January 2008
36 posts
Celebrity who doesn't get it
A celebrity who is famous enough to be in the tabloids all the time meets a normal adoring fan and is creeped out by how much the fan knows about his personal life. “What the hell?” he exclaims, visibly shaken. “How did she know all that stuff?”
A Valuable Expression for Extreme Tiredness
Have you ever felt so sleepy that you can’t even explain how sleepy you are? What I say is, “I’m so sleepy, I could eat a bed.”
Beds are the ultimate outlet for sleep. And eating is the only true way to make something a part of you. So if you’re so sleepy you can barely go on living, you want to be one with sleep… and that requires devouring a bed.
Of course...
General Anesthesia For Haircuts
I wish hair salons administered general anesthesia to the clients before their trim. Not because a haircut is painful (though today mine involved some brutal comb swipes on my ear), but so that you wouldn’t have to sit there for an hour, awake, talking to the hair cutter.
What if you had to be awake during open heart surgery? The worst part wouldn’t be the pain or having to see your...
An Everyman Squanders a Hero Opportunity
A plain man walking home glances into an apartment window and sees a vicious man be attacking a woman who desperately screams for help. “Great,” the plain man says. “And you know I’m not going to do anything about it. Now I’m going to feel bad about myself all day. Just perfect.” And he walks on.
Declare Your Allegiance to Alternative Media
From the Joseph Weisenthal archives comes this bumper sticker idea: “I Believe the Alternative Media.”
The Illusion of Character Growth
In most reasonably commercial films, the film’s protagonist has to start off flawed and then become a better person by the movie’s conclusion. A character who is good at the beginning of the movie and evil by the end, then, isn’t the best crowd-pleaser.
But sometimes your story demands a main character who is good earlier in life, and eventually evil after that. You can’t...
Click-and-Drag-Style Undo
Today I was writing a short film and noticed a section that was better off before I’d changed it a bunch of times. But I couldn’t simply hit undo because that part wasn’t what I’d written most recently, and it would undo everything I’d been working on after that section.
Sure, there are ways around this. I could copy and paste the whole document to another file, hit...
T-shirt to help nerds and weirdos ward off bullies
If you’ve ever been bullied for being a little different, you’ll relate to this. A T-shirt that says, “Don’t Mess With What You Don’t Understand.”
For a completely different message, put those words inside an outline of Texas, and people will think it’s a Texas-pride statement.
Don't Bury Me In A Cold Place
Song called “Don’t Bury Me in a Cold Place,” about someone who doesn’t want to be buried somewhere with cold weather, because he’s afraid there’s a chance you can still feel temperature after you die.
Through rhyme, this song brings up the point that when you’re dead, you can’t move and you can’t go out and buy a coat, so there’s nothing...
Iced Air Hockey
Air Hockey is one of my favorite sports, but all too often, the air trickling out of the holes is no stronger than the hushed breath that carries a whisper. No matter how powerful your whack, the disc scrapes slowly across the surface to a sticking position in the center of the table so consistently, it has to be magnetized.
A better game would be Iced Air Hockey. In most respects, it would be...
Film Festival Trailers
If I had a film festival, whenever I contacted filmmakers to tell them I accepted their movie, I would ask them to edit and send me a trailer of their movie, if they don’t mind. That way, during the festival, I could put trailers of other movies playing at the festival in front of every feature, giving the festival goers a glimpse of the other offerings. Because right now at Sundance, all I...
An Argument Against Eternity
When people tell me that there’s a heaven and a hell, I tell them, “Ah, go to earth,” because the concept of eternity doesn’t make sense to me.
The main reason I don’t believe in everlasting life (whether constant torture or constant joy) is that eternity would be incredibly long compared to temporary life on earth. Even if we say that eternity is a trillion years...
Glass Fish Truck
Trucks that cart fish around the country for human consumption look like ordinary 18-Wheelers, except that they say “Fish” on them. I think fish trucks would be a lot cooler if instead of hiding all the dead fish in that opaque metal trailer, the fish were still alive and packed into a giant aquarium attached to the truck. Cross-country driving would become like a trip to Sea World....
In Their Own Image
Montage of people describing what they believe God to be like. Hippie chick thinks he’s tolerant and a woman. Stern man thinks he’s really angry and vengeful. An old person believes God is aged and wise. An American believes God is an American. Everyone in the montage is very blatantly describing themselves.
Online dating service for people who want to jump...
Generally, long distant relationships begin with both people in the same city, and then one of them moves, and for some reason they decide to keep it together.
Most of these couples find that they’re actually happier and more functional separated like this, because they have the best of both worlds: the freedom of not being near the other person, yet enjoying the security of knowing someone...
Olde Lady
A beautiful woman in her late 20s, but from another era - in Victorian or flapper garb, for instance, holding a fancy old umbrella. She is elegant, thin, and the most desired woman in a house of ill-repute. Caption: “Olde Lady.”
"Mormon" Strippers
I have a feeling this one’s been done, but maybe it hasn’t, so here it is.
Instead of the usual naughty cop routine that strippers pull when invading a lucky/unlucky man or woman’s birthday party, you could have two strippers dressed as Mormon missionaries knock on the door a couple of hours into the celebration. The birthday boy/girl would answer the door, be annoyed, and try...
Don't Forget Us!
Nice small town guy with acting ambitions is beloved by his entire town. They know he’ll make it big, and are always teasing, “don’t forget us when you’re big and famous!” He always assures them that he won’t.
Then a casting director comes to town and the nice kid scores a major movie role in Hollywood, just as everyone knew he would. “Don’t forget...
Someone who just doesn't get it
“I want to be Oscar Wilde in my next life.”
Velcro System For Hanging Posters
Esme Rilke believes there should be a Velcro system for hanging up posters. Instead of wall-ruining pins or poster-ruining scotch tape and blue goo, you could fasten Velcro bits to the corners of a poster and to the desired spot on the wall. Posters then would be easy to mount and to remove, with a minimum of damage to wall and poster.
If you get tired of one poster, it’s easy to replace it...
Alternatives to "Never Trust a Skinny Chef"
I don’t hear people say “Never trust a skinny chef” anymore, maybe because there are so many famous respected skinny chefs. But I still appreciate the intentions of a warning against those who manage to maintain a reasonable weight and yet would dare call themselves culinary experts. So I came up with some equally insightful cautions against questionable members of other...
Curing HIV in yourself by giving it to ten people
An intriguing twist to the HIV virus would be if someone who had it could cure him/herself of it by giving it to ten other people. This cure possibility would be a consolation to everyone you gave it to, but it would also lead to many more people getting HIV, at least for some period of time. As in any pyramid scheme, the people on the bottom would be the losers. However, because the virus can...
Who Not To Be in A Given Economy
From Greg Newburn:
I’d like to do a doc. film on the absolute worst off person in any given market economy.
The main question is how to find this person/persons. You would have to determine the defining features of an economy, and then figure out what job is least adapted to it (yet still necessary). Or the whole movie could be about trying to find the worst off group/person, and then at...
The Beauty Challenge
A cynical, life-detesting German Philosophy major bets a life-loving, beauty-seeing-everywhere English major that he can find something so completely irredeemable and bereft of beauty that even the English major couldn’t see anything to love in it.
Idea Province in use: "Mattress that Accounts for...
On Dec. 6, 2005, I posted this entry about a mattress that makes allowances for spooning. A bed designer named Mehdi Mojtabvi saw this post, came up with a more realistic and comfortable design for it, dubbed it the “Love Mattress,” and has created this prototype.
The only thing missing is a tip of the hat to Idea Province!
Bless...eww!
Typically, if someone sneezes, your response should be, “Bless you!” But if someone sneezes and snot flies all over the room (and blood and milk and so on), a good retort could be, “Bless…eww!”
"Credit Cookie" for Charlie Wilson's War
My idea for a final image after the Charlie Wilson’s War credits got posted on Roger Ebert’s Answer Man. He admits the idea is intriguing, but regrettably has to inform me that the premise of the idea doesn’t totally square with reality. Story of Idea Province’s life!
Reverse Mission
After a devout religious person comes home from a mission in Bolivia, his girlfriend leaves him and he witnesses a heinous murder. Clearly there’s no God, he decides, and loses his faith in religion, since religion involves believing in God.
Then he remembers everyone he converted to religion and feels horrible for pulling a veil over their eyes. Now that he knows the real truth, it’s...
Only Liking the First 20 Minutes of Juno
A lot of movie critics said that they hated the first 20 minutes of Juno, but then loved the rest of it. I loved all of it, but I think it would have been cool to be the only movie critic to love the first 20 minutes of Juno and hate the final 72 minutes of it. I could have put The First 20 Minutes of Juno at the top of my Best 10 of the Year List, and The Final 72 Minutes of Juno as #1 on my...
Cutting down a palm tree prank
Esme Rilke had the idea that if you’re on vacation at a yoga retreat in the Bahamas, a good prank would be to steal a machete from the tool room after midnight, find a particularly thin palm tree, and chop it down.
And this isn’t a prank exactly, but Carmichael Monaco had the idea that if you have a free room in your New York apartment, it would be fun to fill up the entire room with...
Compassionate Contrarian
I can’t claim to be the only one to think of this phrase, since it gets three hits in a Google search - one of them a bi-yearly blog called The Compassionate Contrarian - but I’m posting it here because it hasn’t caught on yet.
A Compassionate Contrarian is someone who goes against the typical mode of thought, yet does so courteously, not seeking to offend those who still cling...
Youth in Revolt
A movie idea from Greg Newburn:
A precocious youngster organizes a public school student strike to protest the schools’ failure and power of teachers’ unions.
My own take on this is that it should probably end with a school shooting, ala “If….”. But that’s only because I think all movies should be more like “If….”. It probably...
I Am Not Sanpaku
Carrie.Anne Murphy and I were going to write a play together about the life of George Ohsawa, the man who took Macrobiotics from Japanese history and updated it for semi-modern times (mostly by adding cigarette smoking and lots and lots of salt). It was to open with George Ohsawa on his deathbed as a teenager, with Westernized Japanese doctors singing to him that he has mere days to live, and...
Bread: Who Kneads It?
For people following an “Evolutionary Diet” that bans grains and beans because humans started eating them too late for evolution to accommodate them, I had this T-shirt idea. On the top it would say “Bread.” In the middle would be a cartoony loaf of bread. And under that it would say “Who Kneads It?”
“Bread: Who Kneads It?” People won’t know...
Arrogant Airplane Ad
A good and arrogant airplane ad would claim that the flight itself was better than where you are going. So, for example, “American Airlines - Better Than Your Destination.”
Story about Communist Aliens
Kind of a mixture of K-Pax, Ishmael and Looking Backward, this would be a novel about aliens who come to America and describe the perfect society of their home planet, which is nothing but a thinly-disguised version of North Korea style communism.
The main characters would be Americans who are skeptical at first of these alien invaders who claim to have everything worked out back home, but as...