Or – “Poochie Is Proactive. He’s In Your FACE. He Doesn’t Just Get Busy; He Gets “Biz-zay”!”
Back in the day, my friend Karl and I used to say that there’s a fine line between “high concept” and “dumb joke.” Any idea, story, or setup can be boiled down to a three-sentence marketing pitch (“How ’bout this: Snakes. On a PLANE!”) but the real test is in what you DO with your concepts once that pitch has been approved. A prime example would be Howard The Duck: “Outsider trapped in a world he never made” created great satire and deep emotions when Steve Gerber did it in comic book form (you should really go get the Essential Howard collection, by the way.) But, when translated by other minds into a film, it’s become shorthand for “box office flop.”
Anyone who has seen a movie trailer or read the Previews Catalogue in the last ten years knows that many of the comic books and movies that make it through to final execution do so solely on how pithy the concept is (“Man wakes up from coma after zombie plague occurs,” or “Woman falls in love with undead emo kid”) but the REAL test comes in the EXECUTION of the idea…
