Film Courage: Jeff of the cards we have chosen from The Story Engine deck,
what do you think the premise would be with our story?
Jeff Kitchen, Dramatist / Author / Founder / Consultant: I wouldn't know what to come
up with as a premise at this point because it's so wide open in terms of possibilities
and each new story idea comes to you in a different way and sometimes there's a
premise built right into it from the beginning like in the live training I'm doing now with
people five days a week we're building a romantic comedy and the idea that I came up with was one
of my favorite movies which is my favorite year with Peter O'Toole directed by Richard Benjamin
it's about a drunken movie star and this guy has to babysit him while he's in town to be part
of the Sid Caesar show based on a true story with Errol Flynn and it's a great movie Peter
O'Toole is amazing in it and I thought well so if this guy has to babysit this this actor
and the actor's about to get thrown out of the country so the woman who's babysitting
him kind of a corporate I can get it done type to keep him from getting thrown out
of the country she marries him and so it was My Favorite Year meets The Proposal
and I was like that's we can have fun with that and you can like see the premise in it right away
like it's kind of sitting there whereas this is more just like somebody dumped a a Lego
set out on the floor and you could build anything out of it from like a mermaid to
a warship to a a castle to a meal and it's like you could and this feels like that it's
it's really dynamic it has a real kind of Philip K. Dick warp to it or
no it's susceptible to having a Philip K. Dick Warp incorporated into it
and it also reminds me of the Alfred bester book The Stars my destination
which is considered one of the top science fiction books of all time but in it there's
a robot that's a bartender it looks like an 1890s kind of Steampunk robot but it's
no one of the characters is radioactive in the story and he can only be around people
for like 29 minutes at a time and he's in the room they're having a really high level meeting toward
the end of the story and this guy comes in who's radioactive and they're really getting down to
brass tacks trying to pressure the main character into doing something and his radioactivity sets up
sets off the robot who's the bartender who's serving them drinks and the the robot starts
getting whacked out and the main character asks poses a question to the robot and
it comes up with an interesting answer because of the radioactivity so there's
there's
Dynamic possibilities in that and it reminds me of an Alfred Bester short story called Fonly
Fahrenheit where the sky has a very high level robot that can paint like Michelangelo write
poetry like Lord Byron whatever and like it can do anything and he can hire it out and make great
money but something goes wrong with it and it goes crazy and it kills a little girl so then
he has to go to a different planet and they're looking for like this super high-end robot
so he makes its capabilities less it can still go out and make money for him but it can't sculpt
like Michelangelo anymore because they'll find him right away and then it kills somebody else
so he keeps going on the run with the robot he can't enable it to do as much and the robot it
turns out is overheating and starts doing this kind of schizoid dance where it's like dancing a
rumba and chanting and it's just and so that like a a radioactive robot or there's so many whacked
out things you can do to a robot that it's very suggestive when a robot wants to steal treachery
a death so there isn't so much like a premise shaping up as just one
possible kind of warped direction based on my own science fiction
tendencies or the things that I enjoy in a story
I think that I would want to look at the 36 dramatic situations for a minute
because it it is a spectrum of possibilities
the other thing is that
as I'm looking ahead to exploring the Enneagram as possibilities for this story
to what degree does an automaton have
the full spectrum of emotional complexity that a human has and obviously even as I'm saying
that I'm thinking well it's an AI and they can build all that stuff in these days but
you know does the robot have a warped sense of the way the world works because his father
used to beat him or something it's like at what point does personal history not exist
or and then of course on the other hand you have the Tyrell Corporation where Tyrell says
we gift them with memories so that they it makes them easier to control because
they don't perceive that they're dying in two years and they have to fight that
they there's their emotions it says it gives them a cushion
so all that is possible right and in fact the better it can be done the more potentially scary
this robot can be or more heroic this robot could be depending and it could be both at the same time
and there you get into the element of dilemma like is the robot programmed secretly programmed
for treachery even while it acts wonderful and enlightened and polite like C-3PO or something
whereas R2D2 will freaking laser you into dust if that's what it takes whereas c3p
would be like are you sure that's quite polite or to to vaporize that fellow so that the the
um competing commands in the robots programming and can create an intriguing dilemma
and the more complexity of personality and character that the robot has the more compelling
the story can potentially be now we could possibly pull another agent card if we wanted to bring in
let's say a b character and maybe some of the moral dilemma would fall on that character maybe
because they're not an AI and they they no I would want the I would want the Dilemma to be
to be in the protagonist okay all right but we still need a good strong villain we definitely
need other players but we're approaching this in an interesting way that we have a handful of
dynamic elements and as and I think that the 36 dramatic situations will be useful I'll pull that
out in a minute it's things like ambition Madness disaster those kind of things and I think that
as some possibilities begin to gel that will inform choices for a good strong antagonist
in other words the story will help define who the
best protagonist might be and other main characters as well.