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How to play the Movie Pitch Game:
This is a game of humor and creativity for movie buffs. It was invented by KO Rob
of The KO Picture Show . It
can be played at home with pencils and paper, or online in a forum or chat
setting, but I put it into a web page so that anyone can play at any time.
Your first step is to submit three words: a noun, a verb, and another
noun. The nouns can be ordinary everyday nouns such as “car” or “pig”,
abstractions like “progress” or “mediocrity”, proper names like “Arkansas” or
“Julius Caesar”, or short noun phrases like “ham and pineapple pizza” or
“the Royal Regiment of Scotland”. The verb should usually be in present
tense, like “invents” or “punches”, but past tense verbs such as “buried” or
“indocrinated” are acceptable. And short verb phrases such as “cheats on”
or “flees in terror from” are okay too.
The idea is that these can be read as a short sentence, like “man
bites dog”, or “gangster meets vampire”, or “Tutankhamen misunderstands
anarcho-syndicalism”. Your three words are stored for later use, and then
you get three different words from the stored list. But you don’t get a set
of three that a person submitted together... you get three words that were
submitted on different days by different people , which as a result may not
work well together. But because they follow the noun-verb-noun pattern,
they should still be readable as a short sentence. For instance, if three
previous players had submitted the three sets of words above, you might be
presented with “gangster misunderstands dog” or “Tutankhamen bites vampire”.
Your job now is simple, but not easy: Pitch! Write a title and
short description of a movie to be made based on the three-word idea you’ve
just been given. Make it sound as fun and interesting as you can. The
purpose of a pitch is to convince people to want to make and see your
movie. For example, if given “Tutankhamen bites vampire”, you might write:
PHARAOH OF EVIL
Vampires are afoot, and ex-cop Dirk Jones (Liam Neeson) traces the infestation
to Egypt. There he teams up with archaeologist Bella Star (Selena Gomez),
and they battle their way to the nest where the vampire plague began: the
underground palace of the undead Boy King! Can they stop the ancient child
Pharaoh from spreading his evil curse across all lands, bite by bite? Let
breakout director Duncan Jones take you on a stylish and thrill-packed trip
from the towers of New York to the tombs of ancient Egypt.
Once you’ve written a pitch, you can then read some pitches written by others,
and rate them with one to four stars. Vote for the ones you find most
creative and entertaining, so more people can enjoy them.
One unavoidable awkwardness of this approach is that sometimes a singular noun
gets matched with a plural verb, or vice versa, such as “Martians seeks horse”
or “Arnold Schwarzenegger invade the Parthenon”. Just be understanding and
adjust the verb in your head, and make that pitch!
This is an open source project — the code is here .