[1986]

> What I've realized is that the fame of the book is closely related to how interesting and unique the "elevator pitch” of the book. Which makes sense when you think about it; It's the elevator pitch that's spreading by word of mouth, not the book.

They call this "high concept"

[thaumasiotes]

"High concept" doesn't refer to the elevator pitch being interesting or unique. The less interesting or unique the movie is, the more high-concept it is.

"High concept" refers to the elevator pitch being a complete description of the movie. Nothing in the plot that might take more than a couple of seconds to describe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_concept

> High concept is a type of artistic work that can be easily pitched with a succinctly stated premise. It can be contrasted with low concept, which is more concerned with character development and other subtleties that are not as easily summarized.

> Extreme examples of high-concept films are Snakes on a Plane and Sharknado, which describe their entire premises in their titles.

Interestingly, this is exactly the opposite of what everyone assumes the phrase must mean, based on the ordinary meanings of "high" and "concept". Such is life.

[kelnos]

> this is exactly the opposite of what everyone assumes the phrase must mean

Huh, yeah, that's surprising. I always assumed "high concept" meant that a work was more "cerebral" or something like that, while "low concept" is something lowbrow or simple to understand.

I had no idea that the term referred to how succinctly the work can be described or pitched.

[TeMPOraL]

I was surprised by this as well.

It doesn't help that in some cases, it would actually correlate. Take the example from the Wiki:

> high-concept idea, such as "what if we could clone dinosaurs?" as in Jurassic Park.

"What if we could clone dinosaurs?" can unroll into anything between some extremely cerebral biopunk (think "Change Agent" but written by Greg Egan) and sharknando with raptors instead of sharks. In either case, the "elevator pitch" would be good, succinct summary - but, if you were to give that line to people and ask them to imagine what the book is like, the answer would depend entirely on the level of interests and sophistication of individual responders.

Or, in short: if you like cerebral stuff and you hear a "high-concept" pitch, you're likely to assume the work is "high concept" in terms of being full of deep ideas.

[tessellated]

For 44 years my misunderstanding of 'character actors' was that they are good at acting like other characters.

[thaumasiotes]

"High concept" is a bit of a different case in that nobody ever knows the actual meaning. It's too obvious that, in the absence of the existing meaning, it would mean "conceptually complex". It's not at all obvious why you would use a phrase meaning "conceptually complex" when what you want to say is "conceptually trivial".

[topherclay]

"I don't really know any high level programming languages, I really only know python."