JaneEspenson.com

Gosh, is it time to get out the mailbag again? Here’s another pile of letters! A lovely card from Leona in Alabama, congratulating me on the new NBC/Uni deal. Thank you, Leona! Another pretty postcard from Ingrid in Germany, who wants more entries of the “Field Guide to Jokes” variety. Great! Because we’ve only just gotten started on that!

Oh, here’s a good question from Lilia in Houston. She notes that I said not to refer to previous episodes within your spec, and wants to know if she can do it if it’s important to her story. Oh! Absolutely! You can certainly refer to previous episodes all you want. My warning was about a self-conscious referencing of previous episodes done expressly to show off your knowledge of the show. I did not mean to suggest it as a general prohibition. Go crazy!

Tom in Brooklyn has some good basic questions about getting into tv writing. I refer you to the blog archives for a lot of your answers – look at the early entries. But the short-handed answer — which I give here because I’m sure it applies to a lot of other readers — is that you can get your first agent long-distance, but these don’t tend to be the very best agents. If you’re serious about the career, it does still seem that a move to LA is necessary. Check out the ABC Writers’ Fellowship for a good way in – it’s easier to move here if there’s a reason to be here. Your feature scripts will be helpful in terms of getting an agent, and also in getting hired, but a tv spec of a show that is currently on the air will be a tremendous help to you. Even if you only use it to apply to the fellowship!

And finally, I have here the most wonderful letter (sent to the whole Buffy staff) from Sara in Jerusalem, who talks about Buffy and about Sara’s own life as a medical student. I’m going to assume it’s all right with Sara for me to quote this section about the parallels:

“… we are old way before our time, spend a lot of time around dead bodies and gore, and give up our youth dealing with things in the middle of the night most people will never have to see. Buffy captures the aftermath of that — the effect on the person, the loneliness, the ‘superiority complex with the inferiority complex about it,’ the fear of how cold and hard you become…”

She goes on to talk about the comfort of having (even a fictional) hero… wow. A wonderful letter. Writing for TV is a pretty darn fun job. And the notion that it might sometimes be a useful one as well… I’m the luckiest person in the world. Thank you, Sara. And I know Joss would thank you too… what you’re talking about really belongs to him.

Lunch: A store-bought Indian bean dish that came sealed in a neat little silver pouch. Just heat-and-eat. Tremendous.

A few posts back, I was talking about the use of repeated words in dialogue. A few of the examples I used were also Reference Jokes — a mention of Stratego here, a mention of Bob Barker there. Reference jokes are one of the easiest things to do, and yet so often they’re done poorly. People pick the wrong objects and people to reference. Go for the quirk! Chess is not as funny as Stratego. iPods aren’t as funny as Stratego either. Stratego is non-obvious, which is what you’re striving for. Also, it is a funny sounding word, which is hugely important.

Which would you find more interesting? If I told you that I saw Rob Lowe placing a very specific order at a Starbucks? Or if I told you that I saw Leonard Nimoy having a pair of sunglasses repaired? Personally, I’d be a lot more excited about Nimoy and his eyewear. And it’s not just because Spock is dreamy. Nimoy may have a lot more restful pilot season than Lowe, but he’s inherently more interesting as a reference. He’s got nostalgia value, and surprise value and a funnier name. (The right answer is that I saw Rob Lowe at Starbucks. Too bad, really.)

If you’re writing a spec Family Guy, and you’ve been studying their scripts, you’ve already noticed how they delight in the off-beat references (The Proclaimers? — my my). But even in a much more traditional show, it’s really worth making the effort to find the perfect reference instead of just putting in one more mention of Elvis or Michael Jackson or Kobe or that girl that disappeared in Aruba.)

Here’s a joke from a Jake in Progress script, with some redacted material:

ADRIAN
I thought things were going so well.

JAKE
I thought they were, too! And then she made it clear that in her eyes I’m about as sexy as _______ in an ill-fitting thong.

I thought for a long time before I picked the name I picked. First let’s talk about the wrong answer. Do not pick a name from this list:

Rosie O’Donnell, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Oprah, Bea Arthur

Not only are these names kind of expected, but they’re kind of mean. All the joke boils down to is: “she’s fat” or “she’s old.” But there’s so much more fun to be had if you pick a name from this list:

Winston Churchill, The Ditech commercial guy, Alan Alda, Clint Eastwood, Haley Joel Osment, the poorly-preserved body of a frozen Viking, Porter Goss…

By making it a man, you automatically get the cross-dressing funny. Better (well, sure). And by avoiding obvious options like “Homer Simpson” and generic options like “a sumo wrestler” and too-obscure options like “Morey Amsterdam,” you guarantee funny of a much richer sort. And, what’s nice is that all of the options are funny in a different way. Haley Joel is funny in his little off-center thong in a completely different way than that poor desiccated Viking is!

The name I actually used in the script was Bruce Vilanch. In retrospect, I’m not happy with it. The cross-dressing is too literal. I wish I’d gone with Alan Alda.

Lunch: another one of those weird tofu shakes. Gakk!

Exactly two years ago at this time, I was at Epcot. I rode that Mission: Space ride. Came out green as a lima bean and clammy as a chamois. Horrible! I had to be led, shaking, to a place called something like “Ice Station Cola” or god-knows-what, for a cold drink and a bit of a sit-down. Didn’t feel right for about eight hours. During those hours, my first development deal closed, so I felt richer. But still barfy. Better than poor and barfy, but still.

The way I understand how the ride works is that you’re spinning in a centrifuge, while at the same time, being shown footage that suggests you’re moving forward. Your brain is telling you two things at once… that you’re whipping forward and that you’re slinging to the side. Stomachs don’t like it when the brain can’t agree about basic stuff like this.

Other tourists expressed their dissatisfaction with the ride, too. Some went so far as to fall down dead. And to their credit, Epcot has introduced a new, milder version of the ride which eliminates the centrifuge part of the fun. This is very very cool of them, and I would actually hop on the ride again in this new version in a second – the basic adventure framework was great. Of course, others aren’t as excited. Here’s a quote I pulled from a news story:

“How on earth can this ride be fun without spinning?” a post on the website ThrillNetwork.com asked. “People might as well stay home and watch TV.”

Well, yes. I am also a big fan of staying home and watching TV. Can’t argue with that. Television, when done right, can be a thrill ride too. Look at your spec again. It might’ve undergone a lot of changes as you’ve worked and reworked it. Does it still have at least one genuinely surprising moment ? A moment that a savvy audience won’t be expecting? And is the surprise motivated… in other words, not a random event or out-of-character decision, but a surprising action grounded in character? Make sure that in smoothing and fixing and punching up your script you haven’t lost that moment. Hopefully it won’t nauseate us, but it’s okay if it jolts us a little.

By the way, I’m not blaming Disney for anything. They gave me my start, they’re surely welcome to the contents of my stomach. Speaking of which:

Lunch: more of that noodle-shaped tofu. How can it be tofu when the package clearly says it’s made from yams, not soybeans? Oh, wait. It’s both. Soybeans and yam flour. Mystery solved.

Because of my new deal, I’ve been driving up to Universal a lot. The first few times I had to do this, I was late for my meetings. Traffic extended the trip to well over an hour. So I made a note: leave early. So then, of course, I started arriving at my meetings a full hour too soon. Because, of course, all the traffic evaporated. Have you ever realized, half-way to somewhere, that you’re absurdly ahead of schedule, so you start looking for things to slow you down? You stop fighting the traffic. You let people in. You move into the lane that’s mysteriously slower. You just stay behind that truck – why not? In LA, this feels like a big infraction of the rules, because you’re supposed to want to be moving as fast as possible at all times.

But it feels good. Good things come from breaking the rules.

Here’s a rule. Or at least a rule of thumb. In general, we try to keep from reusing the same word, especially when the uses fall near one another. In the paragraph above I used “early,” “too soon” and “ahead of schedule” quite consciously, to keep from repeating “early,” “early,” “early.”

So what happens when you break this rule? On a recent episode of Family Guy, the mayor, Adam West, asked:

“Anyone want to play Stratego? I have Stratego!”

And on Buffy (in a Joss-written line), a college girl once scoffed at Willow, who had proposed a spot of spell-casting, by saying:

“Oh yeah, then we could all get on our broomsticks and fly around on our broomsticks!”

Also on Buffy, an enthusiastic minion once promised to eliminate a perceived threat by saying:

“We will get Bob Barker! We will bring you the limp and beaten body of Bob Barker!”

Here’s how I think this one works. Because we tend to try to avoid repeated words, in careful speech as well as in writing, when a character repeats a word they naturally sound either generally inarticulate (like the college scoffer) or over-excited, like the mayor and the minion. Or nervous, as when the earnest suitor in a Firefly episode said:

“…the honor that you do me flatters my… my honor…”

Once again, character traits and comedy are one and the same. The repeated word joke can be funny because it contains a funny reference, like Stratego or Bob Barker, but it also contains the extra funny that comes from revealing character. Want to expose a dumb or flustered character to amusing ridicule? Give them a repeated word. Works like a charm.

Lunch: Forced to skip lunch by the meeting up at Universal! Made up for it with a hearty burrito-and-a-malt dinner.

Tonight: a simple example of comedy done well. I just now heard this, off tonight’s broadcast of the Dodger’s game. It started out, as comedy often does, with pain. A broken bat, flying through the air, clocked the pitcher on the back of the head, sending him to the ground. As he was tended to, the venerable Dodger’s announcer, Vin Scully, vamped. Vin has been around forever. I suspect he once whispered “Hey, I’ve got a good idea” to Abner Doubleday. Vin always has a story.

Tonight, indeed, he had a story. About a worse thing that could happen when a broken bat is flinging through the air. He had all the details, as he was there. The year, the venue, the names of all the players. And the fact that the sharp end of the broken bat pierced the injured player THROUGH THE CHEEKS. “It was awful!” he concluded with a sort of satisfaction in his voice. Yes, yes, I imagine it was.

So why was this funny and not simply strange and terrible? Why was I, in my living room, driven to my knees as surely as that poor pitcher was? Well, for character reasons. Knowing Vin, one couldn’t help but hold one’s breath, knowing a story was coming. And that it would be a humdinger. But, beyond that, I think it was funny because of exactly one letter. The “s” at the end of “cheeks.” Cheek, we expect, we can picture… it came at his face from the side, sure I see that. But cheeks — wow — that just paints a whole new image, doesn’t it?

I don’t know what you all can learn about spec writing from this that you don’t already know: capture well-defined characters so that the audience has expections about them, choose the perfect word, seek the suprising image… So if there’s nothing to learn, I simply invite you to enjoy.

Unless your brother died from double-cheek-bat-having-through. Then I’m very sorry.

Lunch: broiled chicken with a sort of mediterranean salsa: black olives and tomato and lime juice. Nice. Almost bought one of those great “Take 5” bars, but resisted. Do you know them? Candy bars with salted pretzels inside. You’ll love ’em.

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