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I haven’t been to the mail bag for a while, Gentle Readers, for a number of reasons that have to do mostly with the mail bag’s contents dwelling variously in my home, my office, my backpack, my hotel room, etc. The letter I’m looking at now, from Gentle Reader Rich, originated in Montreal. From there it went to Beverly Hills and then finally made its way to me here in Vancouver.

Rich is asking about choosing a show for which to write a spec script. He is toying with the idea of writing a novelty spec — an episode of a show like Buffy that is long off the air. The problem, Rich, is that most agents and most shows these days want to read original material — spec pilots or scripts for short films. Even plays. The primary place for which you’ll need scripts for shows that already exist is for the ABC/Disney writing fellowship, and it only accepts scripts for shows currently on the air. So I’m afraid you’d have a tough time finding a reader for your vintage spec.

I recommend you write a fellowship-ready spec if you’re at all interested in the program. You mention that you like House but are concerned about your lack of medical knowledge. You might find that this isn’t the obstacle that you think it is. You don’t need an M.D. to find out everything you need to know about one specific disorder. You might want to start by watching some episodes of those shows that follow real patients with hard-to-diagnose diseases. I’m talking about Diagnosis: Unknown or Mystery Diagnosis. Don’t lift the exact story from one of their episodes, but these shows are wonderful for suggesting starting places and possible misleads.

There are other good shows to consider as well. I would think that Mad Men would be a fun choice. Since you only have to please the ABC/Disney readers — not create a script that will be usable industry-wide — you can be much more idiosyncratic with your choice of show.

Then, after you’ve got that done, you should really dive into the world of original material. Be bold, don’t make a generic cop show or family show. And don’t hold back, hoarding your favorite story until you’re in the position to sell it for a thrillion bucks. Put it all out there.

You’re reaching for a big prize, use a big reaching thing.

Lunch: mac and cheese from craft services, served piping hot on set. Yum!

Friend of the Blog David sends in a great example of what we were discussing last time — the Bad Joke Joke.

This is from an episode (“Beers and Weirs”) of Freaks and Geeks. In the scene, Neal distracts Lindsay while Sam and Bill swap out her alcoholic beer for non-alcoholic:

NEAL
So, what kind of music are you gonna play tonight? You should play some Chicago. They have a really hot horn section.

NEAL
Friday night — always a good night for some Sabbath.
(off her puzzled look)
‘Cause Friday night . . . is the Sabbath . . . for the Jews.

Heh. Now that’s a good bad joke. It totally comes out of character and out of the relationship between the two characters. And it has that magical quality of being funny at the same time as we understand why it’s not a big laugh-getter. A great example against which to measure other examples of this difficult genre.

Lunch: noodles, sushi, canned tonic water

I’m still in Vancouver, and will be for another month. While I’m here, I’m continuing to read the book I mentioned before, “Best Television Humor of the Year”. The year in question is 1956.

I came across an example of a very-difficult-to-execute joke type in the book. The type is the Intentionally Bad Joke. Here’s how it played in an episode of “The Life of Riley,” as one couple says goodbye to their neighbors, who are heading off on vacation:

PEG/RILEY
Bye! So long! Have a nice time in Portland.

RILEY
(realizes he’s told a lousy joke)
Well, you see, Portland, and cement, er… er… and so I said wooden cement… oh, never mind–

I actually had to do some research on this one, Gentle Readers. It seems that cement doesn’t come from Portland, but that there is a material called Portland cement. Let’s just assume it was better known in 1956. (Or perhaps it’s absolutely huge right now and I’m just out of the cement loop.)

My guess is that the exchange above doesn’t work for you. It doesn’t work because the secret of the bad joke joke is that it has to come out of character. Riley doesn’t have any particular attitude in the scene, no reason to try to make a joke. Here’s the exact same joke, really, from an episode of “Ellen”:

LAURIE
Hey, Ellen, why don’t you turn on the stereo? How about a little Edith Piaf?

ELLEN
Yeah, everybody likes a good rice dish.

The extent to which that works for you as it lies there on your screen probably depends on the degree to which rice pilaf is more familiar to you than Portland cement. But in the context of the episode, it worked. It worked because Ellen was nervous. She was on a date in which she didn’t know what was going to be expected of her. The joke came out of her nervousness and the audience laughs at its badness because they’re really laughing in sympathy with her situation. The worse the joke, the more nervous she must be.

Here’s another one, from the same episode. Ellen is frantically paging through Reader’s Digest, desperate to distract herself.

ELLEN
Oh. Look at this: “Laughter in the Military.” It seems that there was a lieutenant whose his actual name was Lou Tenant. Well, you can imagine the mix-ups.

It’s not hilarious. It’s not meant to be. But it’s funny that, in her emotional state, SHE thinks it’s funny.

Ellen also specialized in the elaborate squirm, explaining her jokes in long rambling monologues like the one from “Life of Riley” only far more complicated. I would not recommend you try this in your comedy specs — it’s a very specialized skill. Blocks of dialogue that require a very specific delivery are not good in specs.

Another note on the squirming phase of the bad joke joke: this is a place in which it is important NOT to write the line “I’ll shut up now.” That is a clam (an old familiar joke). If you’ve heard it, don’t type it. A funny joke about a very recent tragedy can probably still be squirmed out of with the line “too soon?” But the clam clock is ticking on that one, too.

Lunch: left-over room-service lamb chops. Cute and delicious.

I’m up in Vancouver, in pre-production mode for the Battlestar Galactica TV movie. Loads of fun, and it’s going to be amazing, I promise.

I just did a rewrite pass in which I cut twenty-four pages of script (from 113 to 89 pages total). It’s incredible what you can do when you have to. Now, if you have to cut nine or ten pages from a two-hour script, you can probably do it with trims. Lose some scenes that can be moved off-screen, trim the fat off the ones that remain, and you can probably get there. But if you are in serious length trouble, and especially if you’ve already trimmed to the bone, you have to look at story. The trick here is to be open-minded. The things that get cut may include a part of a story that you think is absolutely necessary. It’s okay. Put it all on the table.

Your neatest option is of course to cut a whole story. Got a secondary or tertiary story? Can you lose it? The problem with this option, of course, is that these stories often provide balance and contrast with your main story. Also, having something to cut away to is often crucial, absolutely crucial, to the A-story.

The more likely correct solution is to simplify a story, probably your A story. Think of it as removing a length of diseased colon. You sew the loose ends together after the bad bit’s gone and it all functions as if it was designed that way. The hard part is in identifying the part that needs to come out because you’ve been thinking of it as an absolutely vital part of your system for so long, it’s hard to see that you don’t need it. Get advice from others and take it seriously. Or simply challenge yourself to justify every step of your story and genuinely imagine how it would work without it.

The amazing thing is, after the script-surgery, even you will start forgetting it ever was arranged any other way.

Lunch: sunomono, gyoza and pumpkin cutlets

Hey! We’ve got controversy! Last time, I cited this hypothetical character intro as a good one:

SHERRY, 40s, sharp-tongued, rich and proud, is the woman you sit next to when you want to hear snarky comments about everyone else. She’s all offense because her defense sucks — she’s shockingly thin-skinned. Chain-smoker, stylish, bright-eyed, attractive in a surgical way.

Friend of the blog Alex, over at the Crafty TV Writing blog suggests that this description is a bit of a cheat. He says, while observing he’s become less of a purist about this recently, that:

My personal effort is never to put anything in a script that an actor can’t play and communicate to the audience.

He points out, with specific reference to Hypothetical Sherry:

Until we see her say something snarky, she’s not really a snarky character, is she? The danger is that a newbie writer will write a direction like that and expect us to like the character because, hey, she’s snarky!

His remedy:

Personally, I usually minimize the description, but then have the character immediately bust out a distinct line, or do something out of the ordinary that defines them.

I certainly have nothing wrong with immediately giving a character a line that strongly defines their attitude — in fact, I encourage it. And it’s certainly true that stating that character has a given attribute is not enough to give them that attribute. You actually have to give them that attribute.

I still like my character intro, though. For one thing, I think “the woman you sit next to when you want to hear snarky comments” evokes a TYPE of person, in the same way that “the guy who always spills soup on his shirt front” or “the kind of baby who smiles at strangers” is a type. It doesn’t mean there’s going to be any actual soup-spilling, stranger-smiling or snarky-commenting necessarily going on. It’s just supposed to evoke a certain category of human, and it seems to me that membership in that category is something that an actor can portray in any number of ways.

I’ve certainly been guilty of exactly what Alex is talking about here. I’ll often say, “his humor, when it appears, is self-deprecating,” or things like that — things that certainly could be left for the reader to discover through the examples that follow in dialogue. But I’m still not troubled. In a world in which readers often miss elements in a script because of distractions or time pressures or inattention, I have no problem with building in a little redundancy. It’s a little like that old formula for giving a speech: tell them what you’re gonna tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them. It doesn’t work if you skip the middle, but why would you skip the middle?

I’m reminded many old stories about Hollywood writers hired to rewrite a movie because readers weren’t finding the main character likable enough, or because the studio felt a character wasn’t proactive enough. In the story, the heroic writer always adds one word to the character introduction (“likable” or “proactive”) and turns the script back in, receiving mystified compliments as the execs wonder how he achieved such a positive change. I actually heard another one of these stories recently, a bit more plausible than other versions, in which the change was actually slightly more than one word. The new phrase added to the intro was something like, “she’s off-putting now, but trust me, you’ll grow to love her.” Is it cheating? I suppose it is — you’re certainly describing things unseen — but it also shows confidence. The writer is telling the reader to relax, that they have things under control. The readers feel that their initial reaction is validated, and they also know where the writer is going to take them next.

Rules are supposed to help you communicate with the readers, so they know with consistency how the words on the page are supposed to translate into the hypothetical filmed product in their heads. When the rules stop helping, I believe in stepping away from them.

There are limits to this kind of free-wheelin’ writin’, of course. Alex and I are in total agreement about “backstory intros,” in which the reader is told that this character is recovering from a divorce, or that they’re secretly the sister of the other character in the scene even though neither of them know it yet. That is almost always a mistake, since it forces the reader into a position in which they have story-influencing info that the potential viewer doesn’t have. And when you split the reader and the viewer, you’re making the reader keep track of two separate story-experiences in their head. Bleah.

Now, I should point out, Alex may very well be right all the way through. If the person reading your script likes for rules to be followed, and you break the rules, even with style and purpose, then you might have lost their enthusiasm right then and there. Maybe you’re willing to take that chance, and maybe you’re not. Check out Alex’s blog and his books — wonderful stuff! Have fun making up your own mind on this point!

Lunch: pork pot-stickers homemade by my own mother, who has taught herself how to prepare a wide variety of exotic cuisines to perfection. Better than a restaurant.

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