"Ladies and gentlemen of the audience, please can we have a movie genre for this scene to be in the style of..."There are pretty much always three stock audience responses to this; 'Film Noir', 'Western' and 'Sci-fi'. Sometimes followed by 'German Arthouse'. Sigh. If you're lucky, a more imaginative member of the audience will then come up with something you haven't heard before: blaxploitation, prison escape or middle-American indie... go on... do it, improvisers will love you. No-one knows why Film Noir, Western and Sci-fi come up so often. Scientists have used all the chemicals of the earth to find out, and they can't. All we know is: it is more or less guaranteed they will.
So here's the thing... why is it (when they inevitably come up) do hardly any improvisers know how to improvise any of them?
- Film Noir will always always become a bunch of people smoking and taking it in turns to do a voice over in a New York accent.
- A western will always always begin in a saloon, someone will walk in - miming the flappy doors behind them - and a pianist will stop playing.
- Science fiction will always always have a 1950's tin robot that goes "beep beep boop beep beep". And there will be lasers.
I thought we were meant to be making new stuff up.
It is so easy to research a film genre. Watch a few of them. It's not even an unpleasant thing to do. All those genres have thrilling, varied and creative films that will demonstrate the tropes and stop you going "beep beep boop beep" with an embarrassed look on your face.
Here are nine films to help you out. That's five or six evenings of quality film-viewing and then you'll be the king of unexpected, exciting, authentic genre-work. Also there's some unexpected humour which is always nice. Like in improv.
Film Noir
The classic 'private detective gets into scrapes while searching for something' film.
The same as with The Maltese Falcon, but with extra funny.
All the film noir tropes, but set in a high school in 90's Californian suburbia.
None of them have a voice over, but they do all have a femme fatale, a weird foreign guy and a shadowy villain.
Western
"The most historically accurate of all prior Billy the Kid films."
It's basically a traditional spaghetti western, but it has a strong central female character and funny.
Sheriffs, mercenaries and Mexicans. That's as good a list as any to start a Western.
They are all set in cowboy-land, but "western" is to do with geography. Meanwhile, they don't all have swingy doors and pianos, but they do have themes of vengeance and redemption, harsh unforgiving environments and impressive gunplay.
Science Fiction
Back To The Future, but with less De Lorean and more social commentary.
Has loads of robots, none of which go "beep beep boop beep". Also it's a Film Noir, Double Up!
It's like 1984, Clockwork Orange, Star Trek The Next Generation and iPhones all rolled into one; so you get a lot of research done in a very short space of time.
None of them have tin robots or laser-guns, but they do have dystopian societies, believable settings and investigate what it means to be human.
Wait... you've already seen some of those haven't you? Good. Now read the books they were all based on. Get on with it..
... and don't get me started on Pinter.
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