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  A film more dramatic than comic that becomes even more emotional because of the humor. John Hughes's best film may well be The Breakfast Club (1985), as Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall and Ally Sheedy spend a Saturday together in high school detention. The film turns increasingly dramatic as the story progresses, yet the comic moments keep even the soul confessions of this cross-section of teen culture from falling over into sentimentality.

  A film that mixes humor and pathos and can hit those moments that can make you simultaneously laugh and cry. Of the films discussed in earlier chapters, Kolya would be the best example. We can safely say that European films in general are much more successful at blending tears and laughter than Hollywood products. Look at the scene, for instance, of Kolya making a toy out of a shoe box and other scraps in Louka's apartment. As we close in to see what it is, we realize that he has constructed a coffin and is playing a cremation game. That is the world Kolya has known living with a musician who earns his living playing funerals.

  One filmmaking friend judges the emotional punch of a film by how many handkerchiefs you need to get through it. Thus it's up to you to decide if yours is a one-handkerchief comedy (Four Weddings and a Funeral), a two-handkerchief comedy (Kolya) or a three-handkerchief "weepie-comedy" (Life Is Beautiful) or comic drama (Il Postino/The Postman, 1994).

  ASSIGNMENT:

  I. Write pages 81-90.

  2. If indeed you are interested in exploring how to find the balance between tears and laughter, rent an Italian drama full of comic moments, Three Brothers (Francesco Rosi, i98o), and enjoy how surprising humor comes from three very different brothers returning to their small Italian home for their mother's funeral.

  Week 13: Comic Endings versus Endings of Comedies

  You are approaching the ending of your comedy, and you've obviously had a game plan about how you see your film wrapping up. But has that vision shifted as you come down to the wire?

  Take a moment and draw up at least three or four endings for your script before you get there, just to make sure you are happy with the one you are aiming for. It goes without saying that you want to bounce these ideas off your comic partner, for he or she may also have some thoughts on the matter. Comedy, remember, ends in some form of triumph and some degree of an embrace in which our comic protagonist is not alone. In short, comedy celebrates the birth of a new community of two or more individuals who have new possibilities because they are united in some way. Furthermore, we have said the anarchistic comedies of Aristophanes end in dance and song with the whole community taking part, while romantic comedy ends with the young couple united, if not by marriage then certainly by love and commitment. The fun of finding your ending is perhaps best summed up in saying you are in search of a fresh variation on either of these two classic closings.

  Consider five variations on romantic and anarchistic themes.

  1. A non-marriage romantic ending: Four Weddings and a Funeral ends with Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell in a loving embrace, having promised each other they will never marry each other. Part of the pleasure of this ironic take is that we have just watched a romance that has blossomed in spite of all the set rituals of conventional weddings.

  We can point to many romantic comedies that do not end in marriage, but simply with the couple together. Tootsie leaves us on a New York street with Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange walking into the crowd, arguing playfully about a dress of Dustin's that Jessica wishes to borrow.

  2. A flash-forward "dream" ending: Raising Arizona is framed by Nicolas Cage's voiceover, which makes this very much his story. It is fitting, therefore, that the ending is a dream of himself and Holly Hunter as aged grandparents, welcoming the tribe of their children and grandchildren in a festive familyholiday scene bathed in golden light. The dream is a wonderful blending of fantasy and festivity, a triumph of family for a couple who have had to steal a baby to get started.

  3. Ending on strong comic irony: The "I'm a man" ending of Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot is a prime example of an ironic ending. But my favorite of all time is still Buster Keaton's closing shot for Sherlock Jr. (1924). Remember, he is the small-town projectionist with two interests, getting the girl and becoming a detective. At film's end, the girl is in the projection booth with him while he looks out at the film he is projecting for clues as to how he should act. Following what he sees on the screen, he kisses her, puts a ring on her finger and then looks back at the screen to see the couple now have twins. The closing shot is Buster framed in the projection booth window scratching his head, as if to say either "Do I really want to go down this path?" or "Where do babies come from?" or ... both!

  4. Ensemble festive ending: The First Wives Club (1996, Hugh Wilson) teams up Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler and Diane Keaton as three school chums who meet years later, after they have each been dumped by husbands. Predictably, they put their lives back in order and begin to have some fun. And to cap it all off, by film's end we see them begin to dance together to a pop song down a New York street. The Full Monty goes out in an even more gloriously festive style, as our group of unemployed steelworkers finally get it together to take it all off before wives and girlfriends and other appreciative women.

  5. A quiet ending to a comedy rather than a comic ending: Big Night best exemplifies this brand of closing shot. The simple cooking and sharing of an omelet, each brother with an arm around the other's shoulder, is the way this generally noisy and festive comedy about food, love, brotherhood and dreams made and lost closes. Softly, tenderly, quietly, and fade out.

  ASSIGNMENT:

  1. Write pages 91-100, keeping your ending in mind!

  2. What are half a dozen films you really admire? Consider how they end. Do any of them suggest ways you might handle your own script?

  Week 14: Share the Laughter

  A hearty congratulations! You are finishing your script either this week or next. Either way, I offer my handshake and salute at this point. Put "The End" on the last page and think how best to celebrate. Any way except alone. Share the joy and the laughter, and explode even more mimes in appreciation of the work you have done. Yes, your partner deserves a treat too for having put up with you this long. Make the celebration special, and do not immediately rush to rewrite or try to call an agent!

  Toward a Comic Out-Loud Reading of Your Script

  Take it easy, come back to planet Earth, and think about anything else except screenwriting. Best to let several weeks at the least go by without touching it. Then organize a reading with friends you know can read well enough to give some life and color to your lines, and turn this event into a working party rather than a dry run-through. You may even wish to have someone videotape this event, if the recording doesn't get in the way of the fun of the evening.

  Should you read or just listen? That's entirely up to you. But if you are reading, you are listening as well, for this is your big chance to test your script and to hear what works and what doesn't, what gets laughs and what lies there on the page wishing to hide away.

  Then roll 'em, and enjoy hearing your own work performed. What happens if you skip this exercise? A lot. You may completely mistake what you are doing really well or very badly if you depend on just your reading or your partner's. The group response counts, and your reaction to the group matters a lot as well. You did so much to get to this point, so you deserve to have the best testing of your material possible.

  Follow the reading with a discussion-even an informal one-afterwards. As with a story circle (see chapter 2), such a wrap on the evening may well net a number of significant insights from those participating.

  Should you invite some other friends as well? Up to you, once again. Some scriptwriting programs advertise public readings of scripts as part of a student's degree requirements. You might want to pull in some people you know or even go for some strangers showing up too, as in a public reading.

  ASSIGNMENT:

  1. Write pages ioi-iio and keep on writing
if this is not yet the end!

  2. Go out to a very serious film that appears not to have a stroke of humor in it. Remind yourself of the power of pure drama, but also perhaps of the reasons you feel good about writing comedy.

  3. You have exercised your talent. Now look for and take advantage of any "luck" that comes your way.

  Week 15: Retaining Your Humor from Page to Screen

  You've recovered from the comic reading and tossed out the last of the leftover pizza. Now what? Lock the script away for a few weeks or a month, minimum, and take a long-deserved vacation. A real one if you can, or otherwise a fantasy "few days off" around the house or the neighborhood.

  The rewrite is the next step, but especially since you are working on comedy, you want to be fresh again. So whatever you do, please don't rush into the revision before you have regained your humor, sanity (or parts thereof), and some sense of the pure pleasure of it all again.

  Meanwhile, turn to appendix 2 and see what items may prove useful to you as you begin to think of Life After the Rewrite. Realize that a whole other world awaits you as you head toward seeing your laughter transformed to the screen. Yes, it can be a hard, cruel and humorless set of hurdles, obstacles, roadblocks and land mines. All the more reason to hold on to your unexploded mimes and let them go whenever you need one to explode the most. For I would not be writing these words if that route wasn't also filled with memories of new friendships, hilarious meetings and exhilarating experiences. If you don't see this next step as a grand comedy too (OK, it may often become a farce as well!), then it is time to consider other pursuits.

  ASSIGNMENT:

  I. Finish your comedy!

  2. And do a hearty rewrite after the input of your partner and friends from the comic reading, and from readings by those chosen few whose opinions you trust.

  3. Then on to appendix 2 and the wide world beyond.

  Man plays only when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only a complete human being when he plays.

  Schiller

  I have strongly urged you to write whatever feature comedy you wish and enjoy the process of doing so. Of course, my hopes are that you will find lasting satisfaction in coming up with episodic television comedy as well. But we would be kidding ourselves if we did not from the beginning acknowledge the much more restricted and swiftly shifting world of television production. Translation: this is the chapter in danger of being "out of date" upon publication. Television changes that fast. Keeping that in mind, however, I've tried to focus on general advice that should transcend the shifting sands of trends and hype.

  Yes, it is relatively easy to get your own work on local cable access channels if you are living in the United States. But the moment you begin to think about network half-hour comedy shows, you are speaking of a very highly competitive ball game that is difficult-but not impossible-to break into. That said, let's let the televised laughter begin.

  CHAPTER ASSIGNMENT:

  Write a pilot script for an original half-hour comedy series.

  Week 1: Conceiving Episodic Comedy

  ASSIGNMENT:

  1. Tape a half-hour comedy show that means a lot to you and study that episode carefully, perhaps watching it three or four times. Get hold of the script from Script City or the Internet (see appendix 2), and go over the script for format and set-up and to see what changes may or may not have been made between script and the broadcast episode.

  2. Plan out a "spec" script for the show you have studied in a two- to threepage treatment.

  3. Write one-paragraph concepts for three original series ideas, without ranking them, and test them on your comic partner and trusted friends to refine or redefine them and then, finally, to select one of them as the one you wish to develop.

  Start with a simple question: What recent episodic comedy has worked for you? Is it Frasier's "psycho-com" series, which seems, at this writing, to have gained millions of new fans as well as Emmys each year? Perhaps it is Ally McBeal that appeals, with its surrealistic flashes of fantasy, irony and humor about the problems of a bright and good-looking female lawyer in balancing relationships and career. Or does Everybody Loves Raymond tickle you as a subtly subversive family sitcom in a way that Home Improvement can't? Perhaps you wish to pen an animated series that will take off where King of the Hill and The Simpsons stop, outrageous to a degree that live-action sitcom could never get away with? Or do you see a show like Ellen as your mentor for pushing the envelope of sitcom, not only in Ellen DeGeneres's "coming out" episode but in the show's constant celebration of creative freedom?

  Despite television's seasonal shifts in tastes, it is worth taking a closer look at one or two shows that work for you so that you can better understand how they do it, so you can get hold of exactly what the show is doing to and for you.

  Try your hand at writing a sample script for a popular comedy series as your "passport" sample. And in fact it is not a bad idea to have both the original pilot script we are targeting in this chapter and a spec script for an existing show as a writing sample when you go to shop your project around. Which one to write for? That depends on what is hot at the moment you decide to take a shot at it. Choose a show that is clearly on the rise. As longtime comic writer John Vorhaus notes, "Be the first on your block to write a spec script for a smart new show" (140).

  But note that many television producers would be just as happy, or even more so, to see one of your original feature scripts to prove to them that you have the imagination and talent to go the whole route. Part of the logic of setting up the feature film comedy script in a chapter before this one is to meet such a demand. If you are capable of completing the script you created as outlined in chapter ii, then you should find this chapter's assignment-a half-hour episodic comedy pilot script-easier going.

  As with the feature comedy assignment, see if you can dream up three concepts for comedy series, ranging from (1) fairly safe to (2) slightly outrageous to (3) completely out there and over the top.

  Take the following four points into consideration as you brainstorm, both alone and with your trusty comic partner:

  i. There is absolutely no predicting what will and what will not work in episodic comedy. Try to imagine the original pitch for Seinfeld (four characters who talk about and do "nothing"), for Northern Exposure (a Jewish doctor in an Alaskan village), or for Cheers (a bunch of characters who hang out in a Boston bar). And given that America is a "middle-class" nation, how did Roseanne, a show about a working-class woman and her family, capture our imaginations for so many years? I would suggest the results are not that much different in other countries I have visited either. Mork and Mindy launched Robin Williams, so even aliens in a middle-class household can make us laugh. The message is thus clear: anything goes when it comes to comic concepts!

  2. Build on concepts that you connect with, either through experience or passion or, best of all, both. Ray Romano, star of Everybody Loves Raymond, drew from his own life situation of living near his parents in New York and dealing with an obsessive brother who is a cop. A concept you have passion and knowledge about is going to take you further than something you are only guessing about. There are qualifications to this point, of course. Almost none of the writers on Northern Exposure ever went to Alaska. But everyone "got" that Cicely was a mythical never-never land in which everyone was free to be him- or herself. It was from the start conceived as a "fantasy" Alaska.

  3. Does your concept involve the interweaving of characters and potential situations that will have "legs" to go for season after season? Shows that last more than a few years plan on major changes or events taking place in the characters' lives to suggest "growth" each season. The idea is not to simply repeat set guidelines and situations but to actually have characters and situations that are strong enough to encourage and allow for such growth. The Full Monty was enjoyable as a feature comedy, but would it work week after week and season after season on the small screen? I don't think so. It's a one
-shot, one-punch-line comedy. On the other hand, one of my students came up with the idea of a successful middleaged husband-and-wife team-both professionals with good salaries-who quit and move to a small town to run a bed and breakfast (B & B). In fact, that was her title for the show: B & B, for the characters were named Bob and Barbara. Clearly this concept has legs: you have the ever-changing guests who come through and the fish-out-of-water structure as the couple adjust to country life and to themselves once more.

  4. Is your concept on a timely curve of popular needs or interests? Producer/writer Barbara Hall (Northern Exposure, Chicago Hope, I'll Fly Away and more) notes that pilot scripts, whether for comedy or drama, succeed most often when they are in sync with the perceived "hot" trends of the moment in television. She comments:

  What networks are looking for in a pilot is anything that vaguely resembles a successful series from the previous season. Sometimes, too, they want to see pilots that reflect some successful movie. So if someone has a pilot idea that can be compared to Good Will Hunting this year [1998] and pair it with something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, then you probably have a hit. And I'm only being half facetious. Also, pilots sell far more often from an oral pitch than from a script, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't go ahead and write a pilot, because they are excellent "samples" and good practice too.

  (Personal interview, April 13, 1998. Emphasis added.)

  So end the week knowing which pilot you wish to go ahead with, but save the other ideas too. You never know what you might be able to do with them later when more comic lightning strikes, like an unexploded mime going off.

  Week 2: Structuring Your Pilot

  ASSIGNMENT:

  1. Do a story outline for your pilot, breaking it into a two- or three-act structure.

  2. Identify your "A" story and "B" story, possibly with a "C" and maybe even a "D" if you are writing something as dense as Seinfeld.