by Greg DePaul
That’s right. You heard me correctly. Clueless meets Alive. Clueless is about the social life of wealthy, privileged teenagers. Alive is about a bunch of soccer players whose plane crashes in the Andes. As you may remember, they are forced to eat their own dead to survive.
When we pitched Wrecked, everybody laughed. Our agent laughed. Studio executives laughed. Producers laughed. Naturally, the story had everything you might expect. There were jokes about a bulimic girl who throws up her meal of cannibalized human flesh to lose weight, and a demented football coach who pushes his students to eat him, piece by piece. (At one point, they carry his still-alive, limbless torso around in a backpack.)
And then New Line bought it and paid us to write it.
Where is Wrecked now? I have no idea. Probably on a shelf somewhere or being re-written by some other pair of screenwriters. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that we used the X meets Y game to pitch a script that we got paid to write. And who knows. Maybe New Line will pull it off the shelf someday and make the movie. Heaven knows the world needs to laugh.
Here’s how I pitched Bride Wars:
“It’s about two women, best friends, who accidentally schedule their weddings on the same day. So it’s Dirty Rotten Brides.”
That’s not exactly an example of X meets Y, because there aren’t two movies being referenced. But it’s the same crashing together of two movie types—the wedding movie and the mano-a-mano con man movie.
And it worked. Kate Hudson loved it, and Miramax made me a deal.
So be a genre-bender and play the X meets Y game. You don’t know what you might come up with. The first fifty times you do it, you’ll probably get something you wouldn’t want to see, like Django, Unchained at Midnight in Paris. But every once in a while you find a Wrecked or a Bride Wars. And in case you’re wondering—yes, I still get residual checks in the mail every three months for Bride Wars, and, yes, they pay the mortgage.
It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
So tonight … pour yourself a hot mug of Joe, sit down to write for the night (and maybe into the day), and play X meets Y. Healthiest thing you can do with your pants on. Nobody needs to get hurt. Just do it. Grab ahold of a story, or a character, and toss it smack-dab into a totally different environment. Or even a totally different film. See yourself as crashing cars together for the sheer fun of it. Expect weird stuff to come out of it, but also look for some ideas that are so wacky that they just might work. Those are sometimes the funniest ideas of all.
And if your husband or housemate or old Uncle Bert happens to suddenly turn on the basement light and walk downstairs and find you there smashing movies together—just smile with pride and tell him you’re genre-bending. And watch his expression change. Chances are he’ll just give you a quizzical smile and say something like, “Well, OK, sweety. Just make sure to turn off the light when you go to bed.”
But, of course, you won’t be coming to bed, because you’re a comedy screenwriter and you’re going to stay up all night genre-bending, right?
Fish Outta Water
If you are a comedy screenwriter—or intend to become one—the fish is your friend. The fish is everything. Don’t give up on the fish.
Have I made it clear just how important this comedy writing strategy is? Your fish must stay out of water. It must never swim.
Dream up any character. (This is the fish.) Any height, weight, ethnicity, hairstyle … any point of view or background. Now all you need to do is throw the fish into an unfamiliar environment or situation.
Obviously, the fish needs to have goals and drive. Without purpose, the protagonist may fail to take action like a gerbil thrown into a tiger’s cage. It may just curl up in a ball in a corner and wait to be eaten. That’s not fun to watch. But give that gerbil a goal and it will try to find or fight its way out of that cage, and we want that. We want to watch it try.
As discussed elsewhere in this book, farce depends on characters struggling against their situation. Fish Outta Water (F.O.W.) is a tried-and-true strategy to help screenwriters manufacture farce.
When a bumbling security guard is suddenly forced to deal with gun-toting badasses—as in Paul Blart: Mall Cop—the fish is no longer wet.
When a pompous anchorman is forced to deal with a changing world that has left him and his kind behind—as in Anchorman—the fish is turning somersaults on the end of a fishing line, caught and flailing.
And when a group of Hollywood hipsters are forced to deal with the end of the world—as in This Is the End—the fish is flopping on the deck.
But when a seemingly ditzy sorority girl gets into Harvard Law School, we have the sharpest F.O.W. of the twenty-first century—Legally Blonde. The concept is pure platinum. In fact, it’s so platinum that it supported a second, equally successful flick, Legally Blonde 2: Red White & Blonde, in which the fish stayed the same, but the environment was escalated to the U.S. Congress.
So, when you are sitting at your laptop in the middle of the night in that apartment you rented in Mar Vista the day after you arrived in Los Angeles to become a comedy screenwriter, and you are wondering to yourself, “I’ve got this great, new character to write about. Now how do I make her funny?”
The answer is simple—yank her out of the water. Make her struggle to cope with a new, painfully difficult situation. Then watch her squirm.
Fish Outta Water also gives the audience a newcomer’s point of view into the world of the story. Movies are experiential. We journey through the pits and snares of the world we are thrown into once the lights go down. But we don’t want to go at it alone. We want to be holding the hand of another uninitiated person—the protagonist. That way we laugh and cry together. And if the protagonist is an even bigger bumbler than we are, we laugh at him.
Look, there he tripped again! Look, there, he fell on his face!
The last thing we want him to do is leave the funhouse. After all, only in its unfamiliar environs will our jester trip and fall so much—to our great delight.
As a comedy screenwriter, you need to play games with yourself (or your writing partner) to come up with situations that appropriately (or, rather, inappropriately) match the story up with the protagonist you’re imagining.
Imagining a wealthy socialite housewife who’s never had to work a day in her life? Put her in a restaurant waiting tables. Or better yet—the marines. Or even better—make her take a job as a maid. Or a shit-shoveler. Is that a job? If it is, make her do it. Put her in whatever environment she is most foreign to.
Adversity teaches lessons and breeds character. This is connected to another, more general, writing rule that is discussed elsewhere as well—conflict requires obstacles. Pulling your fish out of the water immediately escalates the obstacles. And that’s what separates the many, many good screenplays from the very few great ones—the degree of adversity. Great comedy screenwriters keep making it tough on their protagonists.
Elsewhere in this book, I talk about the importance of the second act as the comprehensive incarnation of the main idea of the film. OK, “incarnation” sounds a little pretentious, but stick with me as I use an example from a movie you probably know:
Let’s say you’re writing Get Him to the Greek, Nick Stoller’s low-concept comedy about a young music executive who must escort a fading rock star to a concert in order to save his job.
Yes, I know. Nick Stoller already wrote that movie. But let’s imagine he didn’t and you’re the writer.
The second act is heavily loaded with conflict—the conflict between Aaron (the young, idealistic executive) and Aldous (the middle-aged, cynical rock star). Aaron wants to keep his job, but Aldous couldn’t care less and merely wants to follow his tripping heart wherever it leads. And it leads away from the Greek Theatre. Aaron is pathetically loyal to his girlfriend, whom he lives with. He’s never strayed from her—unlike Aldous, whose promiscuity is legendary.
Since you’ve tied the two lead characters together at
the hip, you have Aldous’s entire personality to mine for obstacles. And you also have everybody around Aldous—his rippingly outrageous rocker pals. You’re basically going to have Aldous make Aaron’s job as hard as he can possibly make it. Whenever you need more obstacles, you turn to Aldous.
And every time Aaron thinks he understands Aldous and has made some kind of peace with him that will allow him to get him to the Greek, you complicate the story by having Aldous do more outrageous stuff that tightens the screw on Aaron. And when you run out of stuff to pull from Aldous, you pull from the characters around Aldous—like his dad. Just to make things worse for Aaron, have Aldous’s dad pick a bloody fight with Aaron’s boss, Sergio, who is just the kind of unyielding ass-kicker that never backs down from a fight.
I’m telling you how to adopt F.O.W. as more than just a strategy; adopt it as a mentality. Just keep making your protagonist’s world harder and harder to exist in and you’re on the right track—at least until you’re ready to finish your story. Then, and only then, can your protagonist finally start to get comfortable in a new world.
Only then. Not before.
And when you construct your second act, you’re going to list—in ascending order of explosiveness—each and every possible moment of conflict between Aaron and his goal. The biggest moments will become your set pieces, which we’ll discuss in chapter 7.
So there you are. You can now go and write Get Him to the Greek. Just change the title and character names and maybe throw in a few new plot details.
You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Hardly. I’m telling you how Hollywood works.
But to return to our more scholarly discussion of Fish Outta Water …
F.O.W. is a strategy that helps the comedy screenwriter accomplish the main goal of drama while creating farce—it helps determine exactly the nature of the protagonist’s character. As the protagonist struggles to surmount escalating obstacles, we see what the protagonist is made of.
In Get Him to the Greek, we see that Aaron is a sincere, earnest person who perseveres. That’s proven over the course of the story.
When a protagonist like Aaron journeys through a challenging environment and comes out with his integrity intact, we say to ourselves, “He’s a good man.”
And hopefully we say that after laughing our asses off.
The Idea Factory
I’ve told you about some basic strategies that will help you create strong stories that can make people guffaw with laughter for about ninety minutes—the average running time of the modern film comedy. If you do that, you’ll rise to the top of Hollywood, and, hopefully, you’ll thank me at the Oscars. Hey, one can hope, right?
But now I want you to imagine the comedy screenwriter you’re going to become. I want you to picture Detroit in the fifties—a thriving beehive of industry pushing out cars. Cars of all shapes and styles. Each model a little different, but all having the same basic features underneath the hood—an engine, a drive train, transmission, etc.
Yes, I’m making an analogy here because I want you to become an idea factory. You must develop a system for churning out uniquely funny ideas for screenplays. And once you pick one of those ideas and start writing it, you’ll need a uniquely funny idea for each of the seventy to ninety major scenes that will make up that comedy screenplay.
That means every day must be an industrious day. Like Japan in the eighties. Or China, well, now. Or think of the way they’re pushing out app after app in Silicon Valley. Like there’s no tomorrow. No time to wait. The ideas just flow.
So how do you do that? It’s a two-step process.
STEP 1: Become a keen observer of funny phenomena. Keep a journal, keep a notebook, record yourself on your iPhone whenever you get the feeling, whatever. Just start keeping track of every last funny thing you see, hear, or think every day. Most of it will be crapola. Some of it will later, upon review, turn out to be funny.
When the tattooed guy with a bone in his nose makes eyes at you in Starbucks, write it down. Make eyes back, if you like, or ignore him, but write it down.
When somebody’s overweight grandpa decides to do a cannonball at the local pool and splashes half the people there, don’t joke about it to your best friend sitting next to you, write it down. Scribble quickly before you forget. Then you can snicker about it to your friend. But first things first.
The most basic purpose of writing is to record stuff. Thousands of years ago, before there was electricity, before there was a Roman Empire, and even before there was screenwriting, people wrote stuff down simply for the purpose of keeping track … of stuff. Merchants dealing with many accounts needed a way to remember who owed them how many gold pieces. Kings needed to remember how many soldiers they’d killed or how many ships were in their navy. And now, after all those generations throughout history, you need to keep track of all the funny stuff you see on a daily basis. So buy a little notebook, OK? And keep a pen handy.
After all, you’re a comedy screenwriter, not just some person who snickers to your friends at the pool.
Write the funny stuff down. Write so much of it down that you have trouble keeping track of it all. Then spend hours indexing what you’ve got and alphabetizing it and … you get the idea.
Be your own research assistant. Catalogue your funny life and the funny lives of those around you. If you’re unsure if something’s funny, write it down and figure it out later. You call yourself a writer, right? Not a … not-writer.
Here are some example entries from one of my many notebooks:
Idea for a romantic comedy—a guy who has to learn to be less selfish. Possible title: Selfie!
Modern people should have family crests like people did in the middle ages …
Character idea—a female proctologist who falls in love with one of her patients, but she alienates him when she gives him an especially rigorous prostate exam.
See how lame this stuff is? Pathetic. Anybody can write this stuff. And by the way, none of these ten-cent ideas were the germs of something useful. I’m just showing you the kind of detritus I create on an everyday basis.
Yes, any moderately talented comedy screenwriter can discover a whole world of funny ideas by just paying attention to herself and the people around her. Again, you must see funny people everywhere …
But after you scribble those notes—or type them into your iPhone, as the case may be—keep working. And move on to …
STEP 2: Now that you have lists of funny stuff, go back over those notes and review them. This is another form of idea farming. You’re pulling the wheat from the chaff and scouring it for further ideas. I make lists that are like daily updates on my creative activity for the day or week, such as:
I now have three characters to use for a zombie/romantic comedy if I can get the concept down.
That Greek diner on sixth avenue—a good place for a set piece in which characters have a food fight, throwing everything, including the plates, burgers …
What if my mom woke up in a Game of Thrones world … ?
Now sit down with your daily updates and work up a list of screenplay ideas based on them. Most of those ideas will suck. A few may fly. One may be worth writing.
So you write …
Cut to six months later. Or three, if you’re incredibly fast and you don’t have a spouse or kids to bother you. If you have both, call it a year. But eventually you’ll have something and you’ll work it and re-work it.
Let’s say you just wrote yourself a great spec comedy screenplay. So great that everyone in town loves it. And you know which town I mean (if not, see chapter 2). Producers, executives, agents, and managers are all coughing up their over-priced sushi in spastic appreciation.
That doesn’t mean they’re going to buy your brilliant script. In fact, most great scripts never sell. Why?
There’s little need for brilliant scripts. Each major movie studio will make maybe fifteen feature films a year: a handful of comedies, a couple horror flicks, a few big comic
book and animated movies, etc.
So even if your, say, rom-com happens to be the best rom-com screenplay to grace their desks in many a year, it still isn’t likely to get bought or—even less likely—made.
So you’re just outta luck.
Thanks for playing, right?
Wrong. Yes, of course you want to sell every script you ever write for high seven figures, but the more immediate goal is to earn fans. And when people in the industry read your script and laugh out loud—you’ve made more of them.
Fans matter. In fact, they’re absolutely essential.
OK, so let’s say your script is utterly beloved but no one buys it. Now what do you do?
Meet your fans.
Any decent literary agent can use a hot, funny script to set you up with meetings all over town. And off you’ll go with a skip and a hop … down to the studios.
And what will you do when you get there?
You’ll listen. Producers and executives take those meetings, in part, to tell screenwriters what they need from them. If they’re looking for a new sci-fi rom-com, they’ll tell you. If they want the next Bradley Cooper vehicle, they’ll tell you. Whatever they want from you, they won’t be shy about letting you know.
And more often than not, you’ll hear the same general message from every producer and executive you meet. After all, Hollywood is a town of one mind. The industry is made up of people who spend every waking moment with each other. It’s a sewing circle, a cabal of like-minded puppies all sucking from the same teat. When a few of them decide there hasn’t been a really good family comedy since Meet the Parents, you should probably go back to your dingy apartment in Mar Vista and write a modern take on Meet the Parents.
Trust me. If they want it and you write the heck out of it, they’ll buy it.
The Two-Hander
Sounds almost pornographic, doesn’t it?