The Scott Myers origin story!! I love it! Thanks for posting.

Scott, how did you come up with K9? I love these background stories and I'm sure other readers do too.

Re K-9: I think I posted on this at some point, but perhaps not. It's based on a true story. A Ventura K-9 cop lost his partner Sonny when they interrupted a robbery in progress and the dog was shot and killed by the thieves. A canine member of the police force is considered to be a copy, so that was a felony case against the defendants.

Steve Siegel, my writing partner at the time, and I met with the cop at Charlies in Ventura, the club that Steve owned. The cop was this big strapping guy. Over lunch, he told us about the dog, the history of his relationship, how the dog was a favorite of kids when he'd take Sonny around to schools for exhibitions.

He pulls out some photos of the dog - Sonny was a German shepherd. And suddenly, he breaks down and begins to weep. Turns out he had become so attached to his dog-cop partner, that he found he couldn't be a cop anymore and transferred over to being a fireman.

Steve and I thought that was an interesting dynamic: How a dog could 'humanize' a guy. And that was the starting place of the script and a key theme to the story that stuck all the way through the process.

In this vein, I'm actually collecting story ideas gathered from newspapers and magazines to post next month: A Story Idea Each Day. Movie ideas exist all around us. We just have to be attuned to their presence and keep our eyes and ears open.

At least they're holding to the 10 year rule. I remember seeing the Aussie film Paperback Hero at a Paramount screening about a decade ago. Truck driver who secretly writes romance novels, uses a gal friend's name, has a fling with his publisher, etc. I wonder if they'll also cast Hugh Jackman in this new one?

@Archie: The idea of a man writing as a woman (or vice versa) has been around for a zillion years. I wouldn't be surprised if M. Stone got some of his inspiration for this idea via a spec script that got set up back in the late 80s called "The Gossip Columnist," about a male sports writer who takes over as a, what else, gossip columnist.

@Scott, I've read my Nathanael West and get that no ideas are original. But I also happened to get a batch of forwards this past August from industry folk looking for a copy of Paperback Hero. I just figured it was being remade.

@Archie: We all live in that "no new idea under the sun" world, then something like District 9 or Up comes along. Actual aliens cast as illegal aliens? Old guy and a floating house? I suppose if we dug around long enough, we could find some predecessor story along these lines, but those are two movies that certainly seem 'fresh' to me.

Ironically I suspect because these ideas are so unique, a major studio likely would not have greenlit them (granted Up was released by Disney, but it's a Pixar movie) because they're much more comfortable with the 'similar but different' model which assumes that there's no new story ideas.