Laughing Out Loud Read online

  The ending? A completely festive embrace: all the "actors" come together on a boat and begin singing while floating down the Danube River. The laughter in Social Games cuts in a variety of directions, as we laugh in part at these folk making fools of themselves on camera, but most of the laughter is sympathetic rather than ironic, for each comes through as a person as well.

  Week 3: Constructing a Comedy-Centered Treatment

  You have your concept. Now you must spin it into a treatment that does justice to the humor, characters and story you wish to write. Nothing about screenwriting is harder than writing a treatment that jumps off the page and grabs our attention. Why? Because the treatment is the whole story squeezed into a few pages. And that is doubly frustrating, because to write you must assume both that you know your story and that you have the magical ability to condense said masterpiece into humorous prose. That's asking a lot. Especially when we are speaking about comedy; you are, in effect, trying to suggest why what you are really going to write will be humorous, or side-splitting, or scandalous, or warmly amusing.

  You may wish to plunge in and begin writing without a treatment. But my years of experience have taught me that the effort expended on the initial treatment is worth it for at least three reasons. First, you do confront the whole projectcharacters, story, tone, genre and theme-and work out at least your initial belief in where and why the comedy will become what you wish it to be. Next, the treatment gives you practice in synopsizing your tale, which you are going to have to do many times anyway, so you might as well begin your "act" at the beginning. Finally, writing the treatment allows you the freedom to think about what you wish to change in it as you go along, for the treatment is not written in marble, just ink that can be altered. Particularly because comedy is a special form of storytelling, I think such "pre-writing" of the script is necessary.

  I emphasize spending some time on a treatment for yet another reason: it might be what gets you a contract, a grant or some development money. The last three scripts I've been paid to write have been on the basis of short treatments. Local, state and national media funding organizations rely as much on treatments as commercial film and television outfits, so do polish your treatment skills. Treatments can be registered with the Writers Guild (see appendix 2) or simply mailed to yourself and left unopened as a form of "self-registration" to prove it is your own if the need ever arises.

  Study the treatment below for structure and format. There is no set formula, but I recommend the concept paragraph as an overview of genre, main character, theme and story. Then tell the story, with characters' names set in capital letters the first time, just as in a script. Events are told in the present tense, and you write what we see and hear, just as in a script. There is also a treatment for an anarchistic comedy in the Week 9 section below.

  A Romantic Comedy Treatment

  The following is a first-draft treatment of a romantic comedy written by Laura Coroianu, a Romanian student at the International Academy of Broadcasting, Montreux, Switzerland. Laura had never written a feature script before, and of course she was writing in a foreign language-English-for this assignment. At first she told me she had "no ideas" and then, when pressed, came up with an extremely complicated film about the fall of communism in Romania that no one outside of the country would be able to fully appreciate. Then a smile and this sixpage treatment emerged. Note the absolute simplicity of her set-up, a basically two-character idea that is full of comic and romantic potential. As this goes to press, she has completed a revised script under contract with a European company that wishes to shoot this as a television feature. I have made no changes in her English as it was originally written.

  Sub Sub-Let

  CONCEPT: This is a romantic comedy about a Romanian orthodox girl studying in Switzerland on a scholarship who finds herself alone in a sub-let Geneva apartment of a schoolmate for the Christmas holidays. She sub sub-lets one of the rooms to a young fundamentalist Turkish guy for only one week, and then she cannot get him out of there anymore, and while fighting each other, they fall in love.

  STORY:

  (ACT 1)

  MARIA is a 24-year-old Romanian girl who has graduated from a Business school in Bucharest and has got the chance of a lifetime: to do an MBA in hotel management at one of the most famous hotel schools in Switzerland, the Hotel Institute of Montreux. Maria is good-looking though not beautiful, the type of "pal" accepted in the all-male entourage, she has a strong sense of humor and takes religion with a grain of salt: the "God is out there somewhere, let's not disturb him" attitude. But she is rather short for money and cannot afford to go home during the Christmas holidays. A solution comes her way when her schoolmate ERNESTINE offers her Geneva apartment in exchange for substantial help with writing her graduation thesis.

  MEHMET is a 28-year-old once-was rock 'n' roll kid, now a young adult fallen into a second-puberty religious crisis. His mentor, the Imam, has converted him to the rightful fundamentalist path of religion in which he has plunged headlong. He is an extremely attractive man, that lethal Oriental combination of sea-green eyes and chocolate skin. He wears now only the traditional Islamic clothes culminating with the turban on top of his head. He comes to Switzerland to visit his brother HASSAN, a once brilliant Istanbul physician, now a shop-assistant in a Geneva pharmacy, who has married MARIE-LOUISE, a typical dry blonde Swiss woman of a rather frigid disposition who works in a jewelry shop.

  Maria arrives in Geneva to this lavish three room flat which overwhelms her but soon she finds out that the glamour of the place and of the city cannot warm her heart; the only person she is able to befriend is AZIZ, the concierge, an understanding middle-aged man, who happens to be Hassan's best pal. Only Aziz can understand how lonely poor Maria can feel, and how upset she is that she cannot afford the wonderful Tissot watch that lies in that shop window down the road.

  In the meantime Mehmet is quite fed up with Swiss society and his sister-inlaw's embodiment of it, and he spills out his guts over dinner to the astonishment of his brother, Aziz, and several other guests. Darling Marie-Louise asks him to leave at once, and proud Mehmet will not waste a moment. But where to go with not enough money in his pocket and a return ticket to Istanbul on a fixed date? Aziz is the God sent salvation: he will set Mehmet up in Maria's flat for peanuts 300 francs. Maria will get to buy her watch and have some good company ... perfect arrangement!

  (ACT 2)

  First shock: introductions!

  A Turk with a turban and a fierce fundamentalist gaze is not Maria's idea of a perfect tenant. She sets the house rules and they go to bed in their separate rooms.

  Cut to her dream in Medieval Romania. This is only one of the many visions they start having of each other, set in Medieval times, Maria seeing him as the Muslim predator, and Mehmet picturing her as beauty in his harem. This is Maria's first vision: a long line of girls in folk costumes go down to the river to fetch water in their buckets. All of a sudden a gang of ruthless Ottoman soldiers headed by Mehmet himself storms the group of helpless girls. Maria and two others are kidnapped on horseback and taken to this dungeon at the top of a tower. Looking out of the window, she realizes in dismay that beneath her lies a Turkish city with its minarets and mosques, and the shrill voice of an Imam is filling the air with the morning prayer.

  She wakes up covered in sweat just to realize that the awful noise is still going on at 5:oo am in real life. Mehmet, dutifully facing Mecca on his little carpet, is voicing the first out of his five daily prayers. And this is only the beginning. They both get on each other's nerves with their different customs, traditions and mentalities: he hates her woman's lib behavior and the pork fillets in the fridge, the pork sausages and tzuika (ethnic dish) DHL-ed by her concerned parents; she despises his zealot and the wax dripping from the numberless candles in his "altar-room" right on her friend's furniture. And she freaks out at his deafening prayers that make old ms. SCHROEDER, their neighbor, poke her nose into their affairs and complain to Aziz
, who is over his head in trying to keep the situation cool and he ends up in the hospital with a stroke one day before Mehmet's "contract" expires: i.e., on Christmas Eve.

  Maria wants him out of the house even before, but he refuses to go. Christmas day comes and goes in a tense and depressed atmosphere, with Maria having a long walk around a city of happy strangers. In the evening she lies on the couch to watch Laurel and Hardy in the living room, and starts laughing louder and louder and is joined eventually by a reluctant Mehmet who is engulfed in the cheerful atmosphere and becomes his own old self for a short while.

  Romance is in the air.

  The next morning it's time to leave, but without Aziz to help, he has nowhere else to go. So he refuses to split, and there is no way she can legally evict him. So it's war between them and any dirty tricks are allowed. She fills the flat with burnt sausage smell, sticks a huge Jesus-on-the-Cross poster on his door with the words, THE REAL THING. She plays blaring rock 'n' roll alternating with Gregorian monks' songs, etc.

  He retaliates in drawing moustaches and a turban on the Christ poster, and cutting to shreds her fancy underwear. The roaring conflict summons nosy Ms. Schroeder's attention and she is pleased to report the situation to the local police. Maria has a rough time hushing up the scandal while Mehmet plays hide-and-seek in the apartment.

  No sooner have the police departed than once again the bell rings. Total chaos: relatives of the owners appear on the scene to spend one night at the flat: mama, papa and scheming little junior: all three of solid Swiss German extraction.

  Maria and Mehmet are thus forced to spend the night together in her room which turns out to be impossible due to the mounting sexual tension. So Mehmet ends up sleeping in the bathtub where he is discovered by Junior. Confusion, explanations. Mehmet has to pretend he is the concierge and is blackmailed by Ms. Schroeder into walking her three Yorkshire terriers every morning, a disgusting occupation that draws him in front of Marie-Louise's shop. She follows him back and finds out where he lives.

  Remorseful Hassan comes to his brother's rescue and the war is over. Maria is left alone and sad in a messed-up apartment, just in time to clean it up before the owners arrive the next day. She also finds the Koran in "his room."

  Mehmet leaves for Istanbul in a dreamy mood. He has other visions of Maria. Cut to Maria meeting Ernestine at the railway station, coming back to Montreux.

  (ACT 3)

  Cut to Istanbul. Mehmet is in his old rock 'n' roll clothes, getting out of his house and heading for the nearest club. A silhouette is approaching him from behind: it's the Imam full of reproaches for his falling from faith.

  In the club, Mehmet drinks heavily while watching the strip show. Suddenly he notices a woman in traditional Muslim clothes with a veil on her face sitting at the other end of the bar, an impossible sight, of course, in such a place. She comes round and offers him an open Koran with an underlined passage against drinking, prostitution, etc. He is in utmost confusion while she takes her veil off and we discover a smiling Maria who has not bought her Tissot watch, but got a bargain holiday deal on a ticket to Istanbul.

  They kiss passionately and leave the bar as Mehmet puts the veil back on her face.

  THE END

  ASSIGNMENT:

  Write a comedy-centered treatment of five to eight pages, double-spaced. Be sure to have a title, a concept statement and the story, written not too dryly, but sparkling with the kind of tone and flavor you hope to capture in your script. Yes, you must have a title. Work in a line or two of dialogue, so we can get your style, concept, approach.

  Week 4: Fade in Laughing

  Start writing. But how to begin? Beginnings need to accomplish so much in comedy, especially in clueing us into what flavor of comedy we should be preparing ourselves to enjoy. I've written in my previous book on approaches to opening scenes, but I'd like to rephrase the possibilities with a different focus for comedy. Ask yourself at least three questions: (1) Do I want a quiet or a noisy opening? (2) Do I wish to begin immediately with my main protagonist(s) or delay an entrance while a comic environment is established? (3) Am I trying for a laugh right from the beginning, or am I easing into my story?

  Consider some of the openings we have covered in earlier chapters:

  i. Quiet opening. Big Night begins and ends very quietly. No laughs, no noise. In between are both, as well as anger, joy and that delicious food.

  2. Noisy opening. Sullivan's Travels jumps in with the loud action of the two fellows killing each other atop a speeding train. We quickly realize that we are watching the ending of a serious film that the comic filmmaker Sullivan wishes to complete. Much of the rest of the film will be quiet, even silent. But Preston Sturges wanted to grab us with this action-packed beginning.

  3. Comic character up front. Clueless hits us immediately with Cher, talking to us, as she will, nonstop, throughout the film. She is the narrator, the main character, the endless fountain of humor as we observe and listen to her efforts to control the lives of everyone around her.

  4. Delayed entrance of comic protagonist. The White Balloon has a noisy and crowded opening on a New Year's Eve street in Teheran, but it is several minutes before we actually see the young girl with the blue balloon who is to be our comic protagonist. Why the delay? We are asked to begin to experience the whole city-that is, the girl's environment-before we meet her, for this is a comic tale of her journey into the city.

  5. A laughter-oriented opening. We are laughing during the opening minute of Kolya as Louka, our fifty-something cellist, flirts with the female singer during their performance at a funeral. That opening scene immediately establishes character, as well as a special "Czech touch," mixing laughter and an awareness of death.

  6. Delayed-laughter opening. Fargo has a lot of laughter in it, but the opening is solemn, as the richly orchestrated theme music plays over a bleak winter snowscape in Fargo, North Dakota. The Coen brothers clearly wanted to frame the dark humor of their script with the humorless winter landscape within which the tale unfolds.

  A final example. Wayne Wang's Smoke was written by novelist Paul Auster and is very much a film about friendship, New York City, storytelling and, yes, smoking. It is an ensemble anarchistic comedy but also a buddy film, both focused on Auggie (Harvey Keitel), the owner of a Brooklyn smoke shop, and Paul (William Hurt), a writer recovering from the death of his wife. The opening establishes all of these themes and story elements, as all of the regulars meet and talk in Auggie's tobacco shop. The whole theme of the film is laid out clearly once Paul arrives to buy some supplies and tells the following story:

  PAUL: That's the man. Well, Raleigh was the person who introduced tobacco in England, and since he was a favorite of the Queen'sQueen Bess, he used to call her-smoking caught on as a fashion at court. I'm sure Old Bess must have shared a stogie or two with Sir Walter. Once he made a bet with her that he could measure the weight of smoke.

  DENNIS: You mean, weigh smoke?

  PAUL: Exactly. Weigh smoke.

  TOMMY: You can't do that. It's like weighing air.

  PAUL: I admit it's strange. Almost like weighing someone's soul. But Sir Walter was a clever guy. First, he took an unsmoked cigar and put it on a balance and weighed it. Then he lit up and smoked the cigar, carefully tapping the ashes into the balance pan. When he was finished, he put the butt into the pan along with the ashes and weighed what was there. Then he subtracted that number from the original weight of the unsmoked cigar. The difference was the weight of the smoke.

  ToMMY: Not bad. That's the kind of guy we need to take over the Mets.

  See how perfect this opening is for what Auster wishes to do. We meet a group of storytellers, but within that group, the only one who is a novelist has told an especially good tale, which happens to be true and which also relates directly to what binds them all together: tobacco and "smoke." The story itself draws laughs from us and amazement from those in the shop, and the scene is capped with a joke, as Tommy ties this tale int
o the previous conversation about baseball. For the next hour and a half we will deal with "smoke," that substance, like their souls, that is everything and nothing.

  Your turn.

  ASSIGNMENT:

  Write your first ten pages and make a date with your designated writing partner/friend to go over them.

  Week 5: Focus on Scene and Sequence Construction

  How to construct a comic scene?

  My whole study has led up to such questions. The answer depends on the kind of comedy you are writing and the part of the script you are currently tackling. In putting together any scene-for drama, action thriller or comedy-there is the need for a level of tension between protagonists, or between our comic figure and his or her environment, or between the scene and what has come before and will follow.

  But there is a basic need for that tension to be exaggerated in comedy, and if there are two or more characters in the scene, there is a need for one at least to be the straight man or woman to the other's antics. Also, keep in mind how much of comedy depends on reversal of expectation. And think what "cap" you can put to the scene to top the humor you have already honestly won.

  Consider three examples.

  A dialogue-centered scene: In Four Weddings and a Funeral, Hugh Grant asks Andie MacDowell, in a rare quiet moment before all the events surrounding her actual wedding begin, how many lovers she has had. Our expectation is that she will list a handful and then he will hint at several dozen. But the scene completely reverses this stereotype as she begins to list her lovers, one by one and name by name, as Grant becomes the straight man, reacting with increasing discomfort as the list passes thirty and continues. There are laughs as she goes on and on, as we watch Grant's reactions, and even more as the scene is capped by Grant's embarrassed response when she asks about his lovers.