The Gangster Genre Brainstorming Blog

Hello,

Today we are celebrating my fiancée's birthday. Hello fiancée when you read this.

So I have finished my historical fiction short. It is about three women who accidentally kill an unprepared man in a woods near Salem a week after the witch trials all because they invented lingerie and the lap dance.

So now the next short is going to be Gangster. I'm going to note that at the end of this month me and Celine will be going to Las Vegas for a couple of days. It will be interesting to see how am I going to be able to keep this run of weekly blogs and 10 day shorts deadlines running through a holiday. Take note potential future employers. Kevin is going to show that he is a productive, consistent writer.

Anyway, today's blog. It was going to be on what I would spend $44 Billion dollars on instead of Twitter, but you know what? I'm not that interested in anything Elon or Musk related so let's switch it to the gangster genre.

This should be easy for me since apparently the Irish have a renegade spirit to us.

Billy the Kid, Ned Kelly, The Pirate Queen Grace O'Malley are all famous for their exploits throughout history.

Much closer to home, for me, is the little fact that I live in a city in Ireland unfortunately dubbed "Stab City" in previous times. This was because of the cities issues with gang violence. I would suggest this book "Family Feud" for anyone interested in reading about the gangland scene in Limerick City. The book is a few years old now but it still gives a good history of where it really took off. Another note is that there are many families involved in all of it. One being named Ryan. I can happily say that me and my family are not related to these specific Ryan's. I did remember being told that if I was on a night out in Limerick and someone asked what my second name was, to use my mother's maiden name instead of my own surname. You don't know who is asking what my surname is, someone could hear "Ryan" and decide I'm the wrong kind of person for them to be talking to. Thankfully I never had any problems though.

So let's have a look at the genre. (Insert brilliant observational joke about how politicians are the real gangsters)

First off, let's define the gangster genre. A crime and gangster movie or TV show is defined by the corrupt actions of criminals or gangsters, bank robbers, underworld characters, thugs, or who those operate outside the law. Typically, characters are associated with organized crime syndicates with either heroic or corrupt cops involved.

Sidenote: A previous genre that I have written in, Heroic Bloodshed, is often found within this genre too.

The term "organized crime" first came into regular use among members of the Chicago Crime Commission, a civic organization that was created in 1919 by businessmen, bankers and lawyers to promote changes in the criminal justice system in order to better cope with the crime problem.

Interesting to add to this is that the first movie considered a gangster movie was actually made in 1906, 13 years earlier. The Black Hand , about two gangsters who threatened a shop owner with the kidnapping of his daughter unless a ransom was paid. SPOILER: The daughter was saved by cops.

What I notice is that a very quick google search of gangster movie's will bring up such films as: Godfather, The Departed, Goodfellas, Road to Perdition, A Bronx Tale etc.

Most popular gangster films will be set in prohibition era, in the more recent past or present but they are all realistic portrayals of the world. If you've noticed through my blogs, writings, I often delve into fantasy so I think this is what I will do with this genre. Use vampires, robots, wizards, witches, or anything that I feel can be filmed on a low budget. Now before I can pick what type of characters will be morally compromised, I have to figure out what sort of illegal activities they can take part in.

From this website, it classes organized crime as "engage in offenses such as cargo theft, fraud, robbery, kidnapping for ransom, and the demanding of “protection” payments. The principal source of income for these criminal syndicates is the supply of goods and services that are illegal but for which there is continued public demand, such as drugs, prostitution, loan-sharking (i.e., usury), and gambling."

Prohibition might be a good option to use for any story. Set it in a fantasy world. For example if I went for a Middle Earth style high epic fantasy setting then the illegal resource might be crossbows. Why crossbows you ask? Well my made up reasoning is that crossbows are often favoured because they are much easier to use than bows. In Middle Earth orcs often used crossbows whereas the good folks were seen with bows and arrows. So crossbows might be banned by some fictional fantasy kingdom. However, small communities with untrained militia might prefer to use crossbows than the complicated bows so this is might be where gangs of orcs, elves, dwarves might make their money?

That's one potential avenue to explore.

I have 10 days to finish this gangster short so for my next blog I will need to research. I will probably be looking at Middle Earth groups, if there are any, to see what their motives were. I'm sure they would be heroic but I might be able to twist it. Otherwise I could look into other fantasy stories. I'm ideally looking for organizations rather than kingdoms or any government associated groups. Plus, if I can possibly keep this non-comedy, I would be happy with that. I feel like film noir might be a direction I will go in too. I currently have an unfinished feature called Sponge, about a vampire hunter. Think Buffy meets Training Day. So I could pull from that. Maybe even set this short in the same world as it.

So next week I will hopefully blog about my options then.

For now I am going to spend more time on my fiancée on her birthday,

Thanks for reading

Kevin