Bring the Funny

by Greg DePaul

  The Comedy-Industrial Complex

  As I write this, the movie industry is drying up, feature screenwriters are scrambling to break into TV, and Hollywood is perusing the internet—not a pile of spec scripts—for the next great comedy writers. Or so it is said.

  But there’s one thing to remember—this has happened before. In the fifties, when TV swept the world, plenty of folks thought movies were dead. And it looked that way until Hollywood came up with something TV couldn’t provide—lavish musicals. When VCRs came out in the eighties and cable broke the broadcast TV monopoly in the nineties, again, the film industry seemed inches from death.

  But comedy screenwriters like us have strong reasons to be hopeful. The first is that comedy tends to be cheaper to make than most genres. So studios keep making them.

  And then there’s the animation revolution. In the beginning, it was all Lion King and Finding Nemo, which didn’t threaten live action’s hold on comedy. But more and more animated movies are now straight-up comedies—not just animal movies with the occasional laugh line—but comedies. Ice Age, Toy Story, Shrek, Madagascar, Monsters, Inc., Despicable Me, Chicken Run: all comedies.

  More good news: the basic rules of comedy screenwriting that you find in this book doubly apply to animated movies, which are usually created with painstaking care. And for writers, here’s an added benefit; in animated movies, we don’t have to worry about actors screwing up our lines or—worse—improvising. The nature of animation means that what’s on the page is what’s on the screen. They can’t re-animate a whole scene because an actor had a funny idea, so actors and directors take what’s in the script seriously.

  Of course, few animated movies are made from original spec scripts. Instead, writers who have earned “fans” with their original spec scripts are often invited to come in and pitch their “take” on an existing property. That’s how you get to be the writer of one of those animated comedies.

  So what types of comedy spec scripts are getting bought? As of this writing, it seems high-concept stories helmed by a single actor are fading out. What’s fading in are two-handers, female-centered stories, and cop stories.

  Oh, and romantic comedy never dies. It’s never a foolish decision to write a rom-com.

  Now for the bad news—there are a handful of producers (Judd Apatow being the king) who dominate live-action comedy. Getting into their orbit is painfully difficult, and getting a green light for a script without being in their orbit is nearly as difficult. But if you love the craft of comedy screenwriting, you won’t let that stop you. After all, you could be the next king.

  In any event, if your goal is to write comedy for the big screen, there are still screens for which you can write.

  However, as a practical matter, you should also write for every other kind of medium under the sun: TV scripts, sketch comedy, web series, etc.

  Haven’t ever written something funny on a cocktail napkin? Start. But keep your basic voice and style the same. If you write buddy comedy feature screenplays, try a buddy comedy spec pilot. Stick with your strong suit, genre-wise. Remember that the basic rules and strategies of comedy writing apply to all of its forms.

  The career path of a screenwriter twenty years ago—in which young aspirants went to film school before settling into years of spec-writing in Los Angeles coffee shops until hopefully selling a screenplay—is now only one of the possible paths to success. There are people making movies on their phones, distributing them via websites and social media, and basically operating as one-person mini-studios.

  But most of them—I’m talking ninety-nine percent—aren’t making a profit from it. To do that, you still need to break into Hollywood.

  Pitching

  A few years ago I was invited to speak to aspiring screenwriters at the Austin Film Festival. After a night of counseling young scribes, I decided to grab a beer before hitting the pillow. I meandered around State Street, the center of Austin nightlife, finally drifting into a cozy bar. I was hoping to avoid the hubbub and movie talk that dominated the handful of city blocks around the festival’s central location. I failed.

  The bar, which was packed, had a stage. Nearby, a long line of people waited … but for what? Was this karaoke night?

  Sadly, it was not.

  Onstage were two chairs. In one sat a man in his thirties. Across from him was a woman in her forties. As she stood up from her chair and reluctantly walked away, only to be replaced in the chair by a person waiting behind her, I remembered something I had read in the festival program and realized I was at a pitch competition.

  Yup, it was a contest. Aspiring screenwriters waited in line to sit across from a Hollywood studio executive and pitch him a movie—a movie the writers would presumably be hired to write if they impressed the executive. Or perhaps some of them had already written the movie they were pitching. In any event, I wanted no part of it and left without finishing my beer.

  Pitching is a rarely used skill that only a small minority of Hollywood screenwriters ever need to master. In fact, if you really need to learn how to do it, it’s probably because you’ve already had some success as a screenwriter.

  Why would that be?

  Because no sane producer or executive wants to buy a pitch from a writer who cannot execute what they pitch. In other words, there is no point to pitching it unless you can write it. And, generally, the people who sell pitches in Hollywood are screenwriters with long resumes.

  Would you hire a contractor to build you a house if the contractor had never built one before? I doubt it. No, you’d want to see a house the contractor had built beforehand to judge her or his ability to build one for you. In fact, you might very well go to see such a house before hiring the contractor so you could assess her or his work.

  That’s why pitchfests and pitching contests are such a waste of time.

  By the way, I have sold more than a handful of feature film pitches to major studios. I know of what I speak. And that’s why I don’t want you to waste a second of your precious time as a soon-to-be-successful comedy screenwriter learning how to pitch—because it will be time taken away from the more important goal of learning how to screenwrite.

  Here’s an analogy: Imagine you are a talented young basketball player. You are working to impress coaches and scouts and break into the NBA. You know that, if you make it, you’ll need to learn how to sell sneakers on TV because that’s how you’ll someday make a bundle of extra money. But here’s the thing—you can learn to sell sneakers when you become a star. For now, you need to spend every waking minute on your three-point shot, your ball-handling, etc.

  Now that I’ve warned you away from pitching, I’ll discuss it anyway. I do this because (A) I could be wrong, (B) you, the reader, will hopefully someday become an experienced screenwriter in a position to pitch something that could actually get bought, and (C) occasionally pitching actually helps writers write.

  But remember this rule as long as you screenwrite:

  If you have written a script, don’t pitch it.

  Pitching is, after all, a way for a veteran writer to get paid before writing. That’s the primary purpose of pitching—to avoid the risk of writing a spec that may not sell.

  When aspiring writers tell me they’ve written a script and then go about pitching it to me, I beg them to stop. They usually won’t, so I hit them with a brick. I do that to wake the poor bastards up.

  After all, if you have written a script, you want people to read it. The reason has to do with the purpose of writing a spec. Since almost no specs ever sell, the secondary—more commonly used—purpose of writing a spec is to show what a great writer you are.

  But you can’t do that if readers don’t read you. You can’t show them what a great writer you are by sitting them down and starting a sentence with the words, “We open on a … ”

  No.

  You don’t want them to listen to a two-minute version of your story. And you certainly don’t want them to listen to a twenty-minut
e version of it, which is what an attempt at a two-minute version usually becomes.

  If you want to break into comedy screenwriting, I strongly propose you do one thing over and over until you get there—write. Don’t talk. Write. If your writing is excellent and industry people enjoy what they read, then you can pitch.

  Now, for those who need to know, there are two types of pitches. You can pitch an original story, and you can pitch to write what are sometimes called “assignment” scripts.

  An assignment script is one based on some existing property that you do not own. When a studio or producer controls a property—say, a comic book or a video game—and needs a screenwriter to write the movie version, the studio executive or producer calls all his or her favorite screenwriters to come in and pitch how they would write that script. A call may be put in to the major talent agencies: Send your best writers to come take a crack at this book/play/article/video game, etc.

  And if you are one of those writers you will go and pitch your version of what a script based on that property would be like.

  They might hear pitches from three writers, and they might hear twenty. They will most likely ask the finalists to return many times, each time bringing changes made in response to their notes on the previous versions. They will not, however, pay any of these writers a dime for any of that work. Only one writer (or writing team) will win the pitch-off, and only that writer will get paid for the work.

  And sometimes no screenwriter wins. Sometimes the producers or executives are simply listening to pitches to determine if they want to make the movie at all. If they don’t hear something they like, they may just drop the whole project altogether. Wash their hands of it. Like it never happened.

  Sound like fun? My wife did the same thing to three or four contractors when we decided to renovate our kitchen. Each contractor came up with his own design and pitched it to us. Nobody got paid for that work. Naturally, we went with the guy who best responded to our list of gotta-haves. We had to have a certain type of cabinetry, a certain brand of fixture, a particular stain on the wood floor, etc.

  And the contractor’s job was to make it all work together. Somehow. That’s what screenwriters do when they write scripts based on existing properties—they season to taste. And the producer paying the tab is the taster. Fail to hand the producers a script they love and you will quickly be replaced by someone who will.

  There are two advantages to assignment jobs, as opposed to selling a spec script. One is that you don’t have to create your premise and characters out of whole cloth; those elements are usually given to you. The other is that you get paid to write, as opposed to being paid for having written.

  But know this—the process of meeting with producers and studio executives, then pitching and re-pitching their ideas and properties back to them, can easily drag on for months or years. Plenty of screenwriters toss entire eras of their lives away on these fruitless campaigns without ever seeing a dime of compensation. You are hereby warned.

  The same is sometimes done for re-writes as well. Experienced screenwriters may be invited to come pitch how they would re-write a script the studio owns but isn’t ready to shoot. Perhaps the writers are asked how they would “punch up” that script. Or perhaps they want a “page-one re-write.”

  Either way, some screenwriters are meeting with some people in power and telling them what they would do if they were to be paid to do it—and not before.

  These are a few of the many reasons why pitching is for experienced professionals and not those fighting to break into the business. So, unless you are in that first category, I advise you to avoid it at all costs.

  After all, your time is valuable; you are an up-and-coming comedy screenwriter.

  Agents

  Here again we have a subject matter that is far less important than most aspiring comedy screenwriters believe it to be. If you’ve written a hot spec that’s leaving readers begging for more, you should be thinking about an agent. If you’re still working toward that hot spec, keep writing and ignore the temptation to show work that is not ready.

  Don’t get me wrong—a great agent can make or break your comedy screenwriting career. Meet as many as you possibly can. Get to know them. Pretend to laugh at their jokes. Date them if you can stand it. But do not, under any circumstances, show them that script you’re toiling away on, the one you know damn well isn’t close to being finished.

  And stop being scared. Agents aren’t gods, and they’re not miracle workers. They sell stuff; that’s all. They’re middle-men (or middle-women; OK, that sounds odd). They charge ten percent of their clients’ gross income from writing because they bring something very valuable to the relationship—friends.

  Literary agents cultivate readers—those who can buy scripts and the people who work for them. Since they stand in that huge empty space between the writer and the buyer, it is their job to know both ends of that spectrum.

  It’s easy to get to know you. They can take you out to lunch and learn everything about you before the check comes. After all, if you’ve attracted the attention of a literary agent, it’s probably because you spend all your time alone in your apartment, writing your butt off, keeping your A in the C. By the time some agent finally calls you to lunch, you are more than excited to take that first shower in days, throw on your only collared shirt, and meet him or her at a restaurant.

  But before you actually head off to your first meeting with an agent, let me tell you what not to do. Do not concern yourself with the issue of whether or not the agent understands you. It doesn’t matter if the agent gets you. The agent only needs to be able to sell you. It’s more important that she or he gets the buyers.

  Do not concern yourself with the agent’s age and whether the agent strikes you as hip or cool. What’s cool is selling a script.

  So when you first sit down with a prospective agent, ask the agent what scripts she has sold. Go ahead. Ask. Then ask what potential buyers the agent has access to. Once the agent starts selling herself, focus on one thing—the agent’s ability to make you money. Just remember that no matter what the agent tells you, she is concerned only with that very same thing.

  Agents are constantly trying to determine what their readers want and doing their damnedest to give it to them. Hopefully, you have that on the page.

  Until you have it, agents are worthless to you.

  Trust me. If you have a great script, agents will come. Many of them. Like sharks to blood. You’ll be cleaning them off your windshield with a squeegee. All you need is that script.

  When my former screenwriting partner Hank Nelken and I were looking for representation, we managed to get a script to an agent in Beverly Hills. A few days after he received it, he called us. Instead of revealing the agent’s name, I’ll give him a fake name—Jon Klane. That phone conversation is reproduced, more or less, in the scene below.

  INT. MY CRAPPY LOS ANGELES APARTMENT—DAY

  Me and Hank writing when the phone rings and I pick up.

       KLANE’S ASSISTANT

  Hank, Greg, I have Jon Klane for you.

       ME & HANK

    (thrilled)

  Holy crap!

       JON (O.S.)

    (groans in pain)

  Unh … ah … Hi, guys. I just read your spec and I love it. I absolutely must represent you. Can you come to my office?

  Hank and I high-five and run outside, forgetting our shoes.

       JON (O.S.)

    (unaware we’re gone)

  Good. Thing is—I’m lying on my face right now getting acupuncture. So gimme a couple hours, OK?

  As we jump in Hank’s car and peel out …

  CUT TO:

  It was that simple. Klane loved the script and wanted to represent us. We loved it too and wanted to be represented by him. Instant marriage.

  That story represents an ideal situation for a screenwriter (or, in this case, screenwriting team). No
w I’m going to tell you about a more common situation, one that many screenwriters find themselves in and that should be better understood.

  It’s called hip-pocketing. Hip-pocketing is when an agent maintains a connection with a writer but does little to advance the writer’s career. You can tell when a writer is being hip-pocketed because the writer will say something like, “My agent told me that, as soon as some producer gets interested in me, I should tell that producer I’m represented by her and she’ll totally take the producer’s call.”

  Here’s the thing: an agent will always take a call from money. If a producer wants to buy your script, you can get any agent to take that call and negotiate on your behalf because that’s ten percent easily “earned.”

  To make things worse, many writers who are being hip-pocketed will come to believe that they must somehow remain loyal to that agent. They may stay up nights worrying that, by having coffee with another agent, they are somehow showing disloyalty to the agent who’s hip-pocketing them. But that’s silly—like being loyal to a hooker. Here’s the thing …

  Agents don’t earn their money by negotiating deals. Well, they do negotiate deals, but that’s easy stuff. Icing on the cake. Agents earn their money by promoting their clients. If you have an agent who isn’t melting the phones telling everyone in town what a fantastic writer you are, you don’t have an agent. And if you don’t have an agent, you don’t need to worry about being loyal to that person. You can do what you please. You can flirt with as many agents as you like.

  To be clear, you can always meet with as many agents as you like. After all, even if you have an agent, you still need to maintain social connections with other agents. Why?

  Because screenwriters can change agents as fast as they can change their pants. And very often, they should. After all, agents sell their contact lists. That’s what they offer—their lists of friends. Friends they can call. Once they have called them all and done their best to convince them you are a fantastic writer, capable of moving mountains with your laptop, their usefulness to you is largely exhausted.