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I don’t normally like to tell tales from the writers’ room in this blog, gentle readers. But I do have to let you in on this. Every day, at 4:15, guess what happens in the writers’ room at Eureka? Automatically, apparently unbidden, bowl after bowl of hot fresh buttery microwave popcorn is loaded onto the table in the writers’ room. Every day.

That is just *one* of the reasons that you guys should keep polishing those spec scripts!

Speaking of your spec, let’s talk stage directions for a moment. You’ve probably figured out that I’m a big fan of them. I’m always telling you to make them poetic, to use them to convey a sense of style, of fluid storytelling, to do the work that visuals do in a produced episode. However, they do slow down a read, and you need to be careful not to overuse them.

Let’s imagine, for example, that you have scripted the following moment (this is adapted from a moment in last week’s episode of The Office):

MICHAEL
Wouldn’t you ladies like a male stripper at your party?

The camera finds the owner of the voice — it’s MEREDITH.

In my opinion, this reads better without all the information about how you intend it to be shot — without the indication that the speaker is off-camera, and without the stage direction. Like this:

MICHAEL
Wouldn’t you ladies like a male stripper at your party?

MEREDITH
Shut the hell up, Angela!

The joke still plays, and it reads cleaner, quicker, and I think funnier, without the indicated direction. I think the second option is preferable, even though the reveal of the usually quiet Meredith was very funny in the produced episode.

It can be tempting to use directions all the time, in order to transfer the episode as it exists in your head, into someone else’s head, but you have to be careful not to try to stuff too much in there. You’re auditioning for the role of writer, after all, not director.

Lunch: chicken piccata with mashed potatoes and broccoli

Here’s something cool you can do inside parentheses:

A PERSON
And then my rabbit exploded!

ANOTHER PERSON
(Don’t piss off the crazy man)
Okay, I’ll look into that.

Obviously, what I did here was just put the character’s thoughts in the parenthetical. It’s often more elegant and more fun to do this, than to find the perfect abstract words to describe the attitude you have in mind. What would it be here, after all? “Cautiously indulgent”? “Nervously placating”? Hmm.

If you’ve had trouble coming up with the perfect parenthetical, try this. And note that unlike in real dialogue, you can use swear words if you want, even for a network show — those broadcast standards don’t apply to words that only appear in the script but aren’t intended to be spoken. So go goddamn nuts!

Lunch: Tried something different. “Buffet City.” A big Chinese buffet facility. Oysters as big as kittens, dim sum, inexplicable sushi! Fantastic!

Good news! Andy Barker P.I. has a premiere date! It is: Thursday, March 15 at 9:30 (8:30 central) on NBC. You know this as the 30 Rock time slot of course, but don’t worry, they’ll be back. We’re just borrowing the slot for five weeks of Andy Richter-flavored comedy.

This is, of course, the show I’ve most recently been working on, and I love it. You’re going to love it, too. It’s got Andy, who is charming and hilarious, and Tony Hale (Buster from Arrested Development), and a mind-blowing guest appearance by Amy Sedaris in one of the eps. This is a classy operation, gentle readers, a really funny show, and I hope you check it out! (I’ll remind you again when it gets a little closer.)

Lunch: shabu shabu — beef and veggies and noodles cooked on the tabletop.

I watched an episode of Medium the other night, gentle readers, and I noticed something interesting. They do very abrupt scene transitions on that show, clearly on purpose. The space between the last line of dialogue in one scene and the first line of the next one is generally the same as between two lines in the same scene. It gives an interesting effect, because as a viewer you have to adjust on the fly — oh, we’re in a new place now — over and over.

I haven’t seen a produced Medium script, but it would obviously reflect this stylistic choice. Scenes wouldn’t end with the very-commonly used, almost automatic stage direction: “Off her reaction, we… CUT TO:” since the cuts do not come off reaction shots.

The question on the table, then, is, to what extent is it important that your spec script reflect stylistic idiosyncrasies like this one? (I’m not just talking about Medium here, but about all the shows you might spec and all their little quirks.)

There’s actually not an obvious answer to this one, since, as we’ve discussed before, you never know if the person who is going to read your spec will be very familiar with the actual show. As a result, it’s possible you could violate all sorts of rules that a show follows and still be fine if your storytelling is sharp and your dialogue is snappy.

But why not get it right? If I were writing a Medium, I would execute the scene transitions in their established style. I would also try to make it very, very clear that I was making the choice to do so. After all, you don’t want an uninformed reader to think that you’re making abrupt, jarring transitions because you don’t know how to do lingering emotional ones. I might even go so far as to do something like this:

ALLISON
Some line of dialogue

INT. NEXT LOCATION

And I would do some kind of variation on that for the first several transitions, making it clear that I’m making a choice. I wouldn’t even blame a writer for going so far as to write a stage direction like:

And in classic Medium-style, we cut right into:

Lunch: tried to get to sushi, but LA was a big snag today. Ended up at Jack in the Box with those stuffed jalapeno things. Good.

Ooh, gentle readers, you know it’s always a fun day when there’s a guest speaker. Today I’ve invited showrunner-type Jeff Greenstein, currently of Desperate Housewives, to speak a little more about highbrow jokes and obscure reference jokes in general. He speaks first about jokes whose brows are so high they’re not even on their own heads anymore:

“You know, the best examples I can think of are some of the jokes in the “earlier, funny” Woody Allen films. Jokes that wind up getting a laugh on pure rhythm, even if you don’t get the reference, e.g.: “As Balzac said, there goes another novel” or “When it comes to relationships, I’m the winner of the August Strindberg award.” [Another] one of these is SO ASTOUNDINGLY OBSCURE that it’s actually TRANSCRIBED INCORRECTLY in the published script of Manhattan: Diane Keaton’s character refers to her crippling headaches as “like Oswald in Ghosts” (meaning the syphilitic character in the Ibsen play), but the transcriber, obviously assuming Oswald means Lee Harvey, renders the line as “like Oswald and ghosts,” which means exactly nothing.”

Hee! I love knowing this stuff, don’t you? Now, it’s pretty clear that a joke at this level of difficulty is not going to help your spec script. The rhythm of a joke might draw a laugh in a crowded jovial movie theater, but it’s not something that works very well on the printed page.

So I suggest you aim a bit lower. There are certainly reference jokes that are almost as obscure, though not highbrow, and this makes them at least a bit more likely to find an audience. Jeff gives a really cool example:

“… [M]y all-time, ALL-TIME favorite obscure-reference joke was on 3rd Rock. They had a scene in which Dick Solomon (John Lithgow) goes to the airport to pick up his supervisor, the Big Giant Head, played by William Shatner. “How was your flight?” asks Lithgow. “Terrible,” Shatner replies. “There was some kind of gremlin on the wing!” Lithgow gasps: “THE SAME THING ONCE HAPPENED TO ME!!”

Of course this is a staggeringly ingenious reference to the fact that Lithgow and Shatner played the same role, that of a terrified airline passenger who thinks he sees a gremlin on the wing, in the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” — Shatner in the original series, and Lithgow in Twilight Zone: The Movie. Phenomenal.”

Readers aren’t going to be impressed by an easy joke. Writing an easy joke is like being an easy date. Make ’em work for it. They’ll appreciate it more.

Lunch: cheese-jalapeno bagel from the local Coffee Bean

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