Ideas are the lifeblood of Hollywood, the foundation not only for screenplays, but also for how studios market their movies, pounding a movie’s story concept into consumers’ consciousness through a coordinated media onslaught.

Side note: According to the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), marketing costs represented nearly 40% of the average movie’s budget in 2007 — $35.9 million per movie.

The importance of story ideas in Hollywood is likely why self-proclaimed “King of the Pitch,” producer Robert Kosberg has carved out a nifty corner for himself in Hollywood. Starting out as a screenwriter, evolving into a producer (including the movie Twelve Monkeys), Kosberg is the consummate ‘idea guy’:

“And if you can’t come up with a good idea, there’s nothing wrong with admitting, ‘I’m not good at this. Maybe you’ll be able to find a good idea from someone or somewhere else. Maybe you can find one in a magazine, or maybe your brother has better ideas than you do. Because the good thing about ideas is, if someone contacts me with a good idea but it’s not theirs, that’s okay. As long as they tell me and we still reward the other person, they can stay in the middle, so to speak, and be attached to the idea they found.

The thing about ideas that I love is that they are out there and you can grab onto them and approach producers like me, and still making a living in this world, but you don’t necessarily have to come up with them yourself.

My last piece of advice would be recognize good ideas are out there in the world every day. On television, the radio, they are in conversations you have with your friends. If you start to put your antenna up and be aware of looking for stories and ideas, you’ll find them. And by now you can tell, I’m one of those producers who is always looking for a good idea.”

Words of wisdom excerpted from a lengthy interview with Kosberg courtesy of Done Deal Pro. Consider it a follow-up to my two posts here and here.

I can not emphasize enough how critical the story concept is to any screenplay’s potential success, at least so far as Hollywood and mainstream commercial movies are concerned. If you have a killer high concept, you can write a script that’s an 8 on a scale of 10 — in terms of writing execution — and you’ve still got a decent chance of selling that project.

Let me end with a true story: Larry Gordon, who produced K-9, told me that he used to go through the list of projects studios passed on, scanning their loglines (read: “story concept”) to see if he could uncover any nuggets. In fact, that’s how he found Predator — a studio passed on the Thomas brother’s script, Larry thought the story concept was a strong one, so he ended up optioning the material, setting up, and producing the movie at 20th Century Fox.