by Greg DePaul
Tammy is low concept. In fact, you could say there’s no concept at all. Tammy is a story about a woman who quits her life and goes on a journey with her mother.
See how memorable that logline is? To see that movie, either you have to be a sucker for Melissa McCarthy or you have to walk into the theatre hoping the movie is well-executed. In other words, the movie’s gotta be good because the concept is nothing remarkable.
If we leave aside, for a moment, the issue of how sellable a low-concept movie may be, as compared to a high-concept movie, there is the issue of how writeable a movie is.
As a writing teacher, I prefer that my students write low-concept screenplays. Why? Because writing is its own teacher. When you’re writing a high-concept script, you must sell the concept on every page. You are always justifying the idea. Not an easy task. You may even have to do some bad writing to keep the concept alive. The idea is everything.
When I’m working on high-concept ideas for a screenplay I want to sell or pitch, I do very little actual writing. I sit in a chair holding a mug of coffee, staring at a white screen. On that screen is a list of ideas—every silly thought I’ve had since I sat down that morning. I may have a small notebook open on my lap—with notes I made about funny or remarkable things that have happened in my life or the lives of others. I may surf the web, scouring it for the seeds of stories. I might peruse websites showing synopses of scripts that have recently sold. I might look at The New York Times or Drudge Report or Salon …
In other words, I’m idea farming. For a working screenwriter, idea farming is no less exhausting than real farming. OK, I’ve never actually worked on a farm, so I may be projecting a tad here, but I have been to a farm. Once. That’s how I know.
Idea farming is a necessary part of the process of making a living as a screenwriter in Hollywood. But when you’re doing it, your writing muscles aren’t being used. You’re leaving them on the shelf while you scratch for that next idea, which will hopefully pay your mortgage and put braces in your kid’s mouth.
So be wise and weigh the costs and benefits of working on the farm. For most aspiring screenwriters, the way up the ladder is through writing. Thus, I urge you to pick a low-concept idea and get cracking. In the long run, you are more likely to be discovered as a result of a great script than a great idea for a script.
Writing a low-concept script means less time spent worrying over the idea and more time spent on the writing. And by writing I mean the fundamentals—strong characters, funny moments, great story turns, etc. You won’t improve your writing without doing more of that.
So you can write to sell or write to improve your writing, but not both at the same time.
That being said, let’s get more specific about the gradations of concepts. Understanding and being able to see the differences between concepts is the key to creating and managing them on a consistent basis.
Somewhere between very high-concept films like What Women Want and very low-concept movies like Tammy is where you’ll find most movies.
Let’s place them on a ladder and check them out:
High Concept with Hook
What Women Want
Bruce Almighty
Click
Night at the Museum
High Concept without Hook
Ted
This Is The End
Elf
Evan Almighty
Midnight in Paris
Low Concept with Hook
Legally Blonde
Daddy Daycare
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
Meet the Parents
Bride Wars
School of Rock
Old School
Saving Silverman
Low Concept without Hook (AKA Execution Dependent)
Knocked Up
Bridesmaids
Superbad
Sweet Home Alabama
Get Him to the Greek
Charlie’s Angels (I & II)
Pineapple Express
The Hangover (I, II & III)
We’re the Millers
Friday
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
One Fine Day
Think like a Man
Big Daddy
Grown Ups
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Sure, we may disagree about a few of these. You may think Knocked Up or Forgetting Sarah Marshall have hooks. I just see them as funny situations. The point is this: there is a hierarchy of concepts that movies can be plotted on. If you don’t like my hierarchy, make your own; but make sure you are aware of, and categorizing, every movie you see and every script you read. This is how you come to know the industry you want to be a part of. This is one of the skills that will raise you from an aspiring to a working screenwriter.
Now you may be wondering how my ladder—or yours, if you devise your own—affects your writing.
This question arises: What kind of comedy screenplay should you write? In answering that question, raise another: What kind of story can I write best? That will tell you what kind of script to write.
For aspiring writers looking to get noticed, writing your best script is the way to go. After all, your goal is to get read by people who can help you—agents, managers, producers, etc. Your career is only going to pick up steam if there is a host of people in the industry who can attest to the quality of your work.
Stay in your wheelhouse. If you usually write broad comedy, don’t spend six or more months of your life writing and re-writing a horror flick. (Trust me. I’ve done it.) You don’t have the time, and it’s not your best choice. If your best writing is usually done in service of a high concept, write high concept. If you’re best at low-concept, execution-dependent stories—as I think most writers are—write them and nothing else.
Throw the pitch you throw best, and throw it often. That’s the way to play to your strengths and increase your chances of success. The moment you start to expose your work to agents and producers, you’re in the big leagues. When a big-league pitcher, who is known for his fastball, is playing in the ninth inning of a big game and facing a serious batter, he doesn’t suddenly decide to throw a change-up. He dances with who brung him. He throws the fastball he’s known for.
Had enough sports analogies?
Fine, then let’s talk about …
Comic Justice
How many times have you heard that movies are wish fulfillment? The world is not always fair, and folks work hard for their entertainment dollar. So when they walk into a movie theatre, or go to Netflix, they hope to visit a better place for two hours where good guys get rewarded and bad guys get what they deserve. A world of karma and payback—unlike the one they live in.
Comedy screenwriters must create with that world in mind. And in that world, people are taught lessons they desperately need to learn.
A guy who thinks he could do God’s job better than God will wake up as God. That’s Bruce Almighty.
Two female friends who value their weddings over their friendship are forced to choose between them. That’s Bride Wars.
A loner who retreats from adulthood and commitment is forced to take care of a child. That’s Big Daddy.
In each of these movies there is a force hovering over the film. You may call it karma or some other name. I call it Comic Justice. The force that teaches lessons to mistaken or misguided protagonists. Lessons they need to learn.
Comic Justice is the manifestation of wish fulfillment for the audience. In Bruce Almighty, we see the protagonist questioning God, and we think, If only he could get what he deserves. Comic Justice satisfies that desire.
We see two women focusing on weddings over friendship and we think, They need to be taught a lesson. Comic Justice to the rescue.
We see this selfish loner who eschews commitment and we think, He should suddenly become a dad.
Comic Justice to the rescue!
Comic Justice is the avenging angel of humor tha
t swoops down, kicks butt, and takes names. Oh, and makes us laugh along the way.
Again, the story matches the protagonist, who must get what she or he needs. Creating concepts using Comic Justice is as simple as matching situation to character. The second act—the main body of the story, where the premise thrives—satisfies a need the protagonist has. And here’s the key—protagonists don’t know they need justice. We know it because we see it. They don’t know it and that’s why they need it.
Chances are you’ve been employing Comic Justice in your own private fantasy world for years. After all, we like to believe that everything happens for a reason, don’t we? So when you see your jerky neighbor—that guy who roars down your block in his sports car every day without worrying about the kids playing around every corner—crash into a huge pile of cow manure, causing crap to rain down upon him and his car, you naturally think, “Thanks, God!” You would have paid to see that. And it happened. Satisfaction.
Sadly, that sort of justice is rare in real life, which is why the world needs you—the comedy screenwriter—to make it happen on screen.
So if you dream up characters before concepts, as discussed in the previous chapter, then you need to keep the principle of Comic Justice in mind—because any character fault can be confronted and resolved in a comic way.
Did you see Ant Bully? In it, a kid who beats up ants gets shrunken to the size of an ant. He struggles in his new situation and learns a lesson, and we laugh.
Comic Justice—like almost everything I write about in this book—is a strategy. Use it wherever and whenever you can. Whether you’re brainstorming big ideas for a new script or trying to find an ending for a scene you’ve been working on all night, Comic Justice is now another tool in your toolbox.
Movies Using Comic Justice
Get Hard
Friends with Benefits
Bride Wars
The Ugly Truth
Fool’s Gold
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Knocked Up
Bruce Almighty
The Game Plan
Failure to Launch
Bringing Down the House
What Women Want
Where’s the Comic Justice in The Ugly Truth and Fool’s Gold? Easy. Both are romantic comedies featuring two people who first hate each other, but then ultimately fall in love. When the person you most hate is actually the person you most love, you’re being punk’d by Comic Justice. Both lovers are taught a funny lesson.
In Friends with Benefits, we see something a little different. The two leads of that movie both agree that it’s possible to have casual sex without falling in love. Naturally, Comic Justice teaches them they’re wrong.
The Game Plan, of course, works much the same as Big Daddy. The protagonist runs as far from family and commitment as he can, but Comic Justice traps him with a child that he will ultimately come to love.
In Failure to Launch, Comic Justice is carried out via a conscious plan hatched by characters in the story. A grown man who refuses to leave the house is taught a lesson by his parents, who naturally want him to grow up and get out.
Comic Justice can also be applied to supporting characters and their side plots. The examples are easy to spot, so I won’t detail them. Just remember that this strategy cannot be overused. The audience wants everybody to get their due—from the protagonist on down to the waiter who has one line in the movie.
But what happens when fate gives the protagonists—or any character—what they do not deserve? That’s comic injustice. Otherwise known as dark comedy.
Dark comedy is not favored by Hollywood, largely because it is not desired by most audience members. Dark comedy proposes an unkind world ruled by either an absent or an unsympathetic god. There are few examples of successful dark comedy movies, with the best—Pulp Fiction—having been produced before this century. Thus, in keeping with what I told you in the introduction about only referring to twenty-first-century movies, I’ll skip a full-blown discussion of it.
Am I telling you not to write dark comedy? Nope. I’m telling you to be realistic; if you write dark material, know that it’s not for everyone and may earn you a lifetime of rejection from Hollywood.
That being said, if your dark comedy is as good as spun gold and you are determined to sell it or see it made, you must give it to the right readers. Don’t waste your best work on readers who aren’t sympathetic to your goal. After all, how many darkly comic films were made last year, if any? I suggest that, if you insist on writing dark comedy, you look to television, where it thrives. After all, the question is, Where can you peddle what you love to do?
Genre-Bending
I can think of very, very few movies that don’t fall within an easily identifiable genre. Actually, one comes to mind—The Trip. It was made in 1967, and it’s about a guy who takes LSD and goes on a drug trip that lasts for much of the film. And it’s really, uh, wacky. Funhouse lenses are used; a goat shows up and does stuff; a bunch of unconnected and irrational events take place.
Kinda hard to place The Trip within a genre, right? Well, actually, it is part of a genre called Roger Corman movies. But a discussion of Corman’s low-budget flicks would require another, very different, book. And again, I promised I wouldn’t discuss movies from that century.
In the world of feature-film comedy, are there any movies that fit into no genre at all? I can’t think of one. At least not in this century. Nope. For our purposes, every movie and every script has a genre; in fact, most scripts fit into, or borrow from, more than one genre.
Why is it so important that you understand genre and classify your work by genre?
Because you don’t write movies to please yourself. You write to please others.
And those other people who are going to read and, hopefully, sit through your movie—they expect genre. They crave it. For the same reason you read labels before you buy food.
Before they become familiar with your movie, the audience is always wondering, What kind of story is this? Nobody gets on a ride in Disneyland unless they have some idea what the ride is like. If it’s a roller-coaster, they want to know in advance. I know I do, because I’m afraid of heights and get motion sickness. If the ride is It’s a Small World—I, and everybody else over ten years old, want to get off.
But wait, you say. Won’t it kill your comedy mojo to submit to the restrictions of some cookie-cutter form?
No. After all, does using a typewriter—and conforming to its rules—restrain you from doing your best writing? What about standard screenplay format? Does it hold you back?
I tell you this to save you effort and speed you along to success as a comedy screenwriter: don’t fight the form.
First, because you can’t do it. And second, because you can’t do it. So don’t try.
Instead, give some credit to all the comedy screenwriters that came before you and just accept that genres exist and they are there for you to use. When you are working in a genre, you are taking advantage of the many decades of film history in which it has been established that:
Western shoot-outs generally take place in the center of town with the whole town assembled to watch.
Buddy cop movies always have at least one interrogation scene where the two cops try their different strategies to make the perp talk.
Mentors die. A lot. If you’re writing a story with a mentor, kill him. Thank me later.
In romantic comedies, the protagonist’s best friend of the opposite sex, who gives him (or her) the best advice, is usually in serious love with him (or her).
When the officiant of a wedding asks if anybody present knows a reason these two people should not wed, somebody actually speaks up. (I’ve been to plenty of weddings and have yet to witness this in real life. But then, Hollywood ain’t real life.)
Again, recall Sir Isaac Newton, screenwriter extraordinaire, who said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Write that in your little
notebook of ideas!
The point is: Don’t fight the form. Don’t reinvent the wheel. It’s a good wheel. You need only ride it your way. And remember it’s the bad screenwriters who agonizingly try to build a whole new mousetrap every time they type “FADE IN.”
Moreover, the great thing about learning and replicating the conventions of a genre—whether it’s bromantic comedy or zombie road trip—is that by doing so, you will add to the genre. You’ll find your own unique spin on the convention. You’ll push the genre a few inches further than it’s been pushed before. When that happens, the audience—and the reader—will thank you. After all, you breathed life into something they wanted but had become bored with. You gave them both the new and the familiar.
So what’s genre-bending? It’s when a screenwriter merges elements of two very different films to imagine or describe a third, new film.
When you’re up all night scratching the walls for ideas to start your next big feature comedy script, I suggest you play a game that most professional screenwriters play on a consistent basis—start sorting movies by genre and tossing them around.
I call it X meets Y.
Take a bloody shoot-’em-up and set it in France in the twenties. What do you have? Django, Unchained at Midnight in Paris. I can see the poster—an African American man in a ten-gallon hat unloading his six-guns at the great artists of the expatriate era. It’s brilliant. Laughably brilliant. And it could never happen.
That’s how you play the X meets Y game. You take two types of movies—usually polar opposites—and jam them together into a freaky, shocking shit sandwich. And then take a bite.
Every once in a while it tastes OK. Or it tastes bad enough to actually get bought.
When Hank and I first started pitching, we used X meets Y to come up with the freakiest combinations of movies you can imagine. We churned them out like a little factory. Here’s one that might make you chuckle:
It’s called Wrecked. Here’s the logline:
When a group of Beverly Hills High School students flies to Vail for a ski weekend, their plane crashes in the Rocky Mountains and now it’s Clueless meets Alive.