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Collaborative Effort

Here’s the problem: I’m an impatient, impulsive person. Stories come to me in two different ways: in a slow trickle, or a Niagara Falls-like gush. The slow trickle, for me, isn’t even that slow — a number of disparate ideas will enter my brain over the course of a few months, and I’ll realize these pieces form a single, cohesive story. That’s usually how stories and characters come to me, which is handy because I’ll usually be working on something else, so I’ll be jotting down notes for the next project. Maybe that’s just a short attention span working for me instead of against me.

By necessity, I’ll let that story germinate until it’s ready to be written. I hate writing things like that. Hell, I hate writing anything about my creative process because (a) everyone’s process slightly different, so there’s no real advice or insight there, and (b) every time I write something about “letting a story germinate,” I feel like such a pretentious asshole. At any rate, it’s easy to let the slow trickle story rest, because plowing headlong into a story that’s not fully formed is a recipe for disaster. The gusher is totally different — for me, it’s like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. When an idea comes to me that complete, I have to capitalize on it as quickly as possible before my aforementioned short attention span causes me to lose interest and start working on something else.

I guess you could call this “inspiration.” The story drops in my lap, and I crank out a draft in a week or two (as opposed to the story taking a few months to figure out, then taking another month on a first draft), and believe it or not, these first drafts usually turn out as good as a third or fourth draft of the “slow trickle” stories.

Why does any of this matter, and what does it have to do with my impatience? Let’s set the wayback machine for February. Amelia, one of my pals at Murdstone & Grinby, made a dubious claim: “I’m going to write a romantic comedy.” This claim has a number of problems associated with it: (1) although his favorite movie of 2009 was Easy Virtue (I wish I was kidding, especially now that I’ve seen Easy Virtue), Murdstone has never produced anything even close to a romantic comedy; (2) although she’s sorta funny, Amelia has never written a comedy; (3) maybe I shouldn’t say this, even keeping her real identity a secret, but it’s relevant: Amelia has never been in anything resembling a relationship; and (4) as a result of this lack of experience, Amelia has decided to take the robotic, logical approach to love: it’s the result of a combination of chemicals that fade over time, so why bother giving in to it? I’m not kidding — when Assistant Jim announced he was getting married, she scoffed, “The average relationship only lasts four years. Know why? Because love is just a bunch of chemicals that get people to have sex, and those chemicals wear off after four years.” Which is an awesome theory if not for the fact that an “average” includes relationships that last 80 years and relationships that last three months (I’m going to go ahead and assume it doesn’t include three-day weekend sex romps, which aren’t really relationships — there has to be some mild level of commitment before it fails).

After her proclamation, I said, “That’ll be an interesting change of pace.”

“Stan,” she said, “you’ve written romantic comedies. Would you mind if I ran some ideas by you? I have a few rom-com —” God, do I hate that term — “ideas, so I need some help narrowing them down.”

“Sure,” I said, always willing to help out a writer in need.

She pitched me six ideas. Four of the six were rooted in goofy fantasy — and I’m not talking about “this relationship is far-fetched,” I’m talking about gypsy curses as the inciting incident — which I automatically dismissed because, I dunno, that’s as interesting to me as a judge sentencing a couple to stay married for 30 days. The circumstances that force the relationship to exist are needlessly convoluted and impossible to believe. Maybe that’s a nugget of advice: if you can’t think of a non-supernatural explanation for your couple to be together, maybe you shouldn’t be writing a romantic comedy. As a contrary example, The Purple Rose of Cairo, probably my favorite romantic comedy of all time, hinges on a fantastical turn of the plot. The difference there is that Woody Allen has fun with the fantasy element. Most of these romantic comedies use fantasy to start off their story, but then it doesn’t mean anything to the story itself. With the exception of the inciting incident (and usually some lame machinations in the third act, because the writers finally remember that supernatural element from the beginning), the story is played straight. As opposed to, say, a fictional character taking a real-life woman to a fancy restaurant, then trying to pay with a wad of stage money, then trying to flee in a car that he can’t start because “in the movie, it’s always going.” God, I love that movie.

So the two non-fantastical ideas were okay, I thought. One would have followed a character who uses romance novels to woo women, but when he meets a “tough nut to crack,” he’s forced to befriend a famous romance novelist, whose new book features a similar tough nut. (Originally, I hated this idea, but it occurred to me there’s a lot of comedic potential to the idea of showing a woman’s realistic, terrified reaction when presented with a “romance novel” situation in real life.) The one I told her to go with was, I felt, the one she felt the most passionate about, just based on the way she described it. It’s basically a remake of It Happened One Night featuring a Rolling Stone reporter and an American Idol winner. Through convoluted circumstances, they have to get across the country so he can launch his tour. They hate each other, but they fall in love. It’s not art, but it takes a classic storyline and a simple conflict that allows for characters and a relationship to develop. To quote something I read a few days ago on an old Christopher Lockhart post, “Simple done well is better than complex done poorly.”

Things went awry almost immediately. See, Amelia thought maybe we should base the American Idol character on a modernized take on John Lennon. When she tried to hash out the story with me, it suffered from an extreme lack of conflict, because she refused to portray “John” as having any flaws. I have a lot of theories on how romantic comedies should work, and maybe I’m full of shit, but one of the most important ones is that both characters need to have big flaws that the eventual partner can complement. If he’s portrayed as St. John, the journalist looks like a bitch for hating him. I thought maybe some comedy could be mined from an irrational hatred of a comically nice guy, but that’s really hard to pull off when she’s supposed to be the protagonist.

So she hit on another idea: what if it’s about a journalist and a Ringo-inspired character? Amelia thinks Ringo’s a tool, a hanger-on who just follows his bandmate around without contributing anything to his success. Maybe, she thought, in the context of this script, the journalist could get stuck with the dorky “Ringo” character and not “John” himself.

And that’s when the story dropped in my lap. Yes, she came up with the premise, but the moment she said that, everything clicked into place. It’s like when you get lost, then you finally turn down a street you recognize, and you’re not lost anymore. I knew the exact route to take, but… It wasn’t my story. When she, after discussing the story with me for a couple of days, begged me to punch up the dialogue when she finished the draft, I readily agreed. I wanted to collaborate on this story, because I knew how to make it good. Plus, if she let me develop the story with her, I could push her in the right directions. That’s the thing about punching up dialogue: if the story’s not situationally funny, no amount of amusing dialogue can fix that. She’s not a comedy writer, so she doesn’t know how to structure scenes (or even overall stories) in a comedic way.

I know this makes me sound like an arrogant dick. I don’t think I’m the funniest guy alive, but I’ve been writing comedy almost exclusively for over a decade, and I’m not just writing in a vacuum. Not everything works, but in general, I know how to get laughs, and I know how to structure a story in a way that maximizes comedy. People who haven’t developed these skills just can’t pull it off. I know: I’ve read a lot of comedies by people who gleefully announce they’ve never written one before, and it’s always a disaster, even if they’re funny people who enjoy comedy films. It’d be the equivalent of me deciding I can win the Indy 500 because I’m a good driver. I can drive, but I have no specific training in racing. You can’t win on cursory knowledge and enthusiasm, no matter how good your instincts are. This might sound contrary to my usual “all you need to do to write a good script is to watch a lot of great movies and read a couple of good books on the screenwriting craft” advice. I guess it’s a corollary: you can write a good script based mostly on instinct (but let’s not forget the value of reading a couple of screenwriting books), maybe even a great one, but it takes a lot more skill and experience to master a particular genre. And I say that as someone who hasn’t even come close to mastering a genre.

Hey, earlier I had some kind of point. Ah, yes. I was pushing Amelia in a certain direction because she doesn’t know how to structure comedic scenes or a comedic story, so I wanted to minimize the frustration (for both of us) by having to just rewrite everything the way I wanted it. I was trying to play it subtly, nudging her so she felt like she came up with the ideas on her own and I was just there for moral support. Maybe that’s a dick move, but it felt nicer than just saying, “You need to do this, this, and this, and if you don’t, this script will fail.”

After really getting thorough on the story over the course of a weekend, on Sunday afternoon, she gleefully announced she was off to write. A few hours later, she e-mailed me the first seven pages.

Every single page was backstory. I’m not kidding. Yes, we hashed out the backstory of the characters, but it never occurred to me that she’d open the story six months before it actually begins to set everything up. I read them and said, “Okay, I’m not 100% sure we’re on the same page here, so what I’m going to do is write up an outline of everything we talked about, so we both know exactly what story we’re trying to tell. You go through it and argue with me and make changes or add anything you think I missed.” She said, “Okay.”

It took the rest of the evening, but I had a solid nine-page outline. It explained, in detail, why these scenes needed to be structured in this way, how they develop the story and characters, etc. It reminded me a little of John Hughes’s scriptment for Home Alone, where he spelled everything out in blunt terms to accommodate his eight-year-old star. It felt really condescending, but it seemed clear to me that Amelia was going along with the story I was shepherding without exactly understanding why these choices were being made, and all she wanted to do is write a script about John Lennon, full of heart-shaped doodles and variations of “Amelia Lennon” written in the margins. In my conception of the story, “John” is a MacGuffin who drives certain aspects of the plot but really doesn’t figure much as a character.

She took a look at the outline, said, “Wow, this is great,” then set off to work on more pages. We agreed that she’d write the first draft, and I’d polish it into a funny script. On Monday, she told me she’d have the first act done and e-mail it first thing Tuesday morning. I was pleased, because typically Amelia is an extremely slow writer. I thought maybe the fact that she had a solid outline to work with gave her the confidence to work more quickly than usual. Maybe I should have taken it as a sign when she complained that she “can’t write banter” and that she left several of the opening scenes “blank” for me to fill in with banter.* When the pages finally arrived at around 2 p.m. on Tuesday (maybe that’s “first thing in the morning” in her world?), there were…four of them. I may not be an expert on screenwriting, but I do know that first acts are usually longer than four pages.

This was not because she left everything blank for me to write. It’s because she just wrote two or three early scenes, and that was it. A couple of weeks passed where she just stopped working altogether. She talked a little about it after sending me those four pages, but before long she stopped even doing that. Had the project died before a first draft was finished? I didn’t want to be the sort of dick who browbeats people — I figured, if she wasn’t going to write it, I might as well write it myself rather than force her to do everything exactly the way I wanted anyway.

She had a self-imposed deadline looming: Murdstone takes a pile of scripts with him on plane trips. This is the only time he actually reads scripts himself, but he doesn’t take many plane trips. Cannes was approaching, and Amelia wanted a decent completed draft so she could toss it on his pile. This meant we had to have it done before work ramped up in anticipation of Cannes. She only works on a temporary basis, during “busy” times, so she wanted it done by the time she went back. That didn’t happen, but she didn’t seem particularly concerned, even though she announced to Murdstone the day she came back, “Stan and I are working on a romantic comedy.” To my surprise (and hers, as well), this actually excited Murdstone. He’d read Amelia’s previous script and said something fairly generic like, “The writing is strong, but it’s not my cup of tea.” Apparently he meant that, because the idea of her writing in a more commercial genre thrilled him. He was very excited to read it, and assured her he’d read it on the plane.

This meant we had a new deadline: get it done by the time he leaves. Yet, she wasn’t writing.

“Fuck it,” I said. “I’m already getting distracted with new ideas. I need to get this down on paper. I won’t even tell her about it — I don’t want to steal her thunder. I’ll wait for her to finish her draft, see how well it matches up with mine, make a few changes, and give mine to her as the ‘polished’ draft.” And I started writing. And had a finished draft four days later. Not fantastic, mind you, but a solid start, and certainly better than the combined total of 11 pages Amelia had sent me. Amelia’s actually lucky the volcano fucked everything up temporarily — I did not have nearly as many scripts to read as I usually do this time of year, which sucked for me financially but was great in the sense that I had free time to work on the script.

The week before the deadline, Amelia finally admitted she hadn’t been working on the script because she was depressed. She didn’t tell me what it was about, but I could take a guess (realizing it’s harder to write a romantic comedy without experiencing romance than it is to write a serial killer thriller without having killed a bunch of people, perhaps?). So I took a gamble: presenting my finished draft would either upset her further, or it’d allow her to breathe a huge sigh of relief — again, not a perfect script, but at least there’s something there to work with. I told her about it, and I’m convinced she lied about her reaction. She said it overwhelmed her and surprised her, but she was relieved. She did sound overwhelmed, but she didn’t sound relieved. She sounded a little pissed that I’d stolen her thunder, which was exactly my fear.

You might be wondering why I did this — why I wrote the draft, why I presented it to her, etc. Much as I’d love to keep rambling about “lightning in a bottle,” I had an ulterior motive. If nothing was riding on this script, I would have just written my draft to get it out of my system and then put it aside. We had a tenuous deadline that could either mean nothing or everything: Murdstone would read it, love it, and want to buy it, or he’d read it, love it, and work his ass off to help us get an agent, and suddenly we’d be stuck as writing partners working on romantic comedies. I could think of worse fates, but I’m guessing Amelia couldn’t. Nevertheless, this is what she wanted: a commercial script that would impress Murdstone enough to stick his neck out for us. I can’t wait for life to happen. I need to make shit happen, and this was an opportunity. If Amelia was going to spend five years writing this script, like she spent five years writing her last script, I was not interested in hitching my wagon to that horse. I’d rather her be a little pissed but realize how much I saved her ass than just not do anything and hope she pulled a script out of her ass before the deadline.

Amelia read the script, said she had to excuse herself from the office several times because it made her laugh so hard, and although she had “a few” notes, she thought it was a solid draft and would spend the rest of the week “editing,” at which point we’d argue it all out and come up with a compromise-based draft to submit to Murdstone. Then, Murdstone announced — surprisingly apologetically — that, because of the volcano, work was mounting, and he’d have to finish it on the plane instead of his usual routine of reading scripts. I did not witness this, but Amelia described him as sounding genuinely upset, which is really surprising if you know him (P.S.: he’s a dick). She runs the office while everyone else is off in France, so he told her to leave a copy on his desk the Friday before he comes back, and he’ll read it. The following day, he told her to schedule a meeting for one week after his return, so we can have a meeting about the script.

“What the hell is going on?” I thought, shocked at how seriously he was taking Amelia. I read her script: it’s good, but it’s not that good.

Because of the delay in the deadline, Amelia naturally delayed her “editing.” I was sort of dreading it. I don’t mind getting notes and then taking them back and incorporating the ones I like but throwing away the ones I don’t. This was different — I’d be expected to incorporate all of her ideas, and although I hadn’t heard any of them, she did tell me one frightening thing: she wanted to trim out the dialogue to keep it under 100 pages. The draft was a solid (maybe a little bloated) 118 pages, but here’s the thing: it’s a screwball comedy. I know that film is a visual medium — and don’t worry, I put in a lot of broad physical schtick and visual puns — but screwball comedies live and die on their dialogue. In a screwball comedy, the characters’ personalities are defined as much through what they say (and how they say it) as what they do. I knew there was material to trim and revise — I’d already been regretting a couple of choices I’d made, and simply cutting them would have freed up at least five pages — but I really couldn’t see us getting it down to 100 pages without turning the characters into what I rather harshly described as “exposition-dispensing robots rather than human beings having conversations.” Half the character and comedy was rooted in the dialogue, so chopping things or rewriting them to rob them of all personality or rhythm would pretty much ruin the script.

And that’s when Amelia launched into the “general” notes. This was just last week. Because there was so much, she decided to separate the “general” notes from the nitpicky notes. About 90% of the general notes were “Add, add, add.” The other 10% were “change.” What the hell was she planning on cutting, if she wanted to take a 118-page script and add at least 10 pages to it?

As a last-ditch effort, I spent Thursday revising the script based on those notes. To be fair, I did like many of her suggestions — but some I hated, and hated them even more when her only defense for them was, “All romantic comedies have [insert irritatingly cliché-based scene].” So I took our conversation on Instant Messenger, streamlined the notes, and ordered them based on priority — stuff that was essential to the script, down to stuff that I both hated and deemed unnecessary. I also trimmed out as much unnecessary dialogue as I could find, and attempted a variation on cheating the margin by rewriting certain lines of dialogue and action to keep them from carrying over to the next line. The end result was a stronger 113-page script. I also wrote a long e-mail defending my decisions to not incorporate some of the ideas. She accused me of being angry about things collapsing with Dentist Chick (short version: she had a boyfriend, but was still more than willing to go out with me — I’ve been down that road many times, so it’s time to break that fucking pattern) rather than simply not liking the goddamn ideas. Man, is that annoying.

I also included a passionate defense of the dialogue, but it didn’t move her. On Friday, after I stalled her for days with (legitimate but solvable) cell phone problems, I’d been backed into a corner. I already regret that decision. If we’d done it earlier, we wouldn’t have come up on the deadline, but look: she has this obsession with doing notes over the phone, which makes zero sense to me in an age of e-mail and IM. We’re writing shit down, so I see no purpose in describing over the phone what needs to be changed or cut, when it could just be written into an IM window and pasted into the script. I’ve tried to convince her of this in the past, but she insists on doing things over the phone. So, because I kept putting it off, we ended up staying up until 4 a.m. working on the changes.

I don’t want to say she tricked me, but initially her dialogue cuts didn’t seem too bad. Better than that, she’d come up with a few additional ideas that I really thought were great. It put me in a better mood, and I was happy to keep working — so happy, I didn’t realize she was slowly stripping the edginess and satire out of the script.

See, I have this thing… Why bother writing a fucking story if you’re not going to say anything more interesting than, “Aww, these two people fell in love”? I thought American Idol was the perfect metaphor to make a rather harsh (and, let’s be honest, fairly unoriginal) statement about pop music. Maybe I’m a dick, but I don’t care if she wanted it to be about American Idol discovering a latter-day John Lennon — I see that show as a shortcut. Ambitious, hard-working musicians don’t need a karaoke contest to find success. (And if you’re thinking it’s hypocritical to go for screenwriting contests while saying American Idol is a waste of space — in the first place, I’m not a big fan of contests, but even if I were, you have to contribute something resembling a personal artistic statement to screenwriting contests. Even if you’re just writing some hackneyed shit to make money, a part of you believes in the story, even if all you believe is “it’s commercial.” What do American Idol contestants contribute, creatively? Other than a hard-luck story that’s largely made up by the producers, they just do bland renditions of other people’s songs, “owning” it by adding a bunch of shitty Mariah Carey vocal runs. Is it any surprise that they’re beloved when doing karaoke but fall flat on their asses when singing awful songs written by even worse record producers?) Wow, I hope you enjoyed that mini-rant, because I just lost my train of thought. Yeah, so the script ultimately turns into an indictment of big media conglomerates owning both news and entertainment outlets. The line blurs, so the main character (who is shown as passionate about music and disdainful of the American Idol/pop music assembly line) thinks she’s going to submit this tough exposé about what a sham it all is, when she learns her magazine is owned by the same media conglomerate that owns our American Idol surrogate. She has a choice: resign, or keep going with an article that humiliates the man she’s fallen in love with. Guess which one she chooses?

More than anything else, her character arc hinges on that scene. To some extent, so does the plot. It’s the moment where this hard-nosed career woman realizes everything she’s been working for is a lie, and the choice she makes shows how far she’s come. Her job no longer matters to her — he matters. Yes, it’s trite. Yes, it’s pat. But to quote Amelia, “All romantic comedies are trite and pat.” At least there’s some grim corporate satire, which I have decided is commercially viable in our current state of economic disarray.

“We don’t need that scene,” Amelia said. “It’s long and it doesn’t really accomplish that much. Besides, she goes and meets the love interest and explains every single thing that happens in the scene.”

My take: “I’d rather go back and work on making her dialogue with the love interest less redundant.” There’s a little rule of screenwriting called “show, don’t tell.” What she wanted to do was write a brief scene leading up to the main event, then cut to her explaining what happened to the love interest. No main event. I get the idea, and I’ve seen that sort of thing in movies, but all it says to me is “tell, tell, tell.” She’s explaining what she’s going to do, then she’s explaining what she did. Isn’t it more interesting and dramatic to see her doing it? It’s a long scene because it’s basically the moment the narrative and character arcs collide. She’s tested with a decision that will show the audience whether or not this experience, or her feelings, has changed her in any way, and — yes! It did! Huzzah, she can be taught! So why excise it?

I sat there, in dead silence, for about 10 minutes, contemplating, rereading that scene, reconsidering everything we’d changed and everything we had yet to change, realizing it was 3 a.m. and my fight was gone. All her dialogue edits had dulled the edges. The satirical content had turned into a basic Scooby Doo-esque “overhear shady producers laughing as the plot the demise of their latest Idol. The Big Scene no longer fit, and we didn’t have the time to work on it until it did fit. Besides that, I liked too many of the other changes to say, “Let’s go back and reinsert all the hostile, satirical humor to justify this scene.” So, ultimately, Amelia was right, but she was the architect of her own righteousness. I felt duped, but it’s my own fault. I could have argued more about keeping the dialogue. Part of the problem is with me: I just wanted to get it over with. Part of the problem is with her: I sort of hate to admit it, but she’s a captivating speaker who’s incredibly self-assured despite not really knowing what she’s talking about. The sort of person who can lead 10,000 men into battle without having a plan, so they end up resembling an electric football set. (Yes, I’m that old, or maybe just that poor. Also, I have The Simpsons to remind me of my horrible childhood toys.)

I did go on record as saying I hated this change, and the first thing we’d need to address in the rewrite is making it a dramatic confrontation instead of a series of bland “tell, don’t show” scenes. But we we were gaining daylight (by the time I went to bed, I was annoyed because the rising sun was creeping through the sides of my window shade), so we didn’t have the time to argue about it or rewrite it as something retarded. It was bad writing, but for the moment, it was easier just to cut it.

I still hate the change, but I have to admit, the script turned out better than I expected. It’s not what I’d call good. If they started shooting the script we submitted tomorrow, I’d toss around phrases like “mildly amusing” and “relentlessly mediocre” while hoping the actors’ chemistry redeems what doesn’t work on the page. Again, I fall back on my general philosophy that a script should be required to say something about the human condition or the state of society. If you don’t think a romantic comedy can sustain such high ideals, let me point you back to The Purple Rose of Cairo, or Defending Your Life or The Hammer**. I got depressed over the weekend and watched a bunch of movies I love. Those were three of them, and in all cases, I just kept thinking, “This is what our script needs to be.” But the more depressing thought is: That’s what it was, until that Friday night note session. (Not that I’m comparing the quality — just the fact that it conforms to the romantic comedy genre while attempting to say something insightful about the state of things.)

As I view it, our collaboration is over. I don’t hold out much hope that Murdstone will like the script. Maybe this is crazy — after all, he did love Easy Virtue — but I’d like to think he has slightly higher standards. He won’t buy the script, he won’t help us in any way, so to that end, what’s the point of continuing to work on the script? At the end of the day, Amelia and I wanted to tell two completely different stories. It frustrates me because, I realized, she never read that nine-page outline I sent her six weeks ago. It’s not just that she had problems with what’s on the page — it’s that she didn’t seem to know why it was on the page, which is all explained in the outline.

Look, I’d love nothing more than to fall on my sword and say, “Yes, I wrote a script in four days, and it sucked. It didn’t make any sense, so it needed all the changes Amelia suggested and I was crazy to think my version could work.” However, I sent it to two readers who have never led me astray, and they had some good notes but deemed it pretty solid. So I get confused and annoyed when the end result is a worse product. I understand that this is a business that’s interested in making money. I just don’t understand why peddling a shitty product is the only way to make money. And when Murdstone says, “Nobody will want to see this crappy script” while suggesting a number of changes that previously existed in the script, maybe I’ll be proved right. Or maybe not, if his chief complaint is that it’s still too cynical.

Update: I wrote this post over two weeks ago, but I wasn’t sure about posting it. As of Thursday, the verdict is in: Amelia texted me that Murdstone read the script. However, while she’s convinced herself that both he and Assistant Jim loved it, everything she told me is contradictory: he found it “impressive” and “very well put together,” but he won’t reach out to any agents he knows to help us get it read. He considers the storyline — which, I’ll remind you, combines the frequently abused It Happened One Night storyline and a satire-free homage to American Idol, the most popular television show in the fucking world — “of limited appeal and not terribly commercial,” but in the same breath he says the script is “ready to be shopped around.”

There are ways to interpret the seeming contradictions in a positive way. For instance, maybe what he meant about it not being commercial yet ready to be shopped around is that it’d be good as a writing sample, but it’ll never get made). The positive takes are optimistic at best. I know everyone in Hollywood is a pussy and afraid to admit anything is good (yet, ironically, they’re all pretty okay with turning horrible scripts into worse movies), but people don’t say, “Wow! Impressive! Anyone would want to snatch this up… Except me and everyone I’m on good terms with, so you’re on your own.” I really think he was just trying to politely (and, let’s face it, generically) compliment the script while shoving a little bit of realism down Amelia’s throat. Message received on my end, but as I said, she’s convinced he loved it.

After I groused with a lot of (justified, I think) pessimism, she IM’ed me today saying, “Just re-read our script. I’m pretty damn proud of it.” More pessimism: I tried to re-read the script earlier this week and got so angry at the first three pages that I had to stop. Yes, I agreed to the cuts she wanted. It’s my fault for trying to compromise. I know this. But the fact remains: even the cuts I deemed “not so bad” really kill the flow. I want the characters — even the minor ones, who only appear very briefly in the script — to breathe a little and feel as much like real people as a character who’s only in four scenes can. Is that so wrong? And all of that is gone. It’s exactly what I said I didn’t want to happen: they’ve turned into exposition-spewing robots instead of humans having conversations. Worse than that, Amelia added a joke that is sort of funny — but at the expense of our protagonist’s intelligence. It’s exactly what I frequently rail against when I examine comedy scripts: no internal logic.

I know it’s my fault for giving up and not arguing with the appropriate level of passion and gusto. I can’t say I’m proud of the script we submitted. I wish I could.

*Maybe I’m alone, but I’ve never been able to write a script this way. I think — but I can’t really remember, so I can’t dig up any evidence to back myself up — some people say it’s okay to skip past a difficult-to-write scene and continue with the story. Maybe it’s okay for one scene, but look at it this way: if the scene isn’t easy to write, that probably means it’s important. If it’s important, doesn’t it seem like a bad idea to gloss over something that sets up the scenes you’re skipping to? I don’t know about you, but when I write an outline — even this solid, nine-page outline — I end up deviating from it.

I know I’ll sound like Captain Pretentious here, but when my characters actually start interacting at a human level (rather than the general overview of an outline), things change. My conception of them and their interactions change, and that, in turn, changes the story. Maybe in small, subtle ways — or maybe I have to stop and completely change the outline. If you skip over a scene and come back to it later, you’re stuck. You can’t let the characters surprise you in the scene, because it’s gone from a pivotal scene to something to bridge the gap between Scenes A-D and Scenes F-L. If you follow the natural pull of the characters, you’ll just have to rewrite Scenes F-L, anyway — or you’ll end up with a dull Scene E. [Back]

**This is a great romantic comedy from 2008 starring former Loveline host and current podcast kingpin Adam Carolla. It’s mistakenly marketed as a sports movie, I assume to bring in Carolla’s Man Show audience. It operates on both levels, but it has a lot more in common with Annie Hall than Rocky, and I mean that in a good way. More people should see this movie. [Back]

Tags: Amelia, Assistant Jim, collaboration, compromise, frustration, Murdstone, Murdstone & Grinby, romantic comedies, screenwriting

Posted by Stan on June 6, 2010 10:17 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Career-Based Rambling, Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em, How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It