According to the report luxury ocean liners in Russia are offering pirate-hunting cruises aboard armed private yachts off the Somali coast. Wealthy clients each pay £3,500 per day to patrol the most dangerous stretch of coastline from Djibouti in Somalia to Mombasa in Kenya at deliberately slow speeds, hoping to tempt an attack by Somali pirates. Once attacked, and in case the raiders are bit slow to respond the cruise ship will keep going until they do, the craft is equipped to respond with heavy machinery – RPGs, large caliber machine guns and rocket launchers – and if that wasn’t enough fun for the passengers, an extra £5 a day gets you your own AK-47 and £7 buys 100 rounds of ammo, and in case things get a bit out of hand they are also protected by a squad of ex-special forces troops.

Anyway, we’re here to talk about story possibilities and there are a bunch of things to discuss here. Lets look at the obvious choices:

1. A group of rich guys decides to pay big bucks to go on the ultimate big game hunt and eventually the tables are turned and the hunters become the hunted.
2. A peaceful group of Somali fishermen suddenly find themselves the targets of a group of ruthless hunters, once cornered they have to overcome their peaceful natures and fight back using makeshift weapons in order to stop the carnage and save themselves and their families.

Both of these are okay story choices and with enough twists and turns could make decent enough action movies but they are the obvious choices to make with this material. Option one sounds a bit like 1932′s The Most Dangerous Game meets Deliverance and option two sounds like Apocalypto with a dash of Surviving the Game and to be fair there are a number of ‘human prey’ type titles out there, from the kitsch 60′s excess of La Decima Vittima to 1980′s Arnie, before he was the Governator, gurning his way through Running Man, it’s not a new idea but it’s also not an over-exploited one either and while it still has the power to shock it’s worth exploring.

I’d keep in mind group dynamics when writing this. Whether they’re good guys or bad guys you need a group of them and they will naturally be different personalities, some strong, some weak, some good, some bad and they will play off of one another to inform the story. If there’s a definite bad guy amongst them then he will drive the hunt onwards but to counter that you might have a guy with a stronger moral compass, maybe a weaker personality as well, and he can see the evil that is being done and is wavering about stopping it or going with the flow. That being the case, then he should be the one to stand up to the bad guy and try to stop the hunt. Whether he succeeds or not is down to you but in option one, if he does something to stop the killing, his salvation might be that he is the only one to survive once the tables are turned.

It’s worth keeping in mind the “quotes” that came out at the same time as the article, one, attributed to a Russian yachtsman Vladimir Mironov, was “They are worse than the pirates, at least the pirates have the decency to take hostages, these people are just paying to commit murder.” which, for me, speaks to theme in a big way but the other was from a US Navy Captain who allegedly said “You’re in international waters, there are all sorts of other competing interests….” which adds conflict and interest in the shape of outside influence – for good or bad, it’s your call.

Anyway, I won’t dwell too much on this at this time, although I might come back to this idea at a later date, and the reason is the next, related, item that is actually true and that I found on this website and again at Reuters while trawling for more detail on this post.

So the headline reads Investing in piracy at the Somali “stock” exchange and basically the story goes that in the main pirate lair of Haradheere, locals can buy-in or contribute in some way to any one of a number of “companies” that go out on these raiding missions and take a share of the spoils upon the raids successful completion. The exchange started with 15 companies and is now up to 72 and the potential return for an ‘investor’ can be illustrated by the story of Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee who contributed a rocket-propelled grenade that she got from her ex-husband in alimony to a maritime company and made $75,000 in only 38 days after joining the ‘company’.

But it gets better. By all accounts the influx of wealth has seen the local economy boom. Pirates are charged more for most goods than non-pirates and earnings from piracy get taxed by the local district and used to improve infrastructure such as roads, local hospital and schools, and here we have real storytelling gold.

In my first thoughts I envisaged a Robin Hood tale of the handsome Somali pirate, a loveable rogue whose exploits provide food and clothing and education for all – robbing the rich to give to the poor – and the seafaring equivalent of the Sheriff of Nottingham, hell bent on destroying the pirate and his merry band by any means necessary. But dig deeper. Why has piracy taken such a strong hold on the people and how come the ‘authorities’ turn a blind eye to how the money is made? Can we explore the politics that effects the region and the global policies of all the countries involved to see how they came to this. It’s not all black and white and it would be interesting to find out the shades of grey in there.

Dig deeper still and we can look at the legacy that this is creating for the children of the region. A world where stealing and killing – because that’s what piracy is – is the norm, acceptable practice and and everyday way to earn a living. Who will stand against it if there is no other way to make a living because the local economy is completely based on it? It would be interesting to put an outsider in the middle of all this and watch them deal with it, a bit like Anna & The King or Inn Of The Sixth Happiness. You can either try having them see the world through outsiders eyes and try to change things, eventually seeing that this is the only choice for the welfare of the people and learning to accept it, or they could eventually become truly involved, maybe starting as a love interest for a pirate and then seeing the darker side of what he does before fighting to change things for the better and having to choose between the man and the ideal.

Anyway, that’s enough of my rambling on the subject, please let me know what you think of my efforts and feel free to leave comments.

Cheers!

Drinking at a Five Points tavern in the 1870s. (NY Public Library)

It really starts to come to life when you read the names these women had, like Hell-Cat Maggie, whose base was the notorious Five Points slum and whose teeth were supposedly filed into sharp points while she clawed rivals with brass fingernails. Then there’s Sadie the Goat, who reportedly robbed East Siders by head-butting them in the stomach and Ida the Goose, a prostitute and Lady Gopher, part of the Gophers of Hell’s Kitchen.

Now I know nothing of Ida The Goose or the Gophers but apparently, in the 1910s, she was lured away to the Lower East Side’s Eastman Gang, led by Monk Eastman, but following a bloody shoot-out, rejoined the Gophers. Now that, to me, is your story, right there. Lets’ talk through some of the simple the questions:

• How did she come to join the Gophers
• What was her ‘rank’ in the gang?
• Why did she leave and join The Eastman’s?
• What caused the bloody shoot-out?
• How did she survive?
• Why did the Gopher’s take her back?

The first idea that comes to mind for me is a love story, somewhere between West Side Story and Romeo & Juliet where the star-crossed lovers are members of two rival gangs. Ida decides eventually to follow her heart and join the rival gang to be with her love until tragedy strikes and, bereft and consumed with grief, she is forced to return to the Gophers as they are the only ones that will still have her.

Now I recently watched a BBC drama called The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister which have been described as the Rosetta Stone of queer literature which, while really rather good and worth the watch, actually tells me we could easily put a twist on the usual love story and make it about two women. If you think about it, it’s not that hard to believe that in a time when society frowned upon homosexuality, these two women fell into a life that not only held a total disregard for authority, allowed them to live the lifestyle that they chose without having to explain themselves to anyone – provided they could hold their own in a brawl.

This means we could time-shift the story to show a ‘respectable’ woman’s fall from grace as she realises she cannot live an unhappy lie in luxury when she’d rather be true to herself and happy in relative poverty. We could then witness her descent into the gangs along with her lover and slow rise through the ranks using wit and guile and cunning rather than just brute force – but back it up with a fist or two when it counts.

So that’s me out, have a think about it and let me know if you decide to pursue any of these suggestions, I’m curious to know if anyone’s reading this and if they think it’s at all useful.

Cheers!

On May 21, 1984 two of the inmates of a prison in Celle, Northern Germany, having manufactured this little beauty and then demonstrated its effectiveness by letting fly at a pane of bullet-proof glass, took a prison guard hostage and escaped by car. Amazing! The ingenuity of human beings when confronted by a situation that has them (almost literally in this case) up against a wall never fails to astound me.

Now then, for any writers out there that are seeking inspiration this shouldn’t really need any explanation. However, if you are struggling though, think about these questions:

• How did they know how to make it?
• Where did they get the bedposts from?
• How did they saw them to length? And how were they not heard and discovered?
• Where did they get stuff like batteries and a light bulb from?
• How did they calculate stuff like velocity, range, expansion etc?
• Where the hell did they get shotgun cartridges from?
• How did they not just blow their bloody hands off?

I see this working in a couple of places. Obviously there’s a great set-piece scene here for the ‘fun and games’ section in Act 2B of your screenplay, one of those ‘trailer moments’ you need to have. Two guys, sneaking around making this gun without anyone else knowing what they were up to, using the prison network to procure the various items they needed but without raising suspicion about what they were making – especially to the prison kingpin.

But there’s also a neat opening scene here where our hero is backed up against a wall in a no-win situation and he cobbles something like this together and shoots his way out of danger, ‘saving the cat’ on the way ;-) and something like that would be great to set-up this unique set of skills our hero has that would then pay-off big time later on in the movie as we reach our gripping finale.

So that’s enough, use the prison manufacture as a writing exercise if you want – it might unstick you from your current predicament – but stop reading now and get writing.

Cheers!