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The day that Harvey Korman died, I heard a little excerpt played on the radio of a comedy bit that I’d never heard before, taken from a sketch he performed with Danny Kaye. I’ve located the whole sketch here, but you don’t need to watch the whole thing since other than one funny joke — the one I heard excerpted for the radio — it’s pretty dire. But the joke worked for me. Here it is:

HARVEY
Class, for a baby’s bath, what’s the most important thing you absolutely need?

DANNY
A dirty baby?

Now, listening to this being performed, it’s clear early on what the joke is. It’s one of those “Stating the Obvious” jokes that I’ve talked about before. Once you hit “the most important thing,” you know that’s the joke. You probably already know that the answer is some version of “the baby.” And yet the joke made me chuckle. Because of the adjective.

It’s not just that adjectives make things funnier, although they often do. Moist, bendy, pointy, itchy — they are all great words that spice up any sentence. But in this case, “dirty” is doing something beyond that. Can you bathe a clean baby? Well, if you take bathing to include the idea of removing dirt, then, no, you can’t. So the answer makes literal sense, but it also raises the idea of NEEDING a dirty baby — needing something that is normally undesirable. For me, it even raises the image of someone purposefully dirtying a baby so that they can bathe it. Funny!

The joke isn’t in the words, of course, but in the concept. These are all the same joke (even though they don’t all work exactly the same way — since you can’t purposefully make a chicken raw, for example, it doesn’t quite resonate the way the baby one does):

What do you need to cook a chicken? Raw chicken.
To fix an engine? A broken engine.
To censor a movie? A dirty movie.
To cure the common cold? Well, first you need a cold…

If you wanted to use these, you’d massage the language a bit, but those are the hearts of the lines, right there.

I just did that thing, of course, where I killed the joke by dissecting it. But it’s worth it, because once you figure out how any one particular joke works, you can extrapolate and make jokes of your own. Maybe you’ll find the one your spec script needs.

Lunch: left-over Thai food. Spring rolls and peanut sauce.

I was asked by someone — dear me, I’ve mislaid the note or email — to check with the ABC Fellowship people about a very specific question. The writer needed to know if they could still submit a spec script for the show Moonlight, a show that has only just very recently been canceled. Well, I checked and was told, as I’d suspected, that they’re going by the letter of the law here. The program accepts scripts only for shows currently on the air, and recently canceled is the same as canceled. Now, you might get lucky — after all, there’s no reason to think that all the readers for the program check the day’s cancellation news, but is that a chance you want to take? (It isn’t.)

This should also stand as a warning about specing first-season shows in general. It’s very hard to tell, early on, what’s going to be a hit (remember Commander-in-Chief) and you’re taking a real gamble in assuming that any particular new show will survive. I think you should spec a first season show only if you have connections at that show and think you can get someone there to read it. Then you’re taking the gamble of writing a show for the (sure to be hyper-critical) writers of that same show, but at least it’s a different gamble.

UPDATE TO A PREVIOUS STORY: Today I received a gorgeous orchid from my new best friend Ringo. Or, I suppose, from the very charming Ringo-assistant I met the other day. I assume this is a thank you for returning the box of clothes. The note says “Peace and Love, Ringo,” which is simply too cool for words.

Lunch: matzo ball soup and a cookie

So did you see last night’s new episode of Battlestar? This one, called Guess What’s Coming to Dinner? was written by the amazing Michael Angeli, and I think it’s one of the strongest episodes ever. Suspense, chills and singing!

In celebration, I’m going to use a line from his draft to demonstrate one of my favorite writing techniques. Check this out:

INT. GALACTICA – CORRIDOR
Athena, frantic, wild-horse eyes, bolts down another part of the corridor, no sign of…

I’ve talked about this before, and this is a great example. And I’m not even talking about the stunning description of Athena’s “wild-horse eyes”.

See what he did structurally? By creating a sentence that bridges over the change in formatting (“…no sign of Hera”), he’s making the inherently choppy structure of a script read more like prose, like a short story. This reader-friendly technique can be part of making your spec script feel enjoyable, not just as a description of a good potential filmed product, but in itself. Angeli’s scripts are always literary objects in their own right and if the Battlestar scripts are ever published, I encourage you to devour them.

Lunch: Japanese noodle soup from a restaurant I hadn’t been to before. Pork broth, cabbage, egg, noodles. Lovely.

All right. I’m back home in Los Angeles, and my hope is that blogging will now resume its normal schedule. Sorry ’bout the interruption. Life in Vancouver had a certain work-sleep-work pattern that was very hard on the blogging.

Because I have all sorts of on-set experience fresh in my head today, I think I’ll diverge a bit from the normal function of this blog. In general, I like to limit the discussion to practical advice to those of you writing spec scripts that are not likely to (are not even intended to) ever be filmed. These specs are the audition pieces that get you jobs, or get you into fellowship programs. They have special properties because they are ultimately intended for a reader, not a viewer. That’s why I spend so much time talking about the poetry of a good stage direction.

But I know that some of you are doing something different. You’re actually writing material that will be filmed, either because you’re already working on a show, or because you’re producing something yourself, perhaps for the internet. So here’s some advice for those of you who need to worry much more about the viewer than the reader:

1. Write Short. When the cameras roll, the material seems to expand like a big yeasty ball of unwieldy dough. Three pages will feel like an eternity. Make sure in advance that every line is working for you. Is that particular line absolutely needed? Are you sure?

2. Let the Actors Work. If an actor can do it with their face, you don’t need to write it. In a spec script that will never be filmed, you may find yourself over-explaining emotions with good cause, but if you’ve got good actors, let them do their stuff. If your material is going to be produced, you may want to take a pass (well ahead of time) that eliminates any of the over-writing you may have found necessary at earlier stages.

3. Be Flexible. I know you imagined a specific staging when you wrote it, but now that you’re shooting it, it may feel awkward to bring this character all the way into the room, or it might look weird or simply be unshootable to have that character reacting from the other side of the window. Coming up with natural staging may even require you to change some lines around while it’s being filmed, but that doesn’t mean you failed. Take these kinds of adjustments as part of the process, not as a sign that you didn’t stage it correctly in your head.

And, in apparent contradiction:

4. Don’t Be Too Flexible. Everyone around you may get all excited about some cool shot or unexpected costume choice or really innovative staging of a scene. But you’ve got a job they don’t have. You are the Keeper of the Story. You have to keep in mind whether or not that really interesting choice supports the scene or undercuts it. When you watch them shoot a scene, remind yourself of the purpose that the scene serves in the story as a whole, and make sure that that purpose is realized.

And, finally,

5. Stay Out Of The Way. Give any notes you have to the director, not directly to the actors unless there are circumstances that make it acceptable. Let the director do their thing. Don’t panic and feel like you need to rewrite something on the spot because it isn’t playing — usually it isn’t playing because it isn’t cut together yet. Watch, learn, relax, and enjoy the food.

Lunch: An avocado, lettuce and tomato sandwich with a big bowl of noodles on the side.

I love it when people write in with concerns I never would’ve thought of. We all know the frustration of having some question that everyone else seems to know the answer to, so it’s never even discussed in the books.

Gentle Reader Carrie writes in with one of those questions. She asks:

After reading about copyrights regarding song lyrics not long ago, I got to wondering if there might be any copyrights associated with place names? For instance, let’s say San Francisco. Is there process I would need to go through to use a certain place in a script, or would it be okay to just plunk a story down in the middle of any given town?

Plunk! Plunk away! You can set your show anywhere you want, without fear of legal problems. From San Francisco to the Pope’s bedroom, you can use it all without fear.

Your main concern about setting should have to do with (imaginary, for a spec script) shooting expense. I mean that if you had a big exterior shot in which your actors have to interact with some big iconic piece of the landscape that cannot be recreated on a soundstage, that you might have a problem. For example, if your script called for your hero to blast through the canals of Venice on a jet ski, well, that sounds a bit pricey and it might be off-putting to a reader looking to see if you can write to a TV-sized budget.

The only other setting problem I can think of regarding locations is that U.S. network television has been traditionally wary of shows set overseas, but I’m not sure that should stop you from writing a London-set spec pilot (or wherever), if you’ve got a seriously brilliant idea. Just be aware of the bias because, again, it might, might, make a reader peg you as unsophisticated in terms of the preferences of the market.

Lunch: avocado, lettuce, tomato on olive bread. Too much mayo, but good.

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