7

The Pearls Themselves

For years I taught screenwriting in the conventional manner, which is to make students write a feature script by starting with idea creation: What’s your premise?

Once they came up with one-sentence version of their ideas, which often took weeks, they would expand it to a three-sentence story, representing the three acts. This was followed by an ever-growing outline that eventually showed the sixty or so scenes that would make up their screenplays. And then they wrote.

But I no longer teach that way. Here’s why:

First, that method emphasizes structure above all. Now don’t get me wrong—structure is critically important. But there’s no point in building a frame if you have nothing to put in it. And that’s just what students did—they labored for months on idea and story and plot and then failed to fill their big structural contraption with anything worth working on for months (or longer) afterward. So the method didn’t lead to a good script.

Second, I teach comedy screenwriting. And the comedy screenwriter has an obligation—actually, I would argue it’s an ethical obligation—to be funny.

Sixty unfunny scenes in a row is the definition of failure in the world of comedy screenwriting. If you write that script, you’ve just demanded that some poor reader spend about two hours sitting with your script not laughing. And for those of us who have written coverage for agents and producers, we know just how painful two hours of not laughing at a comedy screenplay can be. It’s about as much fun as swallowing hot sand—except there’s no trip to the beach. On the other hand, you can do it in the privacy of your own room—kinda like suicide.

Eventually I got sick of teaching people to write what they couldn’t fill with funny. Or story. Or characters. Or great moments. All of which is necessary to sell a script.

So I changed my approach.

Now I teach students how to diagram and understand movies, as well as the Basic Drama Rules, and then I give them assignments.

A typical early assignment is to write a scene that would take place in a screenplay that we have studied in class. Like The Heat. I’ll ask students to write a two-page scene using characters from The Heat. Perhaps Detective Mullins wants something badly from Agent Ashburn, who refuses to give it to her. Perhaps both characters have strong agendas and pursue them with reckless abandon. And maybe there’s a ticking clock …

The primary goal of that scene-writing assignment is to force students to craft powerful scenes that have conflict and some sort of beginning, middle, and end. To help them get there, I temporarily relieve them of their usual responsibility to create characters and concept. This allows them to focus on the moment-to-moment scene writing they need to do. As a result, students very often come to see a marked improvement in their screenwriting. Suddenly, they are creating explosive scenes full of conflict and What Happens Next?

And when you are making readers ask What Happens Next? you’re winning your battle with them—the battle to keep their attention.

What’s in a Scene?

If you come to comedy screenwriting after having written plays or sketch comedy, you may not need to ask this question. Playwrights and sketch writers with any experience rarely have to be told what’s in a scene.

But if you come to comedy screenwriting having previously written nothing, or having written prose, the nature of a scene can beguile you. I’ve already told you where to begin a scene—as late as humanly possible—but that doesn’t give much hint as to what to include in the scene itself.

Let’s just be clear about the kinds of scenes we’re talking about here. We’re not discussing scenes—often written into shooting scripts—that look like this:

I’m talking about meaningful scenes. Not establishing shots, montages, or scenes in which very little happens. OK, yes, I realize montages can be meaningful, but …

I’m talking about scenes in which the story is furthered. The muscle of your script. Here’s how to approach those scenes:

Think of each scene as an idea—a unique pearl—and remember never to repeat the same idea. This is what makes good comedy screenwriting so difficult to pull off—you need to generate fifty to seventy pearls to fill a feature script.

Memorable scenes from great comedy films usually show us the protagonist pursuing something she wants, grappling with some obstacle, and either achieving her goal or failing. And, unless we’re in the third act of the film, the protagonist is not likely to get what she wants by the end of the scene, so she must toil onward …

And usually a bigger question is raised at the end of the scene that makes us want to know What Happens Next? Just as in a novel where each chapter ends with a cliffhanger that compels us to read the next chapter.

Remember the scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin in which Andy is forced to confess that he is, in fact, a virgin? It comes about ten minutes into the film, and it launches us into the story of the movie.

The setting is a poker game. Andy is, for the first time, socializing with his co-workers. The subject of sex comes up, and each guy tells his raunchiest sex story. When Andy’s turn comes, he struggles to dream up a story, leading to the discovery by his friends that he is a virgin, which leads to the agreement by his friends to help Andy lose his virginity. It’s a funny scene that advances this idea: Andy’s virginity is a problem to be solved.

Every pearl in a comedy screenplay has three elements:

1. A setting.
2. A conflict (and sometimes more than one).
3. A question (What Happens Next?).

In the scene just mentioned, the setting is a late-night poker game. There are two conflicts. In one conflict, Andy battles his own inability to tell a dirty story. In the other, Andy battles his new friends, who force him to admit he is a virgin. The question raised at the end of the scene is, How will they get him laid?

Remember the scene in Neighbors where Mac and Kelly, the married couple, ask Teddy, the frat boy, to lower the volume on his massive house party so they can sleep next door? That scene has these three elements:

1. A setting: the frat house.
2. Two conflicts:
   1. Mac and Kelly versus Teddy.
   2. Mac and Kelly versus themselves. After all, they want to convince Teddy to calm his party down, but they don’t want to look like a boring, old married couple.

   * Note: Teddy wins Conflict A by exploiting Conflict B. He sees that Mac and Kelly desperately want to appear cool, so he invites them into the party, which they accept, and which raises …

3. A question. With Mac & Kelly partying at the frat house, who’s watching the baby? Will something bad happen?

The writers could have broken the scene into three smaller scenes in order to accomplish the same task. They could have shown Mac and Kelly in Scene A as they try to convince Teddy to turn his music down and he rejects them. Then they could have shown a Scene B in which Mac and Kelly argue about what to do at home minutes later. Then they could have sent Mac and Kelly back to Teddy’s frat house the next morning to try to convince him again—that would be Scene C. And Scene C could have ended as the scene, above, ended—with Teddy inviting Mac and Kelly into the party. There would still have been a setting, a pair of conflicts, and a resolution that raises a new question.

Instead, the writers chose to do as much as they could in the most efficient manner—which is why the scene they wrote works so well and keeps the story moving.

In either case, a story beat is presented to the reader—either through a sequence of scenes or through a single scene—and the reader is left wanting to know more. Which means the page gets turned.

When the film gets to the movie theatre or shows up on TV, that scene—if well-directed—should leave the viewer wanting the same thing.

Master Scenes

As discussed, the poker scene from The 40-Year-Old Virgin is a master scene. That’s a scene where main characters gather and discuss whatever is going on in the story. Master scenes are usually longer (say, four or more pages) and usually touch upon more than one plot. It’s like a big pearl with many smaller pearls inside it. A poker game, a family sitting around the dinner table, an office party, a rehearsal dinner … all good settings for a master scene.

If you’ve seen Little Miss Sunshine, there are a number of well-written master scenes in that movie to use as examples. One in particular takes place in the first act. All the characters in the family are eating dinner. Various sub-plots are touched upon. One character recently attempted suicide, and another is failing in his career as a motivational speaker. We also learn that Olive, the young girl, has entered a beauty contest to be held some distance away. The question at the end of the scene—the take-away question—is, Can we get her there?

The setting of a master scene is usually a forum—a place of discourse or contest where the dramatic goals of the characters are discussed or pursued and then either frustrated or satisfied (though, more commonly, frustrated), and finally a question is raised. That question leads us to the next scene.

Writing the master scene is like writing a scene from a play—the action is primarily undertaken with words. Sit characters down and plant the camera on a tripod: we’re in for some talk. And while your screenplay may only have a few master scenes, they are often crucially important to the story.

So you’d better get good at …

Dialogue

If you have taken a class in feature screenwriting, you have probably been told that a movie is “a story told in pictures.”

That’s wrong. A silent movie is a story told in pictures.

You remember silent movies, don’t you? You might have seen one in a museum once or watched one in film school. But you’re not going to write one, are you?

You live in the twenty-first century, and, for you, a movie is actually a story told in pictures and sound.

Sound comprises three elements in a movie: music, sound effects (also known as Foley), and dialogue. We won’t concern ourselves with movie music and sound effects. Leave that to the director and her crew.

We screenwriters focus on dialogue—a crucial element of every movie and especially important in comedy.

We’ve all heard dialogue that crackles and excites our ears. I’m going to lay out some strategies you can use to generate successful dialogue. And, for our purposes, successful means it pushes the story forward and makes the readers laugh their butts off.

Four Strategies for Successful Comedy Dialogue

Strategy 1: Write the way people actually talk, then shut them up fast.

Young writers are often taught to eavesdrop on conversations to learn how people really talk so they can replicate it on paper. That’s wise. The problem is when they start downloading all they’ve learned onto the page … and don’t stop.

When it comes to realistic dialogue, a pinch is all you need. If your character is from Alabama, throw in a few “y’alls” and you may well be done. If she’s from Queens, give her a few “youz guys.” But please don’t lengthen scenes with verbiage no matter how regionally or ethnically accurate it is. And as for all the ellipses … well … um … let’s just say … that, um … they tire the eyes.

Strategy 2: Become your own best actor.

When you are writing dialogue, speak it out loud. Play all roles. Just make sure you hear what it sounds like to speak the words you have written. This is a sure-fire way to detect and screen out overly written, unnecessarily elaborate language that has no place in your work. And then, of course, the next step is to sit down with actors and hear your entire script read aloud. Assuming you’re working with good actors, you’ll soon learn which words can be cut. In many cases, they’ll cut them for you by editing as they go.

Strategy 3: No repetition.

You only need to tell us that all-important revelation once. Then move on. For example, don’t do this:

And if that doesn’t annoy the bejeezus out of you, wait until you read this frustrating miasma:

_________

Just have characters come out with what they need to say.

Years ago, I worked as a reader for an agent. I would read dozens of scripts in a weekend, and I was looking for any reason to stop reading and give a script a bad write-up. In fact, every time I was about to read a new script, I would flip to the last page to see how long it was. If it was less than one hundred pages, I was already in a good mood because I knew the writer respected my time.

So respect everybody’s time and don’t tease scenes out that can easily be concluded with a line of dialogue or an action. Get to it and move on.

Strategy 4: The Doctrine of Inadvertency.

Funny characters are usually unaware of how funny they are. Serious for them is funny for us. And when they are in frantic motion, pursuing their goals, they are at their peak funniness—tripping over themselves to get what they need.

Ask this question about every character in every scene: Has this character tried hard enough to get what he or she wants? I’m not just talking about the protagonist but every character. Leave no stone unturned in your search for comedy.

I once worked with a director who, when editing, looked for every opportunity to add something funny. Actors were often brought into the editing room to record funny lines over scenes in which their backs were turned and they were walking away from the camera. Just another chance to throw in a joke, another quippy line.

Whenever someone onscreen would throw an object off-screen—a rock, baseball, a tin can—this director would insert the sound of a cat screaming as if it had been hit with what was tossed away. Hey, he figured, why not? It makes people laugh.

I’m not saying you should add random animal screams to a movie, especially if it’s a serious flick along the lines of, say, American Sniper or Schindler’s List. But I am telling you that my friend didn’t get to be a big-time comedy director without searching for every last opportunity to make the audience laugh.

You should do the same. Within reason, of course, and without ever selling your characters out for a joke.

Because every laugh matters.

The Standard

What do you do when you’ve tried your damnedest to make every scene unique and remarkable, and yet you still look at it and say, “That’s such a typical meet-cute,” or “Holy crap! I just wrote the usual hero-saves-the-girl scene.”

What if you write the scene where the depressed ex-boyfriend walks alone in the rain until he suddenly realizes he made a huge mistake for leaving the love of his life and then runs to find her?

In other words, what do you do when you realize you’ve written the standard scene?

You embrace it.

After all, the audience has its expectations. People don’t go to romantic comedies to see the lovers fall off a cliff and die. They know that when they’re watching a Fish Outta Water story the fish will eventually learn to thrive on land. They know the underdog must win. That’s why they watch movies—to get the same darn thing every time, over and over …

They just want it a little different each time; that’s all. They want to be pleasantly surprised but never shocked or left wondering why they came.

So when you realize you’ve written the standard scene for a particular type of story, rest assured. You’re not far off. You just need to sprinkle some magic screenwriter dust on it and season to taste. You don’t need to throw it all out and reinvent the wheel.

And don’t worry that studio readers and producers’ assistants will stop your script at the gates for not being truly unique. Far from it. Their job is to direct scripts to their bosses that give the people what they want—just in some novel, entertaining manner.

Don’t sweat the fact that screenwriting requires you to exploit long-established formulae by simply filling them with your unique content. Some of your scenes will always be reminiscent of past movies. When some brilliant screenwriter writes a script that harkens back to nothing whatsoever and shines with true originality on every page, you give me a call.

But, until then, I encourage you to steal when necessary and write without guilt.

The Four Most Important Scenes

Good screenwriting is decisive writing.

Sure, filmmaking is collaborative, but, unless you are writing with a partner, screenwriting generally is not. We all know the director can shoot your movie any way he or she wants and stars can say what they want when the cameras start recording, but, if you are writing a script to sell, you must write with authority.

In particular, there are three places in every comedy screenplay where no ambiguity can be tolerated: the ends of Acts 1, 2, and 3. If we’re talking about a one-hundred-page script, those points are around pages 25, 75, and 100.

Act breaks should be clearly defined. They should read as if a curtain is coming down hard—Whomp!—onto the stage, signaling to us that now things are going to change. Readers read for that. Audiences look for that. You need to write that.

Go look at the screenplays for some of the most successful recent comedies and look at the act breaks.

1. 1. This Is the End: Act 1 ends when a huge cataclysm rains fire and destruction down on the world, killing just about everybody except, of course, the lead characters. Act 2 ends when a fire kills one of the lead characters and forces the rest to leave the house they’ve been hiding in throughout the second act. Act 3 ends with the leading characters being sucked up to heaven.
2. 2. Parental Guidance: Act 1 ends when the parents drive away, leaving their children with the kids’ grandparents. Act 2 ends when the parents return to find their family in total disarray. Act 3 ends with the parents’ realization that their kids’ grandparents actually did the children good.
3. 3. We’re the Millers: Act 1 ends when the “family” goes to Mexico to smuggle drugs. Act 2 ends when David, the “father,” decides he’s had enough of the family and drives off on his own, abandoning them. Act 3 ends with the family back together and living as a real family in the witness protection program.

Ya see? Definite act breaks. Very definite.

Notice how often act breaks involve someone showing up somewhere or leaving for a long time. Entrances and exits are another way to bring that curtain down—Whomp!—onto the stage. Act breaks are almost never subtle.

Whether it’s because they’ve been taught to think this way or because of some inner psychological need, the audience wants to know when they’ve entered the next stage of the three-act structure. It’s up to you to tell them where in the story they stand.

Oh, and I almost forgot—there’s one more place where you must be very clear that a change in the story has occurred: the inciting incident. I didn’t include it in the previous discussion because it’s not an act break, but it’s important, so …

The inciting incident is when we find out what the movie is about. We almost always meet the protagonist in the first handful of pages. That’s where we see her in default mode; we see how she is living her life before the story starts. Then, suddenly, something happens that lets us know that this day of her life will not be like any previous day. It usually comes between pages 5 and 10. See Syd Field’s book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting if you are unclear on this.

And just as with act breaks, inciting incidents must be strong and clear. To use the same movies we just discussed:

1. 1. This Is the End: The inciting incident occurs when two of the lead characters leave a party to get some food and suddenly witness the beginning of the end of the world.
2. 2. Parental Guidance: The inciting incident occurs when the parents first bring up the idea of having the kids’ grandparents watch the kids.
3. 3. We’re the Millers: The inciting incident occurs when Mike, a powerful drug dealer, tells David to smuggle drugs.

In all of these cases, the inciting incident tells us what kind of movie we’re dealing with and what to expect. The train we want to ride has arrived.

Subtext

And now we embark upon a discussion that is better left between screenwriters.

Unlike the three-act structure and well-known writing strategies like Fish Outta Water, subtext is a subject that producers and executives usually have little interest in. Perhaps that’s because the movie industry’s biggest workhorses—the engines that pull the freight—are now comic book movies. And comic book movies are not known for their subtext.

But comedies still have subtext. Especially romantic comedies. That’s because subtext exists whenever characters must conceal their intentions. When characters’ intentions are hidden or masked, yet they take dramatic action to achieve their goals, subtext blossoms.

Subtext rewards the intelligent viewer who enjoys the challenge of discerning the true intentions of characters in a dramatic story.

Robert McKee gives a line-by-line understanding of subtext in his book Story, and it’s still worth reading today. The purpose of this book is to help you bring the funny—hence the title—so I won’t chart the subtext in an existing film. Instead, I will assume you’ve read McKee and give you a primer in how to create subtext in every scene of a comedy screenplay.

1. Load the Situation

There is a tendency to write scenes in which one character—usually the protagonist—has an agenda and the other characters do not. Don’t fall into the trap. Give everybody an agenda and let the sparks fly. You will have more subtext because you will have more characters trying to accomplish their goals in the presence of other characters from whom they wish to conceal those agendas. In other words—give everybody something to do.

2. Impose a Gag Order

Find strong reasons why your characters cannot just tell everyone their agendas—reasons beyond mere civility. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin we learn in the first ten pages that Andy is deeply embarrassed about being a virgin and doesn’t want anyone to know about it. Then, when he dates Trish—the woman we want him to be with—he must fight to keep his virginity a secret while trying to romance her. That’s subtext—what the actor plays underneath the script.

3. Try This Million-Dollar Subtext Exercise

I once read a script that sold for one million dollars. The script was a thriller and was made into a not-very-good movie, but that doesn’t matter. It was a fantastic script. The screenwriter wrote this on the first page:

Throughout the script, the writer put parentheses around thoughts his characters were thinking but did not express. It looked a little like this:

And so on throughout the entire script. It made for a lively read and infused the dialogue with deeper meanings. Good for him.

I’ve never used that trick on an actual script that I’ve tried to sell, but I have used it to help me write. When I’m writing new pages, I put the unspoken verbiage in parentheses in the first draft to see how it will read. Then, when I’m editing later drafts of the script, I cut those parentheticals out.

Training wheels. That’s what they are. But they work. So I offer them to you. If your results are half as good as mine, you’ll be quite pleased that you can now create some serious subtext.

Set Pieces

A set piece is a scene, or sequence of scenes, that occurs in one location and derives the most comedy bang for the buck from that location. Having a character walk through the kitchen of a busy restaurant, trip and fall for one laugh, and then leave the kitchen—that’s not a set piece. That’s a missed opportunity.

In a comedy, that character should trip all over the place, knocking people and cutlery everywhere. Plates should break, knives should be flying, and the whole place should be on fire when he walks out. That’s a set piece.

Traditionally, there was a production-necessary efficiency to set pieces. After all, if the script calls for a gladiatorial arena to be built and thousands of extras to be hired, it’s just not cost-effective to film a single short scene on that set that supports only a single joke. If you commit the resources to setting a big scene, you had better get your money’s worth (in laughs) out of it.

Steve Martin is the master of the set piece. Did you see The Pink Panther? Martin goes into a hotel bathroom to get a Viagra pill and somehow manages, bumbling around, to start a fire and a flood, which causes him to crash through the floor and land in the lobby below.

Most comedy screenplays have second acts that are buoyed by set pieces lasting three to six pages, thus taking up three to six minutes of screen time. I can give a zillion examples of great set pieces you’d remember from recent comedy movies, but here are eight:

• The police taser sequence from Meet the Fockers.
• The hair removal sequence from The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
• The drunken barroom sequence from The Heat.
• The Today Show sequence from Get Him to the Greek.
• The gang fight between rival news crews in Anchorman.
• The touch football game in Wedding Crashers.
• The tailgate party in Silver Linings Playbook.
• The kids’ baseball game in Parental Guidance.

Ideally, a good comedy screenplay should have at least six set pieces, but there are no established guidelines, no official ordinances governing their use. However, more is generally better. These are the scenes and sequences that producers are looking for when they read your script. This is the stuff that leads to funny trailer moments and big box-office openings. The audience anticipates the humor coming in jabs until it escalates into roundhouse punches and finally that big knockout blow that leaves us roaring with laughter.

I could go on and on, but you’ve got scripts to write. Funny scripts that use great set pieces to earn big laughs.

Pop Quiz!

1. 1. Every scene in your comedy screenplay should have:
   1. A) A setting, a conflict, and a question.
   2. B) A guy getting kicked in the privates by a little kid.
   3. C) A scene where the protagonist’s geek sidekick hacks into the bad guy’s computer system.
   4. D) Whoa. You’re still reading? I suggest you consider Answer A. And B, too. It never hurts to have a kid kick some guy in the balls.
2. 2. The important thing about a master scene is that:
   1. A) It be written masterfully.
   2. B) It read like a stage play incongruously jammed into your movie script. Sorta like a scene from Our Town stuck in the middle of Transformers.
   3. C) It would require subtext to write, and I don’t know what that is.
   4. D) There are times—even in a twenty-first-century comedy—when we need to see all the main characters sit down, break bread, and just talk. And you need to practice writing those scenes so they kick ass.
3. 3. A “story told in pictures” is:
   1. A) At best, an incomplete way to describe a movie.
   2. B) Something that annoys the crap outta me every time I hear it.
   3. C) Here’s the deal—comedies need dialogue. Great dialogue. And you’re not going to abandon your responsibility to write it by telling yourself that a movie is just a story told in pictures. So get to work. And I say that with love.
   4. D) All of the above.
4. 4. The way to write set pieces is to:
   1. A) Write a boring, old drama scene, then toss in a joke or two.
   2. B) Set up a great comic situation in one location, squeeze every drop of funny out of it, and leave it in a shambles when you’re done.
   3. C) Yup, it was B.
   4. D) B!