In Hollywood, imitation is the sincerest form of creativity. As all producers know, the problem with doing anything original is that, even with a $20 million ad campaign (which is frequently larger than the amount spent on making the original work in the first place) there is no guarantee that a film will be a popular success.
The wisdom of the generals eventually trickles down to the foot soldiers. If you’re a writer pitching an idea for a screenplay, screwing the producer’s mate on the table in front of him or her is probably a slower method of career suicide than pitching an original idea. (When producers say they hunger for new ideas, they lie to cover up their intellectual anorexia. Just look at what Hollywood produces.)
Pitching ideas becomes a game where the writer has to tell the producer how original his or her idea is while assuring the producer that it is actually based on existing films. This takes the form of the statement: It’s [NAME OF POPULAR FILM] meets [NAME OF ANOTHER POPULAR FILM]…only different.
As it happens, combining the basic idea behind any two films is more likely to result in a creative disaster than a huge commercial success. Would you really want to see a combination of Alice in Wonderland and Straw Dogs? The beauty of this approach, though, is that the film will go through so many rewrites that nobody will remember what your original pitch was; in the meantime, you will have gotten your foot in Hollywood’s revolving door.
With this in mind, I would like film producers to know that the following film are currently available:
It’s Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid To Ask meets Fail Safe…only different!
It’s Terminator meets Peter Pan…only different!
It’s French Postcards meets Russian Ark…only different!
It’s Mister Smith Goes to Washington meets Winged Migration…only different!
It’s The Right Stuff meets Nosferatu meets Meet the Feebles…only different!
It’s Stuart Little meets Fritz the Cat…only different!
It’s Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 4 meets The Quiller Memorandum…only different! (Or, maybe Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 5 – I haven’t made up my mind, yet, but either way, it’ll be different!)
It’s Last Tango In Paris meets The Elephant Man…only different!
It’s Beverly Hills Cop meets The Remains of the Day…only different!
It’s Little Women meets Straw Dogs…only different!
It’s American Beauty meets King Kong meets Alexander Nevsky…only different!
It’s City Lights meets Escape From New York…only different!
It’s A Star is Born meets Birth of a Nation…only different!
It’s The Philadelphia Story meets Platoon…only different!
It’s Tender Mercies meets 2001: A Space Odyssey meets Safe…only different!
It’s The Last Starfighter meets The Last Emperor…only different!
It’s Talk Radio meets El Mariachi…only different!
It’s Ferris Beuler’s Day Off meets Unforgiven…only different!
It’s Bye Bye Birdie meets Deep Throat…only different!
It’s Mulholland Drive meets Laurel Canyon meets Sunset Boulevard…only different!
It’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery meets Breathless…only different! And, I don’t mean the lame American remake with Richard Gere, either, but Jean-Luc Goddard’s original!
It’s Meet the Parents meets Independence Day…only different!
It’s One, Two, Three meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets The One…only different!
It’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Exterminating Angel…only different!
It’s Rashomon meets Ten Ways To Lose a Guy…only different!
It’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s meets The Shawshank Redemption…only different!
It’s Topkapi meets The New Age meets Straw Dogs…only different!
It’s Bambi meets Godzilla meets Bambi Meets Godzilla…only different!
It’s Animal House meets The Perfect Storm…only different!
It’s Father Goose meets Dirty Harry…only different!
It’s Invasion of the Bodysnatchers meets Awakenings…only different!
It’s Cleopatra Jones meets Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom…only different!
It’s The China Syndrome meets Princess Mononoke meets National Lampoon’s European Vacation…only different!
It’s Persona meets Mondo Topless…only different!
It’s Weird Science meets Straw Dogs…only different!
It’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World meets Straw Dogs…only different!
It’s Daisy Miller meets Straw Dogs…only different!
It’s School Daze meets The Candidate…only different!
It’s American Pie meets Tales from Gimli Hospital…only different!
It’s Time Code meets The Last Action Hero…only different.
It’s Nineteen Eighty-four meets Inside Misty Beethoven…only different!
It’s The Wizard of Oz meets The Wiz…only different!
It’s XXX meets Ice Age meets The Great Escape meets The Road to Rio meets Willard meets Phone Booth meets Broadway Melody of 1934 meets The Towering Inferno meets My Dinner with Andre meets Chained Heat meets Bottle Rocket meets Plan Nine From Outer Space…only different! But, the, uhh, more I think about it, I think it may be more of a miniseries than a feature.
If you think that any of these combinations make sense, that they might actually make a good movie, trust me, you’re wrong. But, by the time anybody finds out, I’ll be sipping pina coladas on a private beach in southern California.