by Mike Sacks
That’s a tough trick for a writer to pull off, especially when it comes to comedy: to be prescient while also not confusing audiences with anything too new and too unrecognizable.
Well, Chayefsky’s [1971] movie The Hospital was just as prescient as Network. He predicted the current state of today’s health-care situation when there wasn’t a whisper of it.
Paddy Chayefsky has been criticized for writing dialogue that was considered, by many, to be too “written.” That the words out of his characters’ mouths were perhaps too preachy and too poetic.
That was the big argument about Chayefsky, because he was making films at a time when films were supposed to not be about words, but just all images. And there were these arguments—endless, really, they just went on and on—that the minute you’re aware of the writer’s hand, the screenplay could no longer be good. But my point was and still is: If you’re aware of glorious writing, so what? I never had a problem with that. Chayefsky’s dialogue was also brilliant in its variety. His writing was always big-hearted and full of emotion. He could write dialogue for regular people: Marty, Marty’s mother, the characters in [the 1957 movie] The Bachelor Party. But he could also write totally convincing dialogue for geniuses: Network, The Hospital, Altered States.
And these days there are any number of writers following in Chayefsky’s footsteps in television, which has become the place for the best of our writers to be supported in wherever their talent takes them. I believe great writing should make you aware of it. I think it’s a fun thing.
There are stories about Paddy Chayefsky being an incredibly intense, obsessive writer. That he thought of writing, as well as life itself, as almost being a contact sport.
And that’s something that I completely understand.
How so?
I see writing as righteous. There are a lot of things in life that we spend time worrying about, agonizing over, being involved with, having it assume distorted proportions. We end up embarrassed by how much priority we give to so many things that, ultimately, we can’t control. But that doesn’t happen when it comes to writing. Writing dignifies any turmoil it puts you through.
Would you consider yourself to be an obsessive? Many of the characters in your movies seem to suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. I’m thinking in particular of Jack Nicholson’s character in As Good as It Gets, as well as Holly Hunter in Broadcast News and Téa Leoni in Spanglish.
I can’t imagine that any writer doesn’t suffer from obsessiveness—a humility that you feel toward your work. Writing is not something you do offhandedly. It should continue to mean as much to you after years of doing it as it did when you first started. I sort of think it’s supposed to be ever humbling.
This intensity hasn’t seemed to wane over the years. I was listening to the DVD audio commentary for 1987’s Broadcast News, and you were talking about some of the jokes that you wished you could rewrite, from a distance of more than ten years.
When you write and direct a movie, you are legally insane. It’s an absolute distortion of reality—it just is. You’re not thinking straight. So when you see the movie again as a rational human being, with some detachment, it becomes a different thing. I saw Broadcast News for the first time after many years of not having seen it. I was channel-surfing and then stayed with it. I finally realized what the movie was all about. It’s about three people who lost their last chance at real intimacy.
Now, at the time of making the film, I couldn’t accept my ending, thinking it should be more definitive. But with the passage of time, I saw that same ending as correctly defining the journey.
You’re a writer with a reputation for doing a tremendous amount of research before you even begin the process of starting on a script. For Broadcast News, you spent a full year doing research on the news media. How important should research be to a screenwriter, even if the script is going to be a comedy?
It’s extremely important—at least for me. I love doing research. The script, the characters, the comedy will always benefit from research. It was one of the best times of my life doing research for Broadcast News; just hanging around with journalists was fun. I have this rule: If I hear something being said three times while I’m doing research, then I believe that it’s generally true. Well, while in the midst of hundreds of hours of research, I heard it said at least three times that some powerful women in TV journalism would privately cry in the course of their working day. And so I had Holly Hunter’s character in Broadcast News cry on a schedule to release tension. There are countless similar examples of things that work in your film that never would have been there without research.
Have there been other occasions when your research has helped you either define or create a character that wouldn’t have existed otherwise?
Lots. It is always important. When we were researching for [the 1978–1982 sitcom] Taxi, we spent twenty-four hours at a New York City garage called Dover Taxi. We read about the garage in a New York magazine article [“Night-Shifting for the Hip Taxi Fleet,” by Mark Jacobson, September 1975]. And we came away with a character that we never could have ever have created on our own—the Louie De Palma character [played by Danny DeVito]. I saw a cab driver bribe a dispatcher in order to get one of the cleaner cabs. This was clearly something that went on all the time. But when the dispatcher saw me watching, he did a bit of theater, slapping the cab driver’s hand away in an effort to look innocent. And that’s how Louie De Palma was born.
You once said that if someone writes a good script, it will eventually be read. That sounds encouraging, but it’s also a sentiment that many struggling Hollywood writers might be surprised to hear.
Well, that’s the great edge a writer has. Somewhere, somehow, you can get your script read. And if it’s good, you will be noticed. If you’re an actor, you need other people in order to act; a director needs other people in order to direct. But writers can be alone in a room and do what they do, without any help. It’s all in their hands. And sooner or later, someone will give it a read.
Has writing become any easier for you over the years?
You know, I had a nightmare the other night—a literal nightmare—that I was talking to someone about writing a screenplay and he told me that he wrote fourteen pages a day. Now, I’ve written more than fourteen pages in a day for a lot of television shows. But never for a movie screenplay. And when you’re working on a movie, there are just so many days when nothing gets written down. That can be tough. Hence, the nightmare.
But I have learned that if you awaken each morning and know the questions you’re asking yourself and know exactly the problem you’re attacking, then the writing process—even if it’s really slow, even if nothing gets on paper—becomes a genuine process. And if you’re in a genuine process, there are no mistakes. If nothing gets down that day, it’s supposed to be that way. As long as your unconscious is preoccupied with the work, you can get into a kind of zone where what seems to be inactivity is progress. The novelist Jonathan Franzen made a comment that brought me to my knees. He said something like, “You can’t call yourself a writer if you can get the Internet on your writing machine.” That’s brutal. But the fucker is telling a hard truth. So, right away, the bar is that far from your grasp.
Other writers have told me they have the same personality tic that I’ve experienced over the years. People used to ask, “What do you do for a living?” It took me more than twenty years to answer, “I’m a writer,” without my voice breaking and without me feeling self-conscious. To be a writer always felt too big to be true. I grew up in New Jersey, where my ambition was to survive. I don’t mean that in a sad or dramatic way; I mean that in an absolute factual way. It’s not rhetoric; it’s just a real basic fact. I could only picture myself selling things, like working as a shoe salesman. I did not have the ability to dream of being a writer. I did not have any of the self-confidence you need in order to try to become a writer, and I think I only achieved
what looked like self-confidence because I did love to write and I could lose myself in the work. Others saw my focus as self-confidence. But it was just me getting away from myself for a little while, writing what I wanted.
And that’s all you can hope for: to lose track of time and to get into a zone to produce writing that you’re happy with. So I’d recommend that to all young writers. Just write. Lose yourself. And when you look up, maybe you’ll be somewhere you always wanted to be.
PURE, HARD-CORE ADVICE
MEGAN AMRAM
Writer, Parks and Recreation; Author, Science . . . for Her!
Even though comedy writing is inherently goofing around with really funny people for ten to seventeen hours a day, it’s also very disciplined. And I am only just starting to figure out how to do it. It’s something you need to exercise. Try to write material—try to write good material—as often as you can. You also need to consume a lot of comedy so that you can figure out what makes something good.
What’s also important is to make sure that you actually like writing. I’ve always wanted to grow up and move to Hollywood—since I was a kid I’ve always had a vague idea that that’s what I wanted to do. But I didn’t know until a few years ago that I actually enjoyed the art of writing. There are a lot of people my age who are trying to get their foot in the door, who want to be famous, or who want a cool job. But if you don’t enjoy the act of actually sitting down and writing for hours a day, it’s probably not the correct choice for you.
I started Twitter because one of my friends did it. I thought, Okay, if I tweet one joke a day to myself and my college friends, this will make me better at writing, and I will have some jokes saved for a pilot or whatever I want to do. I didn’t know anyone who worked in the industry, but as it happens, there are some people who are really into trolling Twitter for new talent. I think some of the assistants at Family Guy saw me first. That could be patient zero of my Twitter spread. Assistants to assistants. Basically, kids right out of college who were helping out the writers and producers. A lot of them have gone on to other jobs now, and I’m still friends with them. So the contagion started that way. They started following and retweeting me, and I was getting some real comedy people as followers. And then [comedian and writer] Rob Delaney became a supporter, and he already had his huge following [more than 930,000]. Once Rob found me, a few months after I started tweeting, that’s when it really hit me: “Oh, my God, this guy is using this for a specific purpose that’s very exciting and new, and maybe I could get a piece of that pie, too.”
I kept tweeting for a few months. I was really working hard at the idea of writing jokes. And then, in maybe one of the greatest things that’s happened to me, I had this meeting with writer and comic Jordan Rubin, who had e-mailed me. He told me, “I have a thing that I’m working on. I might want you as a writer.” He was head writer for the Oscars. He said, “Do you want to write for The Academy Awards?” That was my first job. Just an insane amount of luck, which I am forever grateful for.
Then I was hired on Parks and Rec. I had never written for a sitcom like this. I was hired as a staff writer, so I was brought on as a funny person who knew how to write and someone who had potential to be a good TV writer. Mike [Schur], the head of Parks and Rec, was a fan of mine from Twitter and from my blog. So it was pretty incredible. I still can’t really believe that they hired an Internet weirdo. [Laughs] I think Mike felt, Well, we can always teach her how to write for this show.
I started writing with the single goal to make myself a better writer and then, later, to get a job. And I did; I got my dream job. I still love Twitter because it really is a fun way to connect with people, and it feels amazing to have a ton of people [more than 370,000] follow me just by virtue of them thinking I’m funny. That’s the most pure, wonderful validation of one’s career, basically. But that being said, if I’m at work sitting in a writers’ room, I’m definitely not thinking about Twitter. I’m trying to think about my show and trying to do the best job that I can. So I don’t tweet an insane amount, and I tweet less than I used to. My number-one responsibility is my job, and my number-two responsibility is my Twitter.
If I had to give any closing piece of advice, it would be to make sure you like what you’re doing, to put yourself out there, in terms of your work. Also, just be a human being. Be nice to people and don’t be crazy, which sounds very general, but that’s appreciated professionally. You can be a nice, energetic, funny person, but still not alienate anyone.
Sampling of Tweets from Megan Amram
I’m giving up spell check for Lant
This is a pretty shitty flash mob. It’s in my living room, only my family showed up, and they’re just telling me to stop drinking
Such a double standard that when a guy sleeps with a ton of people he’s “cool,” but when I do I’m “lying”
Face down, ass up, that’s the way I want my open casket funeral
They call me the Titanic because I once went down on a bunch of Irish peasants
After my ex and I broke up, I was in a really bad place (Florida)
PEG LYNCH
“The big events in one’s life occur only now and then, but there are smaller events that are familiar to every family. It’s these daily incidents that make up the private lives of Ethel and Albert.” So began every episode of Ethel and Albert, a hugely popular radio (and then television) series that ran for most of the 1940s and 1950s, on multiple stations both small and national.
Almost half a century before Jerry Seinfeld became famous for his “show about nothing,” Margaret Frances “Peg” Lynch was already exploring the comedic possibilities of life’s minutiae. Ethel and Albert followed the everyday lives of a young married couple, the Arbuckles, living in the fictional small town of Sandy Harbor—no state was ever mentioned. Only the two lead characters were ever heard—at least until 1946, when their baby Suzy was “born”—and they mostly stayed in their house, discussing the most trivial of subjects. In one episode, Ethel challenges Albert’s assertion that he could go the entire day by just using his peripheral vision. In another, Albert misses a dinner party because of a six-cent shortage in the company’s books, and Ethel asks, rather logically, why Albert couldn’t have just paid the six cents out of his own pocket to make it home in time.
Many shows were inspired by Lynch’s own experiences, both as a single woman and, later, as a wife. As she told the Miami News in 1955, she “once lost a beau because we argued over which side of the street a Chicago department store was on.” This simple premise was later the inspiration for an entire episode of Ethel and Albert.
“What I loved about her humor was that she dealt in the realm of real domestic life, not the goofier stuff you found on similar shows like My Favorite Husband and Burns and Allen,” says Gerald Nachman, radio historian and writer. Lynch’s work “was a very different, more mature kind of comedy writing that didn’t depend on jokes but on character and situation, before situation comedy was even a term.”
After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1937, with a major in English and acting, Lynch was hired as a copywriter by local radio station KATE in Albert Lea, Minnesota. For a monthly salary of sixty-five dollars she penned scripts for commercials, radio plays, and a weekly farm news program. She soon came up with the Ethel and Albert characters and convinced the station to produce three-minute episodes as fillers between regular programming. As the show grew in popularity, first in Minnesota and then for another station in Maryland, it was expanded to fifteen minutes.
In 1944, Lynch moved to New York City, where she began writing regular episodes of Ethel and Albert for the Blue Network, which would later become the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Not only did the national network hire her to write all the shows—a rare vote of confidence for a relatively unknown writer—they also asked Lynch to play the lead. In the fifties, Ethel and Albert moved to TV, first as a ten-minute segment on
The Kate Smith Hour in 1952, and then in 1953 as its own half-hour program on the NBC network. Over the next several years, it moved between all three major television networks, from NBC (1953–1954) to CBS (summer 1955) to ABC (1955–1956).
Ethel and Albert officially ended its TV run on July 6, 1956. But in 1957, Lynch revisited the Arbuckles for a CBS radio show called The Couple Next Door. Lynch reprised her now classic role, but because CBS wanted new character names (and because Peg refused), Ethel and Albert were never named for this series, and they only referred to each other as “dear.” Margaret Hamilton (better known as the Wicked Witch of the West from 1939’s The Wizard of Oz) was the third adult to join the Ethel and Albert cast, as Aunt Eva. The series lasted for three years.
Peg lives with her husband of sixty-five years, Odd Knut Rønning, in Becket, Massachusetts. At the age of ninety-six, she continues to write comedy.
Let’s start with where you were born.
I’m originally from a little town called Kasson, near Rochester, Minnesota. It was only a town of about fifteen thousand people, located very close to the Mayo Clinic. I was without a father. My dad died during the [1918] flu pandemic, when I was only two. My mother worked full-time as head orthopedic nurse at the Mayo Clinic. Her boss was Dr. Charlie Mayo, who had cofounded the Mayo Clinic [in 1889].
Dr. Charlie—that’s what we called him. He sort of brought me up; he kept an eye on me. My mother once brought me to see him because I wasn’t eating. And he made a joke: “Maybe she doesn’t like the food.” My mother ignored it, and she said, “But look at her! She’s mad all the time! Look at her fists! They’re always clenched.” So Dr. Charlie said, “Margaret”—which is what they called me then—“Margaret, doors are going to open for you when you grow up. Be sure that you walk through them.” And that was a good lesson. I’d like to think that I have.