Talk:Premise (narrative)

Just film?
Why is this article named and written as if the term "premise" only applies to film? I'm pretty sure it is also used in the context of other stories, such as books, stageplays or any other story. It's a concept that says something about the story or the setting of the story, so I don´t think it really matters through what medium the story is told. In my opinion, the article should thus be called "Premise" and be rewritten in more general terms. RagingR2 (talk) 14:56, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Concept
This article might be renamed Concept. The concept of the 6th Sense is a little boy sees dead people.

I was told about premise by a screenwriter. He told me about a three part premise (sometimes called a promise) with three parts character/action/resolution or something like that. The premise of Romeo and Juliette could be Love/conquers/all deep at the heart, but I'm no expert, perhaps someone else knows where to look, so we could bring it all together here.

Whoever wrote the above is correct. The article is about a film's concept, not it's premise. The mention of high/low-concept films should have been a dead giveaway. The story's premise is the story minus ALL detail. This includes: characters, production details, locations, back stories, side plots, and even situations. For example, The premise of Clerks might be: Relationships survive internal conflict.

Premises should not be confused with morals. For example, One might think the premise of the film Blow is: Crime doesn't pay. In this case it would be more appropriate to say that the premise is: The rise and fall of a career. It's not perfect.

P.S. As far as I can tell, The 6th Sense does not have a clear premise. M. Night Shayamalan is notorious for writing films based on plot twists and not on premise. It is one of the main reasons his movies are so bad.OlinOfTheHillPeople (talk) 02:41, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Love conquers all deep at the heart? That's the theme, not the premise. 98.234.170.206 (talk) 01:46, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

NPOV and source tags
I added these two tags, because (a) the article is completely unsourced, and (b) while the content of the article doesn't seem to have a POV problem, the way it's written does - in particular, it seems to be specifically praising and criticising the premises of certain films, either overtly (e.g. the Full Monty one), or covertly (the White Chicks reference). While I'm not saying that the judgement was wrong in either case, it doesn't belong in the article unless you can reference somebody (preferably someone significant in the movie world, like a producer or a critic) presenting those opinions. Confusing Manifestation 04:34, 20 July 2007 (UTC)