Multiple Discovery

It’s common for two people to come up with the same idea without being influenced by one another. For example, there was a dialogue scene in my unpublished young adult novel where one of my characters talked about the possibility of the government spying on conversations by placing a miniscule listening device inside a tooth. I wrote the novel in 2010 and pitched to countless literary agents in 2011. I had to get rid of the tooth bug idea after watching a 2012 episode of NCIS titled Up in Smoke (season 9, episode 23). 2016 marked the final season of an NCIS character named Tony DiNozzo. I stopped watching it after that but I didn’t stop Googling my ideas online to see if somebody else had already done them. The South Park guys do something similar whenever they come up with a joke. In fact, there have been a few times where I have come up with an idea for a pun but I don’t go through with it because the South Park guys had already done it. They went through the same thing for a Season 6 episode (circa June 2002) called Simpsons Already Did It.

In October 2013, I began writing a novel that was a fashion industry thriller. In the spring of 2016, I had to rewrite the finale. My idea was like a Western shootout where a shooter is travelling through the center of town and has to keep his head forward so as to make use of his peripheral vision. In my concept, all the doors of a storage unit facility are open. The protagonist was to be the gunslinger who has to undergo this task to rescue her lover despite being increasingly injured as she progresses, similar in essence to Leon Lai’s card-slinging corridor scene in City Hunter (1992). The problem with my gunfight was that the setting (if not the specific idea) had been used on two TV shows — The Strain (season 2, episode 1) and Blindspot (season 1, episode 12). The former (2015) was a mostly in-the-dark affair, whereas the latter (2016) was a brightly-lit effort. The suspenseful nature of my sequence was already captured within the context of a 2013 film titled Self Storage.

This reminded me of when I scrapped one of my ideas in another novel altogether. I had an idea for the female protagonist to have a nunchaku that was a double-ended dildo. The sight gag was later used in a Canadian TV series titled Todd and the Book of Pure Evil. Also, I had to change my novel when I saw the ending of an October 2011 episode of Dexter titled Smokey and the Bandit. I won’t spoil Dexter for you, but all I will say is that my version had a Godiva theme. Back to my fashion thriller, I rewrote the finale to be like Bruce Lee’s Game of Death, albeit with the Leaning Tower of Pisa instead of a Korean pagoda. Because there are seven floors, each floor was going to have a colour that represents the LGBT spectrum - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and pink (that last colour is unofficial but there are many gay men who like pink). The orange floor would ideally have been occupied by Sandhya Shetty (an Indian martial artist) who would be using an Indian whip. In fact, each floor would have a combatant who uses an unusual martial arts weapon that either hasn’t been seen before on screen or rarely. Each colour of the floor would reflect the nationalities of the participants.

I wanted Clarence Fok to adapt it as a film because, as he himself noted on one of the audio commentaries on the Hong Kong Legends DVDs, his films share two themes - struggling with identity and lack of freedom. Alas, the people who regulate the Italian tower wouldn’t allow permission for a martial arts movie to be filmed inside. This meant that Marama Corlett could no longer be the star because her literally balletic athleticism would have made her perfect only for the finale, since I was really more interested in making a gunplay-driven thriller than a martial arts movie. In the old days of Hong Kong film fandom, the genre of gunplay-oriented movies starring women were either called girls with guns or bullets ’n’ babes. Back to my Italy-based novel, I then selected Brooke Vincent as the star because she played a lesbian in Coronation Street, her forename sounds Californian, and she looks like Sinn Sage (a porn star who specializes in lesbian porn). Also appealing is that her Northern English accent would fool non-Brits into thinking that she is Scottish (fellow Northerner actress Olivia Cooke has complained about being mistaken for a Scot by Americans).

More relevantly, Brooke once expressed about wanting to do a gritty role like Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby. Originally, my novel took place in New York because I wanted John Woo to recreate the deleted scenes from the New York segment of A Better Tomorrow II (1987). He was the first choice for director because he expressed wanting to do a female-driven film on the audio commentary of Mission: Impossible II. I changed gears when I remembered that 2006 was when the similarly-themed The Devil Wears Prada and Ugly Betty came out. The former was based on a 2003 novel but the latter was based on a Spanish TV series which came out way earlier. Another downside is that one of my ideas would be seen as unbelievable until “deepfake” became a mainstream concept in 2018. My fashion novel was originally titled Virago because it was a sophisticated alternative to bitch. Books can be barred from bookstores and libraries due to foul language. As to why the title was singular, the idea was that each female character is so catty that it made you wonder who the title refers to e.g. Sammo Hung’s The Victim (1980).

I changed the title in 2015 because Ellie Valsin’s Virago (a novel) came out in that year. Additionally, the title sounded too similar to the name of a British travel agency - Trivago. This agency was one of the sponsors for ITV at the time. Love’s Savage Secret, the made-up novel seen in the 2010 adaptation of Red (a comic book adaptation), made me want to change the setting from the Italian fashion industry to the Hollywood film industry, especially since it had assassins using poison. Luckily, all I had to do was remove the female antagonist’s CIA background, the poison and supermodel girlfriend. My basis for the novel was that it would be a subtle remake of Clarence Fok’s Naked Killer (1992) but less trashy, and more classy. It would be more artistic like an arthouse film, although the original film had its fair share of artsy moments. My movie would be the sort of avant-garde remake that would appeal to the indie crowd i.e. the intellectual middle-class people who enjoy watching high-brow European films.

Coincidentally, the original film had Dutch camera angles and accordion music which conjures the image of all things French. Despite the tacky title, Naked Killer was an elegantly made film about women who wore high-end fashion. The décor of one lady’s home was to die for. There is also the issue of Red Sparrow - a 2013 novel that was made into a film in the first half of 2017 before being released in March of 2018. I bring this up because I’m grateful that I never submitted my fashion novel to any literary agents. People would have thought that I was cashing in on either the Jason Matthews novel or the Francis Lawrence adaptation. This is because there was a sub-plot in my novel about ballerinas being used to become assassins due to their flexibility, grace and athleticism. My idea came from the choreography style of Tony Ching Siu-Tung. People often talk about the balletic nature of Chinese martial arts movies to the extent of saying that it has more in common with ballet than fighting. Tony’s sword fights in particular could be described as ballerinas armed with swords.

If Tony didn’t exist then the idea would still have happened because there is something to be said about dancers who become martial arts movie stars. The most prominent examples being Michelle Yeoh, Moon Lee and Zhang Ziyi. Then there’s the upcoming John Wick spin-off, Ballerina. Begrudgingly, I removed the sub-plot. In 2019, I started to have serious reservations about going through with submitting my fashion novel as a back-up plan for when my Jewish millennial novel gets completely rejected. The reason why I put the former on ice was because of a Luc Besson film that was released in the summer. Anna was a thriller about a female assassin who becomes a model in Paris via the KGB and gets involved with the CIA. The story even moves to Milan, which my novel took place in. Adding to the necessity of a rewrite was that The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018) had used my idea of a female assassin who uses aerial silks to deliver martial arts kicks. It’s a shame because Ching Siu-Tung would’ve done a better job since he is the most majestic master of wirework.

In November of last year, I wanted to write a screenplay about a navy officer who was stationed in Hawaii. What stopped me from going forward with the setting was that there was a spin-off TV series that had already begun airing episodes in September. It’s called NCIS: Hawaiʻi. How multiple discovery comes into it is that both creators, myself included, were looking for a new American naval base to be explored in U.S. storytelling. The original NCIS series takes place in Washington whereas the other spin-offs spoke for themselves i.e. NCIS: Los Angeles and NCIS: New Orleans. Thankfully, there are other navies around the world.