Performers Won't Do It For Fun

Here is an odd thing I have noticed about performers. I have had comics over to dinner. I have gone to a karaoke party with singers. I have been at a wrap party with the FAME dancers.

Performers won't do their thing for fun. The least fun dancers at the FAME wrap party were the FAME dancers. The people least likely to crack a joke at dinner are the comics. Actors and singers won't get onstage and karaoke.

I guess the jeopardy is higher for them. I wouldn't do a poetry slam, come to think of it. I also wouldn't enter one of those contests where you write and shoot something in three days. I wouldn't be sure I could do a decent job.

Be that as it may. Next time I go to karaoke, I'm taking a bunch of people from the Accounts Payable department. Those guys really know how to get down.

A Chat with Etan Cohen

I was kindly invited to Etan Cohen's "Master Class" at the JFL, presented by the CFC and the Greenberg Fund. Etan Cohen, of course, is the screenwriter of, among other things, TROPIC THUNDER (with Ben Stiller), MEN IN BLACK 3, and a whole slew of BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD episodes.

A few random takeaways from Etan's conversation with critic Richard Crouse:

- Etan sold his first script to Beavis & Butthead while he was at the Harvard Lampoon. So, if possible, go to Harvard and get on the Lampoon.

- The Lampoon's style, Etan says, is sort of "anti-humor." If someone's laughing, you've sold out. He says that putting Robert Downey, Jr.'s character in blackface in TROPIC THUNDER was sort of the "platonically perfectly offensive" concept that the Lampoon would have appreciated; it came out of the question, "What is the most deeply wrong thing someone could do to win an Oscar"?

- It's a lot of fun to write with the actual actors in mind. If you don't have actors already cast, consider writing for someone in particular anyway. [As I've noted elsewhere recently, this is dangerous if your lines don't read as distinctively as they would if the actor were reading them. Make sure you've really recreated the voice of Will Smith, etc.]

- When there are a lot of stakeholders (as there are with a big budget movie like MIB3), check in with all of them to make sure they're all on board with the movie you're writing. Otherwise you'll wind up having to do it all over again.

[On smaller budget movies, I think you have two choices, I think. Either write for the person who hired you, so they'll hire you again; or write for the director. On most movies, the director is going to keep developing the script until he likes it. If you want to be the last guy writing, and you do, then make the director happy.]

- On MIB3, he was working from 6 am to 4 am some days. He did not explain how this is possible without really good vitamins.

- They had a writing room on MIB3, 'cause it's much harder to write comedy solo. "It helps to have someone laughing."

- On MIB3, he watched a lot of Clint Eastwood movies as inspiration. On a movie like MIB3 or TROPIC THUNDER, the plot is a straight procedural. The comedy comes out of the main characters' reactions to the awkward situations. Everyone else is playing it straight.

- The hardest part of writing MIB3 was the middle. They had the ending and the beginning all along. They wound up taking a three month hiatus while the middle part was reworked -- re-engineered, in fact, from the ending.

Tragically, he did not have an opportunity to explain how he came to be a Yiddish major, and how that could have influenced his comedy stylings.

Chekhov Considered Himself a Comedy Writer

Apparently someone has remembered this important but often forgotten fact. This picture says it all. (That's Cate Blanchett in the red dress being dragged across the floor.)



In other news, Franz Kafka used to have his friends over and read his stuff to them. They'd get drunk and laugh.

Is the Future YouTube?

I've been going to the Just for Laughs Comedy Conference the past few days. I dropped in on an interesting little panel discussion called "Are YouTube Celebs The Future of Comedy?" They had EpicLLOYD of "Epic Rap Battles of History," which my stepson adores; Grace Helbig of Daily Grace; Shane Dawson, and the head of programming for YouTube, Ben Relles.

It immediately struck me how young some of these cats are. Shane Dawson is 24; he got picked up as a YouTube partner at 18. Grace Helbig is 27. If I wrote my notes down correctly, he had been making videos for a while before that. Wikipedia says "Dawson's career began when he and several friends would turn in videos instead of homework in high school. Dawson's first videos on YouTube were old assignments that he turned in during high school."

The point here is that there is a whole generation of kids coming up for whom video making is as natural as writing. Steven Spielberg made a lot of 8mm movies when he was a kid, but that was pretty rare. 8mm was a horrible pain in the ass to edit (the film is literally 8mm wide), and building a soundtrack is -- well, I don't even know how you would do that. These days everyone is making videos. My stepson had a couple of high school assignments where he was required to make a video. Because obviously everyone has a video camera and an editing program on their computer.

The old barriers to entry for video have dropped off the map. Anyone can shoot video on your phone, edit on your computer and throw it up on YouTube.

The new barrier to entry is just that YouTubers apparently upload as much content every 72 hours as has appeared on all the networks, ever. But it's hard to imagine a more merit-based world. Every video has a chance to go viral.

One takeaway I have is that if you are just starting out, you must get out there with your camera and shoot a bunch of videos. I think more and more, people are going to get hired based on what they shot rather than what they wrote. I am not a fan of the auteur theory. (I don't actually know any professional writers who are.) I think the collaboration between producer, director and writer can take a creation far beyond what any one of them could create. But this is what is happening now.

I was struck by a conversation I had last night with a sound designer friend of mine. We were talking about the Quebec student protests, and their failure to communicate what they want. There are a few videos of marches, and lots of videos of cops misbehaving. But where is the equivalent of the hilarious Culture in Peril spot from the last election. Where are the clever, viral spots that will convince people who don't already agree with them that education should be free?

I struggle a bit with this model. I'm used to a bigger production. We made my own viral teen vampire sex comedy, YOU ARE SO UNDEAD, with a $20,000 budget and a RED camera; my amazing producers at Cirrus, Anton Cozzolino and Melissa Pietracupa, probably brought in another $80,000 in favors. We had three days of color correct for the effect where Mary Margaret drains Jo of blood and she turns pale. I probably wouldn't consider shooting something without union actors unless I was drunk.

But that means I'm making one short a year, and fighting to put together a feature, and these guys are making one a week.

I don't know if YouTube celebs are the future of comedy. They are certainly a growing part of the present of comedy. They will tend to squeeze out some of the long-form higher-budget comedies, but probably only the really crappy ones. There will always, I think, be room for another BRIDESMAIDS. There are just too many stories that demand extras and things that go "boom."

But there's a lot of room for viral videos. Maybe some of them will be yours!

UPDATE: Incidentally, YouTube has a lot of information on how to make a good video.

Game Design Template

Q. My friend and I were kicking around ideas for a video game. Is this Baldwin Game Design Template still valid?

From what I understand, it is all but impossible to sell a game concept to a game company with a paper document these days. You need a playable demo. That's a much bigger barrier to entry, but game companies need to see your game idea actually functioning to know if it's worth pursuing or not.

Resolution

I saw RESOLUTION at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal. It's an effective little slow-build movie that does nearly everything right for a low budget suspense horror movie.

The core of the movie is a relationship: an everyman, Michael, tries to get his meth-head best friend from grade school, Chris, straightened out by handcuffing him to the wall of his cabin in the woods. The biggest part of the movie is just the two of them talking: Michael trying to talk his friend into coming out of his addiction, Chris trying to convince Michael to let him "die on my own terms."

It's no accident the two are so good together. Writer-director Justin Benson wrote the parts for them. Then he and his co-director, Aaron Moorhead, rehearsed them for three solid months.

The result, as Stanislavski could tell you, of months of rehearsals, is a performance that feels like no one's acting, they're just real people going through stuff.

Of course it wouldn't be a cabin in the woods if they weren't going to scare you. Some of the scares are human. But then Michael starts finding all sorts of recordings in various media suggesting terrible things that may have happened in the environs.

Complications ensue.

I spent much of the movie really tense and worried, waiting for the monster to jump out and scare me. The co-directors neatly make their world intently creepy without hammering you with music or obvious creepshow moments; I don't think there even.was a score. (No one seems to be credited with one.) There was always just enough to give me a sense of dread.

For my taste, the ending was a bit post-modern and clever; less emotionally satisfying than I would have preferred. It felt a bit shaggy-dog at the end. But the two guys who made this movie with their savings have come out with a very impressive debut.

Not a Good Time to be a Screenwriter: WGA

According to a recent WGA survey:

– One-in-four screenwriters reported leaving prepared materials behind as part of their pitch

– Three-quarters were asked to revise those pitch materials for the major studios, while requests at the smaller studios happened half of the time

– Producers were more likely to ask for revisions, but three-in-ten reported major studio representatives requested revisions to pitch materials

– A majority were asked by the major studios to work before being paid for commencement

– Most screenwriters received only 1 or 2 guaranteed steps in their deals from the studios

– Optional steps were common in these deals

– Nearly two-thirds say the major studios and over half say the smaller studios never exercised any optional steps in their deals

– Almost half were asked to do uncompensated rewrites at a major studio, with four-in-ten saying the studio representative made the request

– Smaller studios were somewhat less likely to ask for uncompensated rewrites, but a greater share of the requests came from studio representatives

– A majority of those working at major studios did the uncompensated rewrites because they felt it necessary to keep their current job or get hired in the future

– Nearly a quarter believe they were paid late by the major studios in 2011

I think most screenwriters will continue to work on a draft till they feel they've brought it to a certain point. Where it gets sticky is when your contract calls for, say, two drafts, and the client wants to call your second draft a "first draft revised." In that situation, you might never get paid for the second draft. I usually insist on getting paid for all my drafts before I start with the free polishes.

Joss Whedon: Ten Rules

7. TRACK THE AUDIENCE'S MOOD

You have one goal : to connect with your audience. Therefore, you must track what your audience is feeling at all times. One of the biggest problems I face when watching other people’s movies is I’ll say, ‘This part confuses me’, or whatever, and they’ll say, ‘What I’m intending to say is this’, and they’ll go on about their intentions. None of this has anything to do with my experience as an audience member. Think in terms of what audiences think. They go to the theatre, and they either notice that their butts are numb, or they don’t. If you’re doing your job right, they don’t. People think of studio test screenings as terrible, and that’s because a lot of studios are pretty stupid about it. They panic and re-shoot, or they go, ‘Gee, Brazil can’t have an unhappy ending,’ and that’s the horror story. But it can make a lot of sense.

I would add that tracking the audience can be liberating. You don't have to resolve every logic problem. Only the ones the audience cares about.

Also, if you know what the audience is thinking, you can mess with them.

The other nine are chez Danny Stack, from a treeware article by Catherine Bray.