That's certainly a huge haystack. I don't envy the process to find the needle(s)... Good luck tomorrow!

> As an exercise, let’s consider two hit movies from the 1980s and see if we can spin some new life into them. The first one is 3 Men and a Baby... In fairness, 3 Men and a Baby is an American remake of the 1985 French comedy hit Trois hommes et un couffin, written and directed by Coline Serreau. As is so often the case, the original is much funnier than the remake, and for anyone interested in writing comedy, it's well worth seeking out and watching. . . . On a different note, I don't know if that's a story that would respond well to gender-bending, because the comedy engine hinges on a highly gendered concept in the first place: three bachelors, who are set up as having no parental instincts or parenting skills, are throw into a situation where they have to struggle with the highly (feminine-)gendered task of taking care of a baby. It's a fish out of water concept. And, in order to resolve their story problem, the male characters have to integrate the missing positive aspects of the female gender: there's the character arc. If I wanted to gender-bend the concept, I'd go in the opposite direction: how do you throw three female protagonists into the deep end on a highly male-gendered activity? If you just give women who for whatever reason aren't skilled in parenting a baby to take care of (typical feminine task), you miss out on that jungian animus-integrating character arc. Maybe someone's dad/uncle is dying, and they have to be driver and pit crew for his smash-up derby car so he can realize his dream of his car winning the big prize--and then you get a fish-out-of-water/underdog story like Cool Runnings or The Swimsuit Issue, with an added gender element. Actually, the 2008 Swedish comedy The Swimsuit Issue / Allt flyter is worth looking at in this discussion: it takes a group of down and out men (à la The Full Monty) who decide to revive a lost Swedish and enter an international competition as an all-male synchronized swimming team. It has some really funny moments--and it's weak points tend to come from the places where it backs off from confronting head-on the gender issues that the premise stirs up. My general comment: before you start gender bending in your premise, look at *how gender works* in the original version you're considering, and really think hard about all of the gender ramifications--and then don't pull your punches. But yes: this is a GREAT technique to breath life into old stories and stale characters--and it incidentally increases the number of roles for women (hurray!) and the chances your script will pass the Bechdel test. Queering-up and changing race on characters are additional filters that not only invigorate stories and characters (and in the case of the latter, can create roles for underemployed actors), but also tend to throw into stark relief the biases, cliches and lazy writing hiding in your work. It's a bit like Samuel Beckett's strategy of writing his first drafts in French (his second and less fluent language) and then translating them back to English: it helps get you past your blind spots.

Shaula, that is an excellent comment and really gets into the spirit gender-bending. Of course, we can simply look at it as role-swapping, but if we REALLY embrace it, there are all sorts of nuances and intriguing dynamics to be mined by looking at stories through the eyes of characters when they are a different gender than we may have imagined them at first. And this point especially:

My general comment: before you start gender bending in your premise, look at *how gender works* in the original version you’re considering, and really think hard about all of the gender ramifications–and then don’t pull your punches.

That is such a great point. Don't just ASSUME you know the essence of the original, rather really dig into that character and see what their psyche and core essence is about. That can inform the way you shape the the opposite gender approach to that character iteration. Thanks, Shaula! Please comment any time!

Thank you, Scott. I've been reading you for ages; I'll try to de-lurk more often.

Any of the big three, I think, if changed, would be very fruitful: RACE/SEX/CLASS. But also something as simple (and complex) as re-casting a character as blind, can totally generate new ideas. Scott, I like that exercise you pulled with the genre-swapping. Sometimes I feel like coming up with new stories is a process of sitting down with something, then swapping glasses with different filters and looking at it until we see something worth watering.