We talked about the importance of story ideas here, the idea being that in order to come up with concepts, writers need to generate a lot of them.

Then I teased you with this:

But how to come up with story ideas? Drop by on Sunday. I’ve got a special Halloween treat for you. One of the best resources I know to help generate story concepts.

Okay, I’m a day late, but as they say — better late than whatever. My big tip: Halliwell’s Film Guide. Here’s a description:

For those unfamiliar with the annual, Halliwell’s is a long running series often praised for being the biggest and best film guide and a must have for all silver screen buffs. This 30th Anniversary edition, with new editor David Gritten – head of the London Film Critics’ Circle – at the helm, is crammed with more entries than any other guide (over 24,000) and over one hundred years of cinema information.

24,000 movies. But more importantly 24,000 loglines. You can breeze through the book and read one logline after another — and in a ‘similar but different’ world like Hwood, what better way to generate ideas than spin pre-existing ones.

You can take a logline and gender-bend it (make the lead a woman instead of a man), age-bend it (make the lead a child instead of an adult), genre-bend it (turn a drama into a comedy, a comedy into a thriller), mix-and-match (take one set of story elements and crash them up against another set of story elements), and so on.

This goes on in Hwood, all the time. Take the case of a recent sale “Skyscraper”. Even the Daily Variety’s description says it in black-and-white:

The story, like that of “Towering Inferno,” is set in the world’s first mile-high skyscraper, fictionally built in Chicago, and centers on the Donald Trump-style developer as well as on the daring crew that rushes in to save the tower when it starts to falter.

It’s The Towering Inferno only with CGI. (Speaking of Inferno, check out the interview with the movie’s screenwriter Stirling Silliphant).

I’ve been through my 1987 version of Halliwell’s several times, rooting around for story ideas. Just flipping through it, my eyes stopped on a 1937 Columbia Pictures movie And So They Were Married. Here’s the logline:

A widow and a widower try to get married despite the ill-feeling of their children.

Sort of a reverse version of The Parent Trap (1998).

So Halliwell’s Film Guide. Great resource for movie loglines which you can spin into similar but different story ideas.