Thursday, August 04, 2011

Spam! The Movie!

Our sojourn in hell continues, but now they're saying our temperatures will drop by about a degree a day for a few days, though we're still breaking records. Going out to the library at noon yesterday was like stepping into an oven. I've been keeping an eye on temperatures in Reno, where I'll be the week after next, and their highs have been in the low 90s, and they seem to be heading into a phase of upper 80s, with lows in the low 60s at night (compared to our mid-80s). I may need to take a parka to WorldCon.

I also probably need to adjust to the time difference. At the Denver WorldCon, I was up way too early, before anything was happening, and that was only one hour difference. This will be two hours. It seems like I'm always going to writing conferences in the east, where they tend to start events early in the morning, so it's even earlier for me. Science fiction conventions start later, and the events go later at night, but I seem to keep heading west for those. I'm falling asleep by 11 these days, so I'll be ready for bed before the Reno parties really get started, and that's where all the good networking happens. I'm hoping it's mostly the heat, so I'll be more lively in a slightly different climate.

After dreaming up all those board game movie ideas, I was thinking about finding other sources of unoriginal movie ideas, but it's hard to go lower than board games. Video games at least have some visuals, and many of them involve narrative. A theme park ride worked pretty well for the Pirates franchise. They seem to have made a movie out of every superhero comic book ever, and they've even taken Saturday-morning cartoons to the big screen. There have been lots of movies based on Saturday Night Live sketches. I guess we're down to ad campaigns, which I know they've tried to turn into TV series, but I'm not sure about movies. During the 70s there were a few movies based on pop songs.

I know! Movies based on Internet spam! And the best part is, you don't have to pay royalties or option fees because if anyone tries to claim credit and demand payment, then they could be prosecuted for the spam and/or scam. There's all sorts of movie potential in the story of the relative of a foreign dignitary desperate to find a safe way to get the royal family's money out of the country. And then all those "male enhancement" spams could be made into a gross-out guy comedy in the vein of The Hangover.

I've got a conference call with my movie agent tomorrow. I'll have to bring up these ideas.

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