I love Halliwell's. We play a game similar to Balderdash or Dictionary, but using Halliwell's. It's great fun especially with 6-8 people. And of course I also like mashing up titles to generate ideas and make people laugh on Twitter. Her meets Dawn of the Dead--A guy's AI system leads him to a small town during a zombie apocalypse where he and his phone fight to survive. Saving Mr. Banks meets Pirates of the Caribbean--Blackbeard's ghost savagely negotiates with Walt Disney over the design of the POTC ride. -Steve

That's exactly the spirit, DSI. Mix and match. Invert. Genre bend. Gender bend. Geo bend. If it's true there are no new stories, then why not embrace that fact engage in some creative 'recycling'?

[…] This is based on the anecdote I heard about Woody Guthrie. Having written 4,000 songs in his life, he was asked how he came up with so many melodies. His answer: “Well, I take a melody I like, and I change it a lil’ here, and change it a lil’ …read more […]

I haven't found a Halliwell's yet. I know, I need to. As for that list... dang, WAY too many of those apply to me, so this might be a little too close to home. BUT I am intent on doing every single one of these. I'll have to ponder this a bit.

I could see a dark comedy in a similar tone to that of "The Wolf of Wall Street" A founder would be a guy that would give moderately expensive conferences about saving money, good money management, etc. And of course he's this big spender that lives off the people he says he 's trying to help.

Or we could see the other side of the story of several people that were fired in "Up in the Air". Maybe they were fired and had financial troubles, so in the package of documents they received they have a list of Underspenders Anonymous. And one of these guys had a really great idea but nobody in the company listened to him. Now that he's jobless he decides to do this idea - let's say a portable, cheap, efficient electric generator that runs on garbage. He tries to get funding, the company where he worked tries to steal the idea saying part of it was developed when he was an employee, but of course he did the research on his free time. Oh, and in the support group he finds people that help him.

I imagine this is what most of those kinds of conferences actually are. If you want to follow the WoWS/Leo DiCaprio train of thought, maybe it's an imposter like Leo's character in "Catch Me If You Can." A guy there to attend the conference, perhaps, and decides to hijack it in order to bag all the money.

The true story of Mr Fusion.

Although if I could put my smarty pants on for a minute, if you want your character to make a REAL breakthrough, the trick sin't burning trash for fuel... that's a 20th century/type 0 solution in the 21st century... we're trying to become a Type 1 civilization here. The BIG technical revolution will be either a durable, long-lasting transparent solar panel (which they're working on), basically the ability to turn any surface that gets sunlight into a power source, or a sugar battery (that's the big bottleneck right now, the rare metals required to create batteries for electric cars, it's still a big hazard to mine them out of the Earth and recycle them afterwards. A sugar battery can be grown on a farm and decompose naturally once it's done. You could have it stem from the character (or a family member) having diabetes, so sugar is constantly on his mind.

Off topic: I think the solar panel would be just a component of that big technical revolution, it would also be the battery (not necessarily sugar battery) to store that power and much more efficient machines that don't spend most of the energy converted to heat.

Back to topic... we could take the "12 step" part of the idea and give it a spin. How about... "Ireneholics Anonymous" So you have THE most wonderful woman on the planet. Irene. She's gorgeous, smart, intelligent, generous... everything. THE perfect woman. But of course the perfect woman is looking for the perfect man. So far she hasn't found him. Even when she breaks up with our protagonist she's super nice and he ends up grateful for how she dealt with it. But he's still in love with her. Suddenly another guy talks to you - it turns out her former boyfriends have made a 12 step group to get over her. And they invite the protagonist. Of course nobody really succeeds and they start fighting for another chance.

Or spin the idea 180º and we could have "Cheapskates Anonymous". A 12 step self-help group for people that earn good money but are really, really, really stingy. Millionaires that regularly go to McDonalds to get their supply of paper napkins. People who would rather have a tooth removed than filled if it's cheaper. Oh, of course the entry fee to the group would be very, very, very cheap.

Or the flux capacitor.

Re: Scott's take on the story. What if we are talking about a couple that's madly in love. One of them is stingy or good with finances or success oriented. The other, our protagonist has money issues, several of the 12 symptoms of underearning. And his couple thinks those are the only things keeping him/her from being the perfect man/woman. Of course they're engaged. And he/she takes his couple to UA. Just as Scott said, the sponsor is a grifter that makes his/her income from the people he meets at UA. But he/she is the opposite sex of our protagonist, and the grifter is very, very attractive. A femme fatale or a Don Juan.

You may be right, and I guess it's a MacGuffin so it doesn't matter, but what's the thing then? If you have a solid object that's built, a talisman, you can have an emotional connection to it, instead of a math problem where someone else COULD have figured it out, if you have something that was built and assembled in a garage, then it's not "they're stealing my idea," it's "they're stealing my thing!" It becomes a football, everyone tries to get possession of it. And you can hold it up and say "THIS will be in every computer, cell phone, and car in the entire world!" and people can wrap their heads around it more than "this manufacturing formula will decrease so-and-so..." And really, the reason I picked "sugar battery" was that it was the only thing I could think of that probably won't be invented in the next ten years. Solar panels, room temperature computers, etc, that's all Moore's Law, we'll get there sooner or later... heck, they could come up with it before the movie's finished, then where would you be? It was just the first thing I could think of that would be the most future-proof but that people could easily wrap their heads around.

I'm thinking Moneyball/Jerry McGuire, sports/financial/legal behind the scenes drama: With free agency and his first non-rookie, major contract pending, Donovan Jones, a 3rd year NBA player and budding star goes into the offseason following a career year. The future seems bright as a huge payday looms on a contending team. But as contract negotiations proceed, a minor but potentially fatal medical condition is found, one that earlier in the season cruelly took the life of a veteran star player. Now, those very same teams that had feted him are playing hardball in order to secure his future services cheaply. With an extended family to support, can he and his controversial agent work together to achieve his goal of long term financial security and multiple championships, or will Donovan have to sacrifice glory and compromise his love of the game for money?