida. So Seal Team Six secretly carried him away to some Super Max prison where’s he’s been under interrogation… until he escaped. Now it’s up to your protagonist, the Black Jack Bauer, to bring him back… or kill him for real this time.
- Remember a few months ago when they found a body on the grounds of one of the royal estates in England? And remember how the story just dropped out of the news cycle? And remember how it was once believed that Jack the Ripper may have been a member of the royal family? (This has since been disproved… or has it?) Suppose this death was somehow connected to the Ripper killings and the royals (or someone very loyal to them) were covering it up? And now it’s up to… the descendant of someone who worked on the original cases, someone disgraced by the scandals at Rupert Murdock’s papers, to get to the bottom of things before the murderer/Ripper strikes again…
- They spent ten billion dollars to build the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) and it hasn’t worked yet. The first time they turned it on it blew fuses, when they announced they had discovered superluminal (faster than light) particles, it turns out the readings were due to “faulty calibrations” of the measuring instruments. But what’s really going on? Is it sabotage? Are they trying to hide something? Did they find the “God Particle…” or did it find them? Did something take over all their computers and start “running” things? You work out the details.
- Abe Lincoln is hunting vampires responsible for the Civil War, Edgar Allen Poe is hunting a serial killer inspired by his writings, Jane Austen is battling zombies and sea monsters (all movies coming to a theatre near you soon!), so why not have Zora Neale Hurston going against voodoo priests (or priestesses) during her anthropological work in Haiti? There’s even a built-in sequel, where years later, she battles them again in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance. (It seems on of the patrons has taken up the dark arts and is being protected by members of “the Niggerati” and could explain why she was so often at offs with them. ("Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me," she once said.)
So there you have it!
You’re welcome!
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