by Greg DePaul
I was once in a meeting with a producer who was looking for me to collaborate on a project. He sat me down, served me an ice-cold beverage, and waited for the room to get quiet before finally looking me straight in the eye and giving me his two-word pitch:
“School Nurse.”
That was all he had.
“You can totally see the poster, right?” he demanded.
Actually, I could see the poster. In fact, I could imagine a movie theatre standee of Will Ferrell dressed in a tight, white nurse’s skirt and one of those little white hats, leaning against a wall of lockers in a high school hallway.
“Yup. I can see it.”
He got excited. He’d been looking for the right writer for this idea for a long time.
“So you want it?” he asked me, hoping I would work up a full story based upon those two words.
But I said no.
“Why not?”
“Because all I can see is the poster. What happens once the audience sits down for a hundred minutes and actually watches the whole movie?”
“That’s your job,” he said.
Again, I shook my head no. Then he said the most painfully condescending words you can ever say to a screenwriter:
“But it writes itself.”
“So you write it,” I told him.
That was our last meeting.
To be fair, I have no doubt that a truly gifted screenwriter could write a great script out of School Nurse. Hey, they made Pirates of the Caribbean, didn’t they? And that came from nothing more than the title of an amusement park ride.
But then again, Pirates of the Caribbean implies a story. You know the characters are likely to go out and do some pirating at some point. And they’ll probably do it in the Caribbean.
The same could be said for Mall Cop. You know at some point he’ll have to take on some criminals. In a mall.
But School Nurse?
OK, I know where it’s likely to be set, but what’s he going to take on—the flu?
My point is that it’s very hard to create a story from character unless the very nature of the character—or the character’s job—implies the story.
Nevertheless, there are teachers of screenwriting out there who implore their students to rack their brains to create an original character and fill the character out with all kinds of nuanced details before working on the story.
This can lead to another problem, which I like to call the Overly Conceived Character. Seriously. Don’t load your protagonist up with a laundry list of distinct personality traits unless those traits are truly story-important-—that is, they should be traits that prompt their characters to take definitive action in the story.
Non-story-important elements of a character’s personality don’t matter. After all, if your protagonist hates asparagus, but it never comes up in the story, who cares? But if we see him on a date with the woman of his dreams, and she has cooked him asparagus, and he eats it rather than hurt her feelings, then his hatred of asparagus matters. It’s story-important.
If you do—against my advice—decide to create a protagonist using the inside-out method, keep it simple. Create only as much character as you need. Pair character traits with contradictory desires and needs. This way you can create Fish Outta Water situations, which are discussed further in a later chapter.
Again, look at The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Andy is a painfully shy man, so the writers have him pursue something that’s terribly difficult given his shyness—love.
Look at Trainwreck. The protagonist is promiscuous. By pursuing love in the form of a monogamous relationship, she’s entering difficult—and also very funny—territory.
If your protagonist is a pompous ass, like Ron Burgundy in Anchorman, you drop him into a story that will confront everything pompous about him. Because that’s what we want to see happen to a pompous ass.
Clearly, I am proposing that all character creation be done with the story in mind. But there are some teachers of screenwriting who tell students that good comic characters are interesting even when they are doing nothing.
I wish they’d stop saying that.
I have yet to see a movie that boasted both a static plot and a satisfied audience.
OK, actually, there is one—My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It’s a story without much W.H.N. (What Happens Next?). There is a wedding, but no real risk that the wedding will fail to go off. There is romantic tension, but we never get the feeling that the lovers will break up. It’s basically all about the funny characters—Toula and her wacky family. That’s it.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding violates the rules of screenwriting. It has little more dramatic action than My Dinner with Andre. If you’re too young to remember, My Dinner with Andre is a movie in which two guys have dinner. That’s it. Dinner.
And by the way, I love My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Love. It. But it’s a rare exception to the universally accepted rules of dramatic storytelling that only a rare, exceptionally gifted writer like Nia Vardalos could create.
The rest of us should remember this: character needs story, stakes, confrontation, and all the other elements I outline in later chapters.
So while a few, rare screenwriters may break the rules, I urge you to mimic the overwhelming majority who stick to them.
Which brings me to …
The Outside-In Method
This means story first, character second.
Take, for instance, Bride Wars. You may remember that movie was cruelly denied an Academy Award.
Bride Wars started as a one-liner: When two best friends schedule their weddings on the same day, they go to war.
It came at a time when I was working ten or more hours a day to brainstorm ideas for a script I could sell to a studio. Every morning I went through the same ritual—I sat down with a cup of Joe and faced a white screen. Sometimes I read the trades, and other times I surfed the net for ideas. But mostly, I pulled from what I knew—the detritus littering my brain. I wrote whatever fell into my head.
It so happened I was engaged to be married and my wife and I were planning to be part of a double wedding with her sister and her sister’s fiancée. This got me thinking about two brides fighting over a wedding … which somehow morphed in my head into a story about two women who accidentally plan a wedding on the same day.
At this point I didn’t have characters of any type in mind; I just needed two women.
I figured the concept would drive the creation of characters. After all, what kind of women would fight over their weddings? Wedding-obsessed women. So I created two wedding-obsessed women.
Another thing became clear—they needed to be close. Sisters or BFFs. After all, if they’re not close, who cares? The closer, the better—to keep the stakes high.
But somehow sisters seemed implausible. After all, wouldn’t mommy and daddy talk sense to them? And couldn’t they just have a double wedding since they’re family? So I made them best friends.
I asked this question as I crafted the protagonists: What character details will best serve the story?
Considering that the story rests on a shaky premise—the idea that some mistake puts the wedding on the same day and the mistake cannot be reversed—I looked for ways to use character to support the premise. Here’s what I came up with:
One of the women is the leader of the friendship; the other, the follower. So … meet Liz and Abby. (Their names were later changed, but more on that later.) Liz is the alpha dog in relation to Abby’s lamb. Liz pushes and Abby gives.
This supported the premise. When the complication arises regarding the wedding date, there needs to be a strong reason neither woman backs down. They can’t be reasonable and accommodating, or else there’s no movie. I reasoned that if I establish that Liz is pushy, we’ll believe it when she pushes Abby to change her date. And if we also establish that Abby harbors longstanding resentment of Liz for being so pushy, we might buy it when Abby finally stands up and refuses to bend this time. Thus, a standoff ensues. On
e woman pushes; the other refuses to budge. The war is on.
Through this process I came up with close friends who are wedding-obsessed. One is pushy. One has previously been on the wimpy side but is now—awkwardly—standing up for herself.
Where to put them? Seattle? Tokyo? One producer I pitched the story to wanted them to live in Houston. Turns out he hails from—big surprise—Houston. But ultimately that producer didn’t attach himself to the project, and the producers who did wanted Manhattan. So Manhattan it was. After all, the exact setting wasn’t story-important. Two brides can battle anywhere. Why not New York?
So that was my outside-in process for character creation—every character trait was prompted by the story. I even came up with a sub-plot involving Abby’s brother falling in love with Liz.
Naturally, that meant Abby had to have a brother and his character traits also had to serve the story. And so on …
Relatability
At various points in this book I am telling you either how to write your best or how to satisfy the market. Screenwriters must do both at once. The word you see in bold above this paragraph will help you do that.
For a writer, it is highly advisable to create characters the audience can relate to. As a salesperson looking to sell your script, it is mandatory.
But what does relatable mean?
It means the character has some trait, or combination of traits, that the audience can grab onto—either because they possess it themselves or because it reminds them of someone they know.
Call it a handle.
I watched the movie The Heat in a crowded theatre. When Detective Mullins, played by Melissa McCarthy, went home to see her trashy, bickering family, a woman sitting in front of me leaned over and chuckled to her friend, “Her family’s just like yours.”
The other woman chuckled back, and the two of them snuggled closer and paid rapt attention to the rest of the movie.
Bingo! The Heat’s trashy, bickering family worked as a handle for two audience members.
Ron Burgundy loves his dog—just like you do. So does Elle Woods from Legally Blonde. Andy from The 40-Year-Old Virgin enjoys a good egg salad sandwich—just like you do.
OK, to be fair, you may hate dogs. Or egg salad. You may even hate both. But if you do, you’re in the minority. America loves that stuff. And you want America to love your characters. So give them handles.
My first major produced movie, Saving Silverman, is about what happens when the friends of a weak-willed nebbish learn he’s marrying a control freak. Sound like anybody you know?
When Hank and I pitched Saving Silverman to various studio executives and producers, they went wild for it. Many of them told us their own personal stories about friends who married the wrong person and how they wished they could liberate their friend from that wrong person. We had multiple bidders on the project—a screenwriter’s wet dream.
You may be wondering, What’s the difference between relatability and likability? Aren’t they basically the same thing?
Answer: usually. What’s relatable to us is usually likable as well. But there are exceptions.
Which brings me to that rarely seen beast—the Unlikable Protagonist.
You see unlikable protagonists on TV in dark HBO shows like The Sopranos or Veep. Selfish people doing bad things. Yet we love to watch them because they’re so darn relatable. After all, Tony Soprano was such a “normal” suburban Jersey guy—when he wasn’t killing somebody. Selina Meyer struggles with her argumentative daughter just like an average mom. We love that. Makes her human.
But in comedy movies, an unlikable protagonist is hard to find.
Bradley Cooper’s character in Silver Linings Playbook is arguably unlikable. We see him dismissively break a window at his parents’ house, brutally beat up another man in a shower, and even strike (sort of) his mother.
Nevertheless, he’s relatable as heck. After all, he enjoys jogging, music, tailgate parties … oh, and he’s struggling with bi-polar disorder—like plenty of people. Just about anybody can find something relatable in his character.
I know what you’re thinking—Silver Linings Playbook was adapted from a novel. And the success of the book supported the filmmaker’s decision to present an arguably unlikable protagonist. If it had been a spec, a producer would have balked, “We can’t root for that guy!”
And he’d be right. Studios don’t want to take a risk on a spec screenplay featuring a morally ambiguous lead character. Thus, it is about as easy for a screenwriter to sell an original comedy spec script featuring an unlikable protagonist as it is to pass a camel through the eye of a needle.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done, and maybe you’re the screenwriter to do it.
Now let’s look at …
Your Character Stable
Here we discuss everybody in your screenplay who is not the protagonist.
All characters in your script must exist to serve the needs of the story. And since the purpose of the story is to reveal the truth of character, the supporting cast must help you do that.
Anchorman is about a blithering curmudgeon who must navigate an evolving world in which (Sakes alive!) women can be news anchors. The deeper truth of his character is that, despite all his macho pretensions, he is actually capable of loving an assertive career woman.
But before he redeems himself, Ron must first resist all attempts at change. Only after doing that and losing everything does Ron realize what he must do to win back the woman he loves and save his soul.
How best to present a blithering curmudgeon? Surround him with characters like this:
1. Brian Fantana: a playboy who uses bizarre colognes to seduce women.
2. Brick Tamland: an idiot who inappropriately speaks his mind.
3. Champ Kind: a redneck who wrongly sees himself as catnip to the ladies.
Take a look at this list and think back on the characters as you remember them from the movie. You will likely realize that Ron’s ensemble is made up of dimmer shades of Ron.
And that’s a strategy you can employ when forming your own ensembles of supporting characters—make them knock-offs of the original. I call these Shadow Characters.
The audience wants to see Ron confront the modern world. And when they’re not watching that, they enjoy watching other little shadows of Ron do the same. Because that—an oaf confronting modernity—is what they came to see. Over and over again in various forms.
But what about comedy movies that have no true protagonist? I’m not talking about a “two-hander,” the Hollywood term for a movie with two leads, which I discuss in chapter 5. I’m talking about a true ensemble as in The Hangover.
In The Hangover, three men share a common dilemma—how to find their buddy, who is mysteriously absent when they wake up in a Vegas hotel room.
Unlike a supporting ensemble, a true ensemble is usually a more well-rounded group, as we see in The Hangover:
1. Phil: confidant, a leader, but hiding a secret that makes him vulnerable.
2. Stu: weak-willed, nebbishy, easily pushed around by his domineering girlfriend.
3. Alan: narcissistic, lazy, lacking social graces.
The key to this character gumbo is diversity within a common whole. And no redundancy: After all, the group needs only one crazy guy—Alan. It needs only one good-looking, charismatic fellow—Phil. It needs only one wimp—Stu.
Three men share a common dilemma … and one very photogenic baby.
The goal of the screenwriter when creating a true ensemble is to make the characters easily identifiable and distinct. And, as I’ve written elsewhere in this book, the way to establish characters is through action. So if you plan to introduce the members of a true ensemble, give each of them a defining action that we see demonstrated in the first ten or so minutes of the movie. This will reserve a unique place for each one in our brain.
That way, as we watch the first handful of minutes, we can say to ourselves:
Sh
e’s the bossy one.
He’s the fearful one.
She’s the bully.
And so on …
Pop Quiz!
1. Oedipus and Ron Burgundy have one thing in common: A) Both are Greek.
B) Both are accomplished jazz flutists.
C) Both slept with their moms, killed their fathers, plucked their eyes out, and exiled themselves from Thebes.
D) Both can be described with a single adjective.
2. The character of Andy in The 40-Year-Old Virgin is a good example of … A) Why you should save yourself for Miss Right, no matter how long it takes.
B) What living without a car in L.A. will do to your sex life.
C) A character probably created using the outside-in method. Please don’t choose this answer. It’s wrong.
D) A character probably created using the inside-out method because the story serves the character, not the other way around. Oh, and “B” is also a good answer. Trust me, I’ve lived in L.A. You can either buy a car or marry your hand.
3. Not only is Bride Wars a mind-blowingly fantastic film, but it’s also a great example of … A) Why you should always check with your BFF before booking a wedding.
B) Candice Bergen’s best work.
C) What an industrious screenwriter can come up with if he shuts himself in a room every day for a year with nothing but a coffee maker and a laptop.
D) The outside-in method of character creation.
5
The Big Idea
Any good comic screenplay is far more than the sum of its parts. Great jokes, great moments, funny characters, a mind-blowing beginning, and an equally mind-blowing ending—they’re all as useless as pretty lights wrapped around a dead Christmas tree if the script doesn’t have a Big Idea. Or if the Big Idea doesn’t satisfy.