What’s the formula of the High-Concept movie? March 29, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Artfully Deranged, The Film Industry, Audience , trackbackHave you ever had a Lloyd Grossman cooking sauce? The makers of said cooking sauce commissioned a survey that yielded the following information: Britons consume four staple meals and that’s about all we can be bothered to cook. According to the Guardian newspaper that would suggest that we eat one of our favourite meals – that being Spaghetti Bolognese – nearly three-thousand times in an average lifetime. Perhaps this says we just don’t like to cook, at least, extravagantly, or that our appetite is less adventurous than we might think. Or maybe we just like the same things. Maybe we want spaghetti Bolognese or Chicken curry or Sausage and Mash every week. We are used to it and the formula is tried, trusted and comforting.
After I finished my Friday night meal of spaghetti in a Lloyd Grossman Bolognese sauce, I placed Samuel L. Jackson’s new high-flying adventure Snakes On A Plane into my DVD player and hit play. After about the hour mark when Mr. Jackson is down in the belly of the plane trying to get the power back on, I had the distinct feeling I’d been here before. No, I hadn’t seen the film and just forgotten about it like some form of random-amnesia that forces the brain to forget average movies. It was the formula of it all that set the déjà vu into overdrive. Well, that and the fact Jackson did the exact same thing in Jurassic Park – they even had walkie-talkies but of course in Spielberg’s dinosaur adventure the aforementioned king-of-cool lost his arm, or was that his body, before he had a chance to radio for help.
That got me thinking – every film we see has a formula. It’s the same with literature, there are basically around eight stories that have been told in thousands of different ways with only character names, locations, and small details being changed (in fact, some theorists believe there are only two main story structures, and others believe there is only one). In cinema the easiest and most identifiable formulas are seen in romance films for example (the boy meets girl, there’s a conflict but they get together in the end) and slasher films (beautifully parodied in Wes Craven’s Scream - teenagers get killed in horrific ways by a seemingly unstoppable killer who likes sharp, metallic murder weapons but final girl defeats the evil in the end). However, the simplest formula comes from those movies that first ‘busted blocks’ in 1975. With their one-line pitch, instant iconography, easy marketability and consumer appeal, and star-name, they introduced cinemagoers to bite-size (quite literally in many cases) movies. It was a gift from the television generation (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Joe Dante, Robert Zemeckis) to American audiences. Welcome to the high-concept movie. They are easily recognisable and much like our formula-diets, easily digested.
So what is a high-concept movie?
Good question because the whole idea of a ‘high-concept’ genre of films is as much debated as whether or not Margot Kidder slept with every major film director of the 1970s. Many believe the fire starters were Spielberg and Lucas with Jaws and Star Wars, but the term may well have been developed from the work by Barry Diller and Michael Eisner at the ABC Network during the 1960s. It has also been argued that the high-concept movie dates further back to the likes of Casablanca and even Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane but this only applies to the idea of identifiable similarities within the films and not the commercial activities that only really became prominent in the late seventies and eighties. Essentially, the high-concept movie is one where the plot can be summed up in a sentence or two, one that has a simple title that tells you most or everything you need to know about the film, and an idea that breeds easy-to-sell marketability. This includes everything from soundtracks and tie-in pop music (think P Diddy’s hit Come With Me for Godzilla), star vehicles and franchises, consumer goods, and dominant, impact-inspired themes (examples would be dinosaurs let loose on the public – Jurassic Park, meteor heading to earth that will destroy everything – Armageddon, Deep Impact).
It could be argued that the high-concept movie has lost its distinction simply because American cinema is now almost totally overrun by films that are made primarily on the basis of profitability. Indeed, has 21st century Hollywood become high-concept and then everything else? The most dominant Hollywood directors of the past twenty years would suggest this – Spielberg, Tony Scott, David Fincher, James Cameron, Stephen Sommers, Simon West, Michael Bay.
In pandering to the needs of the average cinemagoer you get more people into theatres, more people talking about your movie, and therefore more sales. But maybe they are just pandering to that staple diet I was talking about earlier. Every high-concept movie includes very similar things in its formula. There’s a predominant theme of good versus evil which always sells, with the main character having to face a major problem that will always be as big as Armageddon, or a giant sea lizard type-thing attacking New York city, or dinosaurs running riot downtown, or a bus that will explode if it goes under fifty miles per hour. And they also feature the extraordinary – either the character or the situation, but one is so dominant it fights against the other to create obvious and seemingly unstoppable conflict.
It’s quite obvious why high-concept movies are so well liked because they deal with broad themes that are recognisable to any type of filmgoer, who can, whether they are male or female, black or white, English-speaking or not, identify with such themes. Lost love, war, fear, life and death, family, and honour, are all dominant within the films themselves. Examples would include Jaws (fear, death), Top Gun (honour), Pearl Harbour and Saving Private Ryan (war, honour). And in many cases a star-name is used to draw more popularity to the film – Tom Cruise (Top Gun), Bruce Willis (Die Hard franchise), Tom Hanks (Saving Private Ryan).
Another reason high-concept films are easily digested is because they rely on plot over character. For example, Snakes On A Plane describes the plot, the conflict and pretty much everything you need to know about the film. Essentially, that is what the film is about – snakes are let loose on a plane and the characters, including the hero, who in this case is an ordinary man faced with extraordinary circumstances, must survive. Saying ‘bomb on bus’, ‘child alone at Christmas’, ‘lawyer who cannot lie for a day’ or ‘man is forced to live same day over and over again’ would instantly evoke the memory of Speed, Home Alone, Liar, Liar, and Groundhog Day. Yet, if I were to say ‘struggling writer finds inspiration in his wayward but eccentric student’, you might think of Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys, but I could have been referring to Billy Crystal in Throw Momma From The Train. The reason for the ambiguity is because these films are character-based rather than plot-based and the significance is less obvious. The high-concept movie has to have an immediate significance to an audience so Snakes On A Plane works in the same way Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Armageddon, Eight Legged Freaks, Speed, and Twister do. There is an immediate idea of plot, theme, and conflict.
Whether or not critics like high-concept movies, they are here to stay, and they will continue to dominate the box office.
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