Mel: Look, there's a street in Atlanta where I did this once.
Mel: More successfully, I will say.
Chas: Hi, I'm Chas Fisher.
Mel: And I'm Mel Killingsworth.
Chas: And welcome to Draft Zero, a podcast where two, I was going to say Australians,
Chas: but one Australian and one almost Australian whenever their number comes up.
Chas: Try to work out what makes great screenplays work.
Mel: And today we're talking about physical comedy on the page.
Mel: We're talking Bringing Up Baby, the 1938 movie written by Dudley Nichols and
Mel: Hagar Wilde, starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Mel: We're talking about the Happy Endings pilot, written by David Kasp.
Mel: And we're talking about Bridesmaids, written by Annie Mumulo and Kristen Wiig.
Mel: And my impetus for doing this is I'm writing a comedy of remarriage.
Mel: So a feature rom-com that is all about lots and lots of misunderstandings and
Mel: slapstick and physical comedy.
Mel: And so I wanted to look at physical comedy on the page.
Chas: Yeah, and I leapt at this opportunity. As long-term listeners can hear,
Chas: we are missing one of our main co-hosts.
Chas: Stu is away on show, but Mel has very kindly stepped in and not only brought
Chas: the topic, but also helped in the selection of the homework,
Chas: which was also assisted by our Patreons.
Chas: And this is a spiritual sequel episode to one of our very early episodes on white space.
Chas: And we were looking at how can you use the page, the words on the page,
Chas: to recreate the feeling of pace.
Chas: And we saw how, you know, different techniques could make time as a reader to...
Chas: Feel faster or slower and that there were different ways
Chas: of doing that and when mel mentioned writing
Chas: different kinds of comedy i thought all right yes physical comedy and i really
Chas: we it was hard to like guide our poor patreons as to what we were looking for
Chas: because i think what is in trend in comedy now is to have physical comedy moments,
Chas: but there's fewer and fewer of those, you know, like Mr.
Chas: Bean kind of extended physical comedy, you know, Fawlty Towers, whatever it is.
Chas: I'm showing my British heritage here.
Chas: You know, Charlie Chaplin, Marx Brothers, like slapstick still exists,
Chas: but it's often just in moments to get a laugh.
Chas: And for me, the challenge as a writer is not those
Chas: moments we we thought about doing everything everywhere all
Chas: at once but we're also going to table that for a future episode but
Chas: so much of those when they use physical comedy in that film
Chas: it's like moments to to draw a
Chas: reaction and to me the
Chas: challenge of just writing comedy in general
Chas: is making it funny on the on the page to recreate that feeling in the in the
Chas: audience but writing physical comedy just even when we were thinking about it
Chas: and mulling homework i was just thinking it must be so hard because you can
Chas: describe action and a lot of physical comedy is essentially like writing an action set piece.
Chas: But to write that action such that it is as funny as it looks without saying, it's hilarious.
Mel: And that's the director's problem.
Chas: So, yeah, I was really excited to get into this episode.
Chas: Mel, can you let our listeners know the constraints we were putting on in our homework selection?
Mel: Yeah. So, we wanted to do, and throughout the discussion of this,
Mel: we came up with this really interesting thing where we were working to distinguish
Mel: What is screwball versus farce versus slapstick?
Mel: Because we came up with a lot of films and then it felt more like they were
Mel: farce or it felt more like they were a screwball but didn't have the slapstick
Mel: physical comedy we wanted.
Mel: And so I sort of was trying to nail down what is different about those.
Mel: And screwball is something that has language, plot and physicality.
Mel: Slapstick is physicality. And it may involve language. It may not.
Mel: It may be entirely silent. and farce is language
Mel: and plot it may involve physicality but it may not um and so plot involves like
Mel: you know sometimes people are just barely miss each other going in and out of
Mel: rooms it's not really physical comedy they're just sort of uh the camera is
Mel: showing you you know proximity and then there's a lot of language going on um.
Chas: Yeah absolutely and i was i mean as someone who
Chas: was kind of raised in in my drama degree we
Chas: did a whole semester on commedia de latte so
Chas: i was like ah slapstick and farce they they
Chas: go hand in hand and and we got into a debate about it and ultimately you were
Chas: correct that farces often have slapstick but not all farce is slapstick and
Chas: and like for a recent example i think veep is satirical but it is farce.
Mel: So much farce but.
Chas: It's not slapstick.
Mel: A few moments yes slapstick and that's
Mel: fine but it is overall farce um and
Mel: then you have something like screwball which uh i'm
Mel: bringing up baby is what we landed on but there
Mel: were several that i wanted to do so you look at something like
Mel: charade which is definitely a farce that has some slapstick you look at um one
Mel: of my all-time favorites his girl friday which is a screwball because it has
Mel: all of the above every scene has plot language and physicality and they're all
Mel: going at 100 miles per hour yeah.
Chas: And i mean stew and i uh whenever we bring you on mel Like, you're always like,
Chas: oh, we should do this amazing film from, like, the 1940s. And we're all like, no.
Chas: Cinematic and screenwriting language has moved on from there.
Mel: That's like saying we shouldn't study Shakespeare anymore if we want to write novels. I mean...
Mel: Yes, there are differences. I do admit there are absolutely differences.
Mel: But every couple of months on screenwriting Twitter, the argument pops up that
Mel: like once you learn the rules, you should break them and you should do what works.
Mel: And so if you're going to do what works and you're limiting yourself to reading
Mel: stuff that has been written in the last 10 to 15 years, I think that's a massive mistake.
Mel: And one of the really interesting things although of the scripts that i could
Mel: find i really wanted to do a scene from charade couldn't find the script of
Mel: all the scripts that i could find bringing up baby is actually probably the
Mel: most that is obviously quote-unquote of its time.
Mel: There's actually a lot of things it does similar to
Mel: bridesmaids which is really interesting but i do think it's
Mel: of its time and yet i still got a lot out of reading how
Mel: it did it and one of the other things that i think with the
Mel: three scripts we landed on that is really interesting is that we
Mel: chose three scripts that do three different types of
Mel: slapstick so bringing a baby is mostly
Mel: involving vehicles and a car there's there's there's cars
Mel: going on and things like that in happy endings
Mel: it's the whole scene has a lot of slapstick moments but
Mel: it's an it's an ensemble piece and they're small moments and at one moment
Mel: they involve this item and the other moment they
Mel: involve a different item and it keeps moving on moving
Mel: around the room and doing different things and then bridesmaids it's
Mel: essentially one big event with all of these characters and the event goes for
Mel: like four minutes so you've got and and it it's physical comedy as opposed to
Mel: something like bringing a baby which is you know this giant machine being wielded
Mel: around so it's definitely three that uh i think have had different strengths which is great and.
Chas: It was it was challenging for us to find scripts because this is a an episode
Chas: where there was no point if we couldn't find the scripts for projects.
Chas: So, Sue and I in previous episodes, we've looked at Game Night,
Chas: where that entire amazing, you know, stitched together, seeming one-shot chase
Chas: of the FabergÃ© egg around the house.
Chas: In the script, it says, Boomer pursues whoever holds the egg and it turns into
Chas: a high stakes game of hot potato.
Chas: You know, like that entire sequence, that's screenwriters enjoying themselves
Chas: and handballing the problem straight to the director.
Chas: Um, although I think there might've been right directors on that.
Mel: Uh, Stu has a whole breakdown of it on ShotZero and he talks about the previs
Mel: and a bunch of other things. So, you know, insert plug here.
Chas: All right. So the screenplay credits are by Mark Perez, uh, revisions by Dana
Chas: Fox and Catherine Silverman.
Chas: Current revisions of the version I'm looking at is Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daly.
Chas: And then, you know, we've looked at that wonderful bit of clowning that Ryan
Chas: Gosling does in Nice Guys in the toilet stall where he drops the cigarette and
Chas: it's brilliant and it looks like he's improvised it.
Chas: But then when we went to the script, it's actually beat for beat in there.
Chas: But A, we've done those projects and we want to look at new ones.
Chas: And B, we, like I said, we want, I wanted in particular extended
Chas: ones so that you could get that sense of geography what's
Chas: the movement within the the scene and um
Chas: and above all how to make something that is going
Chas: to become more and more technical in terms
Chas: of what you're trying to explain to the reader is going on
Chas: and how do you make that funny because i
Chas: think you can make technical stuff in an action scene
Chas: feel tense and dangerous quite easily
Chas: uh you know maybe that's just me betraying my biases as a writer but you know
Chas: bam dash dash oh no like i feel like you can inject the feeling that you want
Chas: more easily in straight up action than it is to inject humor into a more technical scene and.
Mel: Even with that with the thing you're saying about action right you have the
Mel: crashing you have you know bam you have gunshots you have things going off you
Mel: can't just tell the writer haha.
Chas: Funny you.
Mel: Know you have to it has to be funny.
Chas: I mean i can't remember what script it is now if you were here he would remember
Chas: but i think we did look at one bit of big print which ended with like it's hilarious
Chas: full stop like it's just telling us how to feel about the what we've just read no.
Mel: Pressure on the.
Chas: Actors or anything there well uh no pressure on the director in the end of this
Chas: sequence from bringing up baby so.
Excerpts: No, but if you'd only let me explain. You see, I just gave someone that bad girl and that...
Excerpts: I hope you've realised that you've made a perfect fool of yourself in front
Excerpts: of everyone. Have you finished? Yes, yes, I have. Thank you very much. Oh.
Excerpts: You lied to me. Yes, but just a little bit. I mean, no, no, no.
Excerpts: It's a ridiculous story about a leopard. But it is a ridiculous story.
Excerpts: I have a leopard. Where is the leopard? In there.
Chas: But what I thought we might do for each of these scenes is obviously we've brought
Chas: scenes from different parts of the of these films.
Chas: So we have to give kind of a broad summary of the film, where we are in the story.
Chas: And I think what happens in the scene will probably play audio from the scenes.
Chas: But the whole point of this is you're probably not, dear listener in this audio
Chas: format, going to understand necessarily what is going on that we want to describe on the page.
Chas: And then we'll probably dive into favorite moments and techniques actually on
Chas: the page in the big print.
Chas: And I do think in comedy, it's especially challenging to get readers to read
Chas: the big print. You know, so much of the humour comes from the dialogue,
Chas: and comedy is such a dialogue.
Chas: Often, certainly contemporary comedy is so dialogue-driven.
Chas: I can imagine readers just never reading the action lines at all.
Chas: All right. Well, Mel, given Bringing Up Baby is your baby, do you want to pitch or summarize?
Mel: I'll summarize. This is quite, it's actually easier because this happens near
Mel: the beginning of the film.
Chas: Yeah.
Mel: So David, who is played by Cary Grant and Catherine Hepburn,
Mel: who plays Susan, have met just once before.
Mel: And this is essentially, you know, it was hate at first sight.
Mel: And now we have their second big meeting.
Mel: And so the idea of like first impression, second impression is terrible.
Mel: So David is out golfing and trying to make a good impression on Mr.
Mel: Peabody, who will factor into the scene later.
Mel: And then the scene commences. Uh, if you, the screenplay is available online
Mel: and it essentially starts on page 10.
Chas: We'll put, we'll put links in the show notes.
Mel: And this scene starts with very little dialogue.
Mel: It's almost entirely what's happening and describing all of the physicality
Mel: and for, for a couple of pages until suddenly the dialogue really starts cracking.
Chas: Yeah. I mean, so broadly the movement of the scene, you know,
Chas: Susan steals David's ball and plays it and he's kind of grumpy and interacting with Susan while Mr.
Chas: Peabody's getting frustrated that David isn't playing with him.
Chas: And that is delightful back and forth.
Excerpts: You shouldn't do that, you know. But that... What shouldn't I do?
Excerpts: Talk while someone's shooting.
Excerpts: Well, anyway, I forgive you because I got a good shot. But you don't understand.
Excerpts: See, there it is, right next to the pin. But that has nothing to do with it.
Excerpts: Oh, are you playing through? No, I've just driven off the first tee.
Excerpts: I see you're a stranger here.
Excerpts: You should be over there. This is the 18th fairway, and I'm right on the green.
Excerpts: If I think this part, I'm going to beat my record. I'll be with you in a minute.
Mel: It's 207... The screenplay's 207 pages, and the movie's about 90 minutes. So it whips.
Chas: Yeah. So Susan finishes the 18th hole with David's ball and leaves.
Chas: And then David resumes playing with Mr. Peabody.
Chas: And Susan begins, gets to her car and starts driving, trying to drive out of
Chas: the car park while seemingly crashing into every car in the car park.
Chas: But in particular, David's.
Excerpts: Hey, mister, I think that's your car.
Excerpts: Hey hey oh i'll be with you in a minute mr peabody.
Chas: And what i actually love about this is so
Chas: i'm i'm on page 10 now and what you have is the david is at the first tee and
Chas: uh susan is in the car park and this is one of those times where like my modern
Chas: instinct is to establish the two locations and then ease the reader in,
Chas: you know, and I think this is my big observation from actually how well Bringing
Chas: Up Baby does on the page is its geography and the sluglines actually help.
Chas: Because it gives you a mental bit. It's almost like an edit.
Chas: You know that you're cutting from her to him whenever you see a slug line.
Chas: And I guess because it's only two locations, you're not having to read the slug
Chas: line necessarily. You just know you've moved from her to him.
Mel: Yeah. And the other thing that's interesting is it tells you,
Mel: it kind of tells you whose point of view you're in because especially at the start,
Mel: he ends up walking over to her at the
Mel: car and then everything's sort of happening there and then
Mel: you're cutting back to where mr peabody's looking on but at
Mel: the start david enters and doggedly tees his
Mel: ball again rather grimly he takes a driver from
Mel: the caddy so you're with david right and then the automobile starts honking
Mel: the sound throws him off balance he drops his club he gets startled you're still
Mel: with him cut to the exterior parking space day so the first time we see there
Mel: there's a little uh there's a slug line And then under that in all caps is what
Mel: he sees colon in the parking space nearby.
Mel: Susan is trying to move. So you are still with him and his point of view.
Chas: Yeah.
Mel: He's thrown off and he looks over and sees Susan trying to back her roadster out.
Mel: Then you're back with David exterior at first T day, all these things happen.
Mel: And then it starts doing that cutting back and forth. And it's, it's quick.
Mel: It's, it's, there's two lines and then we're back with David and there's two
Mel: lines and then we're back and then there's four lines and they're back.
Mel: And so it, you're right, the slug lines mimic the editing and how quickly this is all happening.
Mel: And it really drives the pacing because yeah, it's just action lines so far,
Mel: but it's not, there's quite a lot of white space on the page because you're
Mel: going back and forth between what's happening in each location quite quickly.
Chas: Yeah. I mean, so part of my resistance to doing like older screenplays is like
Chas: the, not just the fashion, the style of how screenplays written have changed since then.
Chas: So one of the things that seems unusual for me is that there doesn't,
Chas: they don't seem to use paragraphs within a scene very often in action lines.
Chas: So at the top of that page, we've got a one, two, three, four,
Chas: five, six, seven, eight, nine line.
Chas: Paragraph but it's still they've still
Chas: like carefully measured the sentences it reads very quickly
Chas: they use m dashes like other than
Chas: breaking up those paragraphs now there isn't
Chas: much that would change to to update this script and i just want to make an observation
Chas: on this particular page that we'll come back to i think we'll we'll do it again
Chas: and again because i think it's important for what's one of my takeaways from
Chas: writing physical comedy is that the the words on the page.
Chas: Mimic the repetition that we're seeing in the comedy so
Chas: you know as he lifts his club for the swing an automobile horn
Chas: toots nearby he doesn't look around but the sound throws him
Chas: off balance he drops his club and raises for another swing
Chas: another horn which distracts him as he raises
Chas: his club again determinably there is a crash of a
Chas: bumper against the bumper he lowers his club grimly and
Chas: looks around so there's lots of words like hooking
Chas: in from sentence to sentence like they don't try
Chas: and look for different words for raising his club they
Chas: use you know repeating the word another um
Chas: across sentences to tie it together and then
Chas: going down the page like he raises
Chas: his club again and this time there is a terrific crash slowly he
Chas: lowers his club and looks around like and finally uh david suddenly drops his
Chas: club and strides out so that like the words on the page and the repetition are
Chas: yeah mimicking the edit we can see we can visualize the humor and the and the repetition of it yeah.
Mel: There's the even the like like some of the onomatopoeia words you've got like
Mel: smacked repeats a few times and like toots and like things like that so you've
Mel: got the you know and a lot of comedy is you know rule of threes and all that.
Chas: And It.
Mel: Happens in the writing as well.
Chas: I mean, so then it moves from him being distracted from his golf game to her
Chas: accidentally locking her car bumper with his car bumper and she's like towing
Chas: his car around the car park and he rushes to try and get in the car.
Chas: Now, I have seen Bringing Up Baby, but it's been 20 years.
Chas: So, I can't actually visualize this. I was, uh, what I, what I do appreciate
Chas: about the script is it very much made me see what is, what I imagine is going on on screen, uh,
Chas: very well without feeling like it's over explaining, you know, there's some, uh,
Chas: camera direction and stuff like that, that we probably wouldn't do now, but.
Mel: But most of the camera direction
Mel: in this scene is for things that are actually
Mel: required because of a visual gag not all
Mel: of it there is more but there's a couple of visual gags where
Mel: for example we're in peabody's point of view and the
Mel: part of the point is that peabody can see what
Mel: david's doing but can't see that he's on the running board
Mel: of the car for example and so it shows him so that the
Mel: camera it says you know camera medium long shot above the hedge that sort of
Mel: direction is important because otherwise because the humor is coming from the
Mel: fact that we the audience know what's happening below the hedge but peabody
Mel: doesn't and the camera rather the camera direction is what's pointing that out to the reader yeah.
Chas: Because uh like you said and and what we had before with very firmly in whose point of view are we.
Mel: Um so.
Chas: Peabody is now at the first tee and now both Susan and David are in the car
Chas: park in their cars and it clearly says on page 12 what he sees, referring to Peabody,
Chas: is the shot of head and shoulders of David above the hedge, right?
Chas: Susan and her car are concealed by the hedge. So we understand the visual nature
Chas: of the gag is that David is like moving back and forth behind his hedge trying
Chas: to have a conversation with Mr.
Chas: Peabody while trying to shout at Susan to let her know what's going on.
Excerpts: Look, let me drive this car. Oh, it's alright. It's an old wreck anyway.
Excerpts: It doesn't matter. Well, you don't understand. This is my car.
Excerpts: You mean this is your car? Of course. Your golf ball? Your car?
Excerpts: Is there anything in the world that doesn't belong to you?
Excerpts: Yes, thank heaven. You! Now, don't lose your temper.
Excerpts: My dear young lady, I'm not losing my temper. I'm merely trying to play some golf.
Excerpts: When you choose the funniest places, this is a parking lot. Will you get out of my car?
Excerpts: Will you get off my running board? This is my running board!
Excerpts: All right, honey, stay there. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Mr.
Excerpts: I'll be with you in a minute, Mr. Peabody.
Mel: And less the bridesmaids scene, although it does use a few anti-sees, we here, etc.
Mel: But the happy ending scene, instead of using camera directions,
Mel: it says how the characters look.
Mel: So there's a scene or there's sorry, there's a gag in happy endings where it's
Mel: really important that the audience hasn't seen something until the camera pans left.
Mel: And instead of saying that the camera pans left, which is what bringing a baby's
Mel: done, it says everybody looks to the left. so it's it's getting across the same
Mel: idea it's just bringing it baby is a little more technical about it.
Chas: Yeah and i think if they had written just
Chas: the action you wouldn't get the framing that is funny right the thing that's
Chas: funny about this thing yes it's inherently funny that susan is unaware that
Chas: she's towing not just david's car but david standing she's aware and blithely enjoying it.
Mel: But you know.
Chas: Yeah, the word blithely is definitely used. But the fact that it says,
Chas: camera is now on the opposite side of the hedge so that we see clearly David's predicament.
Chas: David turns and waves helplessly at Peabody as he rolls past.
Chas: So, you know, we've been given both Peabody's experience of just seeing David
Chas: rolling back and forth and we've got like-
Mel: We see clearly.
Chas: The much more kind of dangerous, fun stunt of David being in the car as well.
Chas: And I do like that, you know, we've got full shot parking space as Susan gathering
Chas: speed tows David around a lane that brings him past the hedge again.
Chas: Peabody watches amazedly his head turning. Sorry, I skipped the slug line there,
Chas: but it allows us to visualize there's the stunt and there's the gag of going,
Chas: David is back, just zooming across behind the head from Peabody's perspective.
Mel: But I think that just demonstrates your point that once you've established the
Mel: two places, your brain is going, okay, it's almost like we would use intercut
Mel: now, except it is being very clear.
Mel: Okay, now we're here. Now we're there. Your brain is kind of,
Mel: okay, I get that the slug line's there. Now we're with Peabody when you're reading it.
Chas: Yeah. And the first time David glides past the hedge, he waves helplessly at Peabody.
Chas: And then the second time he turns and waves placatingly.
Chas: So, look, I'm going to be upfront that reading the script, it didn't make me laugh.
Chas: Whereas reading the other ones, I actually laughed out loud.
Chas: But what it did do is give me a really clear sense of the geography and it gave
Chas: me such a good sense of the geography and such a good sense of the edit and
Chas: such a good sense of the uh framing,
Chas: that i could see that it would be funny on screen and.
Mel: It is i mean and not to uh if you if you read the next scene which we're not
Mel: doing for this i just want to touch.
Chas: On it really.
Mel: Quickly if you.
Mel: Two things that are really great
Mel: about it is first, it's a complete juxtaposition is a white tie event.
Mel: So you've got this, you know, these people who are outside doing sport and riding
Mel: around in cars and doing this.
Mel: And then the next scene is at a white tie event where they run into each other again.
Mel: And there's a gag where David slips on an olive like Susan has thrown an olive
Mel: pit on the floor and David slips on it.
Mel: And it's clearly written in a way that you it's meant to be funny because you
Mel: see the feet and then the feet fly up out of out of screen and then whatever.
Mel: So it's clearly written in a way where you can tell it's David,
Mel: but it's not meant to perform. And then they cast Cary Grant.
Mel: So they cast a former acrobat and they shoot it completely differently.
Mel: It's shot to be like funny in that in that way of like the feet fly out of frame.
Mel: And then he just actually performs the stunt.
Mel: So I think, yeah, they're clearly writing with an idea towards helping you picture
Mel: the final product and how you can accomplish the type of humor that they're
Mel: going for, which is physicality plus that rapid fire.
Mel: Because once the dialogue does start with the car, you know,
Mel: the car stuff is still going.
Mel: You know, David climbs on the car, student starts to back out and they're going
Mel: back and forth while he's riding around towards the parking space going,
Mel: there's no need to lose your temper.
Mel: David quietly frenzied. I'm not losing my temper.
Mel: You know, it's, they're, they're giving you the clear idea while the dialogue
Mel: is establishing their relationship.
Chas: Yeah. I mean, so the scene, or the sequence rather, moves from David basically
Chas: trying to stop his car being towed while keeping Mr. Peabody on the course.
Chas: Mr. Peabody walks off. And so David can then basically
Chas: fully engaged with susan he breaks forcing
Chas: her to acknowledge his existence that she's
Chas: towing him around and then she wraps
Chas: his car or uh hits it runs it into a tree separates her car but then also like
Chas: keeps coming back and banging into him and then david start like it's a lovely
Chas: character shift that for the first time he loses his temper he looks after her
Chas: car as it rolls away down the driveway,
Chas: then on a mad impulse, drops into gear and follows.
Chas: As she goes out of the gate, he comes round and past her and scrapes her front fender. Her eyes flash.
Chas: She pursues him and takes off his fender.
Chas: They keep up this game, ad lib, director, until finally no fenders are left
Chas: on either car and David is in a ditch.
Chas: So they do finally, the writers at the end of that, do finally do the game night cheat.
Chas: Like, yeah, you guys can just sort out how this plays out until there are no
Chas: fenders left and one's in a ditch, but they've done so well to almost earn that crescendo and-
Chas: been all the character beats have played out.
Mel: I think also um there's an
Mel: interesting part which i discovered has happened in
Mel: all three of the scripts that we ended up picking which is
Mel: that there are pieces of this scene that
Mel: appear in a different order than they are in the
Mel: script but the pieces as they
Mel: are are so written quite similarly but they are edited in
Mel: quite a different order that does shift the overall
Mel: arc of the scene and all three of these have scripts have
Mel: done that where there's bits that have been moved around
Mel: and not shot in that order if you watch them next to the scene which
Mel: is quite interesting so they're filming it and they've got these two actors and
Mel: clearly how it's written is with the
Mel: physical comedy in mind but then you have these actors in in all of these cases
Mel: you have these great comedic actors and sometimes when they're in a flow of
Mel: things actually it works better to do it you know to let this flow and then
Mel: do this gag this way etc which is quite interesting that we got three that they
Mel: keep all the bits but rearrange them in post?
Chas: I mean, I guess we can credit the editors for making a decision and assume that
Chas: maybe it was shot that way.
Chas: Who knows but what in this particular one what was the rearranging what what got moved around.
Mel: Um i marked it uh okay
Mel: so where susan uh
Mel: toes uh the head and shoulders of david david standing on his car blithely towing
Mel: him around it happens much later okay so it goes they actually start arguing
Mel: a bit more and uh you know uh he says i'll be with you in a minute but then
Mel: he and Susan started having a bit more back and forth.
Mel: And all of that bit is bumped to a little bit later.
Mel: So clearly they just wanted to get into the chemistry of the two of them a little
Mel: bit sooner before they came back with the visual gag.
Chas: And maybe it would have been harder to play her being blithely unaware of her towing his car.
Chas: So, you know, maybe it wasn't, they couldn't sell him shouting at her and her
Chas: either being unaware or just...
Mel: Or feigning unawareness.
Chas: Yeah. Oh, what a good word. Fain. That's a word of word that will trip you up.
Mel: Yeah. I mean, I've said it, but I'm also very well aware that it might be spelled
Mel: differently than there.
Mel: And there's 18 different potential ways to spell it. So I've given up at this point.
Mel: I'm sure that there's an E in there somewhere that I don't believe there should be.
Chas: So as much as I've, you know,
Chas: rubbished and resisted your 1940s homework selections,
Chas: this is this is well worth a read like
Chas: i flew through these 10 pages and well 17
Chas: pages uh and the fact that the script is like you
Chas: said 202 pages long and yet the film is
Chas: 90 minutes is uh does not surprise me at all and frankly i think the only thing
Chas: that would change in modern times is just breaking up those paragraphs a little
Chas: but i don't think the words on the page would necessarily change or their cadence or their repetition.
Chas: And the big thing I took out of this was actually good use of slug lines,
Chas: like setting up the geography and the gags and the visualization so well.
Mel: I would encourage, I ended up reading the whole next scene and getting a lot out of that as well.
Mel: And I think they're both so different that if you are really interested,
Mel: I would definitely say to sort of read the two of them together and see how
Mel: they do things differently.
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Excerpts: zero. That's draft zero without a hyphen.
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Mel: Let's move on to Happy Endings.
Chas: So one of the other constraints that we decided in choosing our homework for
Chas: physical comedy is we both, I think, instinctively wanted to do live action
Chas: physical comedy, not animation.
Chas: Because obviously physical humor is a big part of contemporary animation.
Chas: We're almost in a golden age, particularly of adult animation right now,
Chas: and there's so much physical humor in there, but I think we both wanted that
Chas: constraint of writing something that human beings could theoretically do.
Chas: Now I know we're in the age of CGI.
Mel: And we tend to prefer cgi in
Mel: our action and not in our comedy yeah partly because
Mel: i think part of the thing is that's funny is the concept
Mel: of real people potentially getting hurt but not or actually having to land that
Mel: pratfall yeah whereas when it comes to action you know we just want things to
Mel: be to be bigger and better but in in comedy slapping someone across the face
Mel: is still funny yeah and And doing it for real is the only way to really make it funny.
Mel: And by for real, of course, I mean timing and hoping that your scene partner
Mel: turns the right way and et cetera, et cetera.
Chas: Yeah. But what we were aware of or we felt instinctively is that there were
Chas: more of these extended comedy sequences in film.
Chas: Television now than they are in cinema.
Chas: I mean, that said, we were constrained by scripts.
Chas: So, I really wanted to do Joyride because I think that has got the cocaine scene
Chas: in the train and then also the threesome is fucking hysterical.
Chas: And even if they'd written it's a threesome, it's fucking hysterical.
Chas: Like, I would have been happy to have read that. But unfortunately we couldn't
Chas: find the Joyride script other than me learning that it was the original title
Chas: was the Joy Fuck Club which I wish they had.
Mel: Kept they fought for it I had a hard time finding this specific TV scripts that
Mel: I wanted because I think oh right I want this scene but a lot of times in TV
Mel: shows there if you can find the script out there,
Mel: it's not the one that you're particularly after at any given time it's always.
Chas: The Emmy campaign.
Mel: Ones and sometimes it's later in the seasons whereas with happy endings it's
Mel: the pilot so if you haven't seen it it'll take you about five minutes to uh you know watch the bit.
Excerpts: The six of us have been friends forever so when alex and i decided to get married
Excerpts: it was going to be the greatest day of all our lives instead it turned into
Excerpts: a bad matthew mcconaughey movie alex i love you what's happening here come with
Excerpts: me i'm sorry i can't do this,
Excerpts: I'm sure she's totally regretting that decision. It's going to be okay,
Excerpts: I promise you. Huge game changer. Huge.
Excerpts: When friends have been together this long, nothing can break them up.
Excerpts: It's not even a breakup. I can't believe that you got the white trash tourist braids.
Excerpts: You look like Predator. I feel like you're going to rip my spine out and keep
Excerpts: my skull as a trophy. I'm sorry.
Excerpts: You're the only girl I've ever even liked. I literally can't even picture myself
Excerpts: with another woman ever again for the rest of my life. Have you seen my tongue ring?
Excerpts: God, I hope I didn't swallow another one.
Mel: Originally, I had picked the opening scene because I remember the opening scene,
Mel: you know, guy and rollerblades and all that.
Mel: And we ended up, I'll touch on that scene real quick, but we ended up going
Mel: a couple pages later to Alex and David's house.
Mel: This is, I just now bumped on the fact that it's Dave and David that we've picked,
Mel: which is very confusing.
Mel: I was like, Dave, that's not right. No, yes, it is. um at
Mel: alex and david's house and seeing how there's this longer sort
Mel: of uh ensemble physical
Mel: comedy bits going on over and over but in i
Mel: do think that the it's worth reading
Mel: the first couple pages how they set up
Mel: the guy on rollerblades which sets the entire
Mel: tone for the show being that you know that 10
Mel: more ridiculous and and characters who are willing to
Mel: go a long way for a joke or an elopement as
Mel: it were um you know you've got hot guy races through
Mel: the streets of chicago like the end of a shitty rom-com he
Mel: whips around the corner and gridlock he's trapped and it both does it sets the
Mel: tone for the thing but if you're reading there's a every time i'm emphasizing
Mel: a word it's all caps there's a lot of exclamation points and as a tv script it was
Mel: interesting that how much they use a lot of all caps and parentheticals and
Mel: things like that i found that really interesting like very very heavily i.
Chas: Mean the that opening scene like i i'm glad you pointed that out because i think
Chas: what it did really well and i've uh banged on a lot about you know one of brian
Chas: duffield's early scripts having like the most unfilmable gags in its action line,
Chas: but they go towards tone, right?
Chas: So, all that stuff like, you know, the worst rom-com is making you go,
Chas: oh, this is deliberate, right? This is,
Chas: satire or spoof, right? You're not reading this thinking, oh,
Chas: this is the worst rom-com.
Chas: It's like they are aware that that's what they want you to be feeling,
Chas: but that it's going to be a funny version of that.
Chas: So, that goes to great lengths. But there was a particular gag in this opening
Chas: sequence that you wanted to get to.
Chas: And so, this is the only one that I've never seen at all.
Chas: It wasn't available on any of my many streaming services.
Chas: So, I read it and I was like, you know I was reading through this script and
Chas: I'm like I've got a good idea of the tone of this I've got a good idea of these
Chas: characters and I know that it's funny from the dialogue but I was almost about
Chas: to text you one of my classic like Mel you've picked a you've missed the brief again,
Chas: but then we got to that amazing scene later.
Mel: I do think it's interesting though in the opening scene,
Mel: that it does tell it also gives
Mel: us camera movements so it says we slowly pull the
Mel: camera back away from them and then the camera goes back into
Mel: the church like it is giving us camera movements as well because that is part
Mel: of not just the tone but like what we see which which happens uh quite a bit
Mel: in the next scene now i will note that this is definitely of the three be the
Mel: most changed from the script.
Mel: And it takes, it cuts one gag entirely, and it, oh, first of all,
Mel: interior Dave and Alex's apartment day.
Mel: It says it opens with Springsteen's She's the One blaring, actually opens with
Mel: Indigo Girls' Closer to Fine blaring. Excellent choice.
Excerpts: Alex. Oh, hey, guys.
Mel: But most of the rest of it is the same, except one of the really interesting
Mel: things I noticed now, it's not about there are a lot of action lines.
Mel: There's a lot of physical gags. But what I realized was there's a lot more dialogue,
Mel: particularly from Dave than there is in the script.
Mel: It's the same basic content, but they give way more lines. And what I realized
Mel: is that when they started actually blocking the physicality,
Mel: they needed him to keep talking to get from one place to the other,
Mel: from one gag to the other.
Mel: So on the top of page nine, he has like four lines about, oh,
Mel: pretty good. I came up with an awesome new drink.
Mel: And he probably has about 10 to 12 lines minimum that he's riffing on because
Mel: he has to get up, greet his friends.
Mel: We have to see that he's in the boxers. he has to walk across pull the blender
Mel: out of the box so while he's doing all of the physicality that happen as the
Mel: action lines are written they've realized we don't have enough dialogue to to
Mel: to make this interesting as it goes so they've had to give more things for him
Mel: to say as he does things yeah.
Chas: I mean that's fascinating and we'll we'll play the the dialogue here is you
Chas: know pretty good i came up with an awesome new drink who wants to be the first
Chas: customer to try my world-famous beer float.
Chas: So that's what's on the page and now we will excerpt what he actually has to say.
Excerpts: What's up? Hey, how you doing?
Excerpts: Sweetie. Great, really great. I'm kicking ass. I've been doing lots of stuff.
Excerpts: Taking online yoga, meeting great people. They're calling me Bodhi,
Excerpts: which is awesome because of Point Break.
Excerpts: Been watching that a lot. Totally holds up. what happened to laurie betty right
Excerpts: oh i invented a new drink who wants to try a gin smoothie crazy a little bit
Excerpts: of this a lot of that sidebar petty thanks to the blender it's awesome.
Chas: But what you're going to is the need because they probably could have done it
Chas: as shot oh sorry as scripted where you've got these short dialogue scenes and
Chas: cutting to the gag but then that edit would have cut out the physical humour of it.
Chas: The dialogue was insufficient to have the space to set up the gags.
Chas: And one of the really good things I think about this scene and how it's written
Chas: on the page is it has two running...
Chas: Gags that it sets up on the page very early on in the scene.
Chas: Now, the first one is the one that develops and develops and develops,
Chas: which is David has just been left at the altar by his fiance for Rollerblades hot guy.
Chas: And not only that, she's gone on their pre-purchased honeymoon together.
Chas: And Dave's been for a week, you know, wallowing, wallowing in their apartment.
Mel: And using all of the wedding gifts.
Chas: Yeah. So Springsteen, she's the one blares in the messy room.
Chas: Shades drawn photos, bottles, wrapping paper strewn everywhere.
Chas: The place is packed with unwrapped slash opened wedding gifts.
Chas: Find Dave tucks tie undone, disheveled on the couch, blanket over his lap.
Chas: He sings along as he opens gifts and arranges a fancy
Chas: place setting on the coffee table with some of them plate silverware
Chas: napkin etc so it takes a bit of time to set this
Chas: up but what that then allows is that
Chas: later in the scene every action line is nothing but him opening and using and
Chas: abusing a new wedding gift and it it's like they take that time at the beginning
Chas: of the scene to then allow those like quick physical humor beats to happen later on and.
Mel: The things actually So a few pages later, as all of his friends are talking,
Mel: it continually will just drop a little bit of an action line about what David is doing.
Mel: Like David blows his nose. David sips the beer float, which which keeps him
Mel: front of mind because he's the point.
Mel: But it brings back those items. He literally blows his nose into the napkin
Mel: that was the place setting.
Mel: You know, so those. Yeah, it sets the scene. It's something that you would,
Mel: in theory, see in two seconds on the screen.
Mel: But all those things come back around, which is which is really great.
Chas: I mean, in one of them, like, David drops back down onto the couch, destroyed.
Chas: A toaster dings. And I was like, oh, it's the toaster in the kitchen.
Chas: Like, I immediately think toaster kitchen.
Chas: But the writers know that. And so, they say, a toaster, in brackets, gift, dings.
Chas: So, now, without them having to say that it's with arm's reach of him on the
Chas: couch, Just from saying gift in brackets, I now know that that toaster is plugged
Chas: in and within arm's reach of the couch.
Mel: Which is a really good takeaway for me because I've got this one long scene
Mel: that I've been writing that uses several different things that are around the
Mel: room and thinking about how sometimes you have to stop and say,
Mel: oh, you know, the Kleenex box is on top of the Chiffer robot, whatever.
Mel: If you just set it all up at the beginning, it doesn't necessarily stop your flow.
Mel: Now, there's a balance to be had there. Sometimes you don't want to know about that.
Mel: Kleenex box until you need to use it but yeah here because so many of the gags
Mel: use the gifts having taking that time to set that all up at the beginning really
Mel: pays off because then it can just flow yeah.
Chas: I mean so I'm just going to read through the gags and look maybe we'll we'll,
Chas: will intersperse the dialogue from the actual show.
Chas: So half of page eight was basically setting up the visuals of the room,
Chas: right? So it's doing all that setup.
Chas: Page nine is pretty much all dialogue other than the beat that you've already
Chas: pointed out, which he grabs a blender out of gift box, scoops ice cream into
Chas: it, pours beer over it, then holds it out to them beat.
Mel: And it's action, action, action, action, grabs a blender, scoops the ice cream,
Mel: pours beer. But real quick, before you finish the rest of this,
Mel: at the very bottom of page eight, it says italics equal baby voice.
Chas: Oh, yeah.
Mel: And then throughout the next few pages, his friends will sometimes drop into
Mel: baby voice when they're talking to him. Like, they're trying to be really gentle and not scare the baby.
Mel: So it sets that up and then it'll just keep using it.
Chas: Yeah, because that was the second running gag. And I'm like,
Chas: initially, I was like, why are they doing that?
Chas: And then I realized, because, again, that was right in that early setup when
Chas: the characters have come, the friends have come in. and it says,
Chas: yeah, in square brackets, italics equal baby voice. I'm like, why have they done that?
Chas: And then it's because every single character at a certain point uses the baby voice.
Chas: So it's funny on the page as well, like a line that might not have been so funny.
Chas: You're imagining without them every time having to go parenthetical baby voice.
Mel: Because we've all been there, right? Whichever side of it we're on, we've
Mel: all either been in the group of friends you've been the one where the group
Mel: of friends have come before
Mel: and it starts becoming contagious and you're like oh all of you at some point
Mel: are doing this to me or you know you you suddenly realized to your friend that
Mel: oh we're all just oh honey it's okay so yeah they mention it and then it'll
Mel: keep coming back but they don't need to you're right do the do the parentheticals every time all.
Chas: Right so uh forgive me for my uh performance interspersed with the uh excerpts
Chas: but let's see how this comes out.
Chas: If I don't do that and these are just the gags, these are the gags done in the action line.
Chas: Dave pulls out a piece of toast, takes a sad bite.
Chas: Dave sips the beer float, recoils disgusted, then wipes his mouth with the linen
Chas: napkin from the play setting.
Chas: Dave blows his nose into the napkin. This was the one that you were referring to earlier.
Excerpts: Dave, you're giving off a real Howard Hughes vibe here. I feel like you're about
Excerpts: 10 minutes away from storing your urine in jars.
Excerpts: Let's go get you some food. I just ate three French bread pizzas and most of
Excerpts: the world's largest chocolate bread.
Chas: They, the friends, look left to see an fao schwartz sized chocolate groom and
Chas: the disemboweled bottom half of the bride beat i.
Excerpts: Left the hand to hold.
Mel: If that's interesting you say that because the next
Mel: part that whole flashback part is the part that they've completely cut out
Mel: so it simply continues all right the
Mel: gags okay it goes to david lays down on the couch defeated and pulls a nice
Mel: blanket gift tag visible over himself beat the friends don't know what to do
Mel: so it's actually realized that that flashback scene has interrupted the flow
Mel: of all of these gags that are going and it skips that entirely so.
Chas: What is impressive i think about they've taken the time up front in the scene
Chas: to set up the geography and the layout of the room and two running gags so the
Chas: the baby voice running gag but That's a performance one, but they've set it up for the reader.
Chas: It becomes funnier for the reader because I'm now like waiting to go,
Chas: who's going to talk in baby voice next.
Chas: But then by doing all the gifts and setting that up, I am seeing those gags
Chas: and I'm laughing at them as he uses and abuses each of these wedding gifts one after another.
Chas: And it's painting a picture for me of the whole room as he moves from one to the other.
Chas: It's uh yeah it's a this was
Chas: an excellent scene to pick and i was originally going to say you know you've
Chas: missed the brief the only funny thing that's in the first scene is the word
Chas: rollerblades but this one despite being a very dialogue heavy scene does the
Chas: physical humor on the page perfectly because the physical humor is almost completely
Chas: disconnected from the dialogue.
Mel: Yeah i think in the first scene it's there's a there's a couple of moments and
Mel: this is about it being interspersed through the scene because i started reading
Mel: it and i texted you i was like actually we should do the next thing actually
Mel: no we should and then you were like we should just do the next thing like yeah that one um.
Chas: But do you have anything else you want to observe from.
Mel: No i think there there are still one or two parentheticals in there and what's
Mel: interesting to me is like so you get this moment where brad and then it goes
Mel: parentheses re beer float and parentheses and it's something that's not strictly
Mel: physical comedy but it's where the lines are telling you what he's referencing,
Mel: what he's looking at, referring to.
Mel: You give the actor a moment to sort of really react to that because there's
Mel: all these bits going. You have a few...
Mel: Bits again where we a lot of those sort
Mel: of all caps like when a toaster gift dings a
Mel: toaster dings is in all caps with an exclamation point yeah
Mel: so there's a lot of those different things going on like
Mel: fao schwartz size chocolate groom and the
Mel: disemboweled bottom half of the bride all in caps yeah
Mel: you know um and in the actual film
Mel: scene there's a moment where he that that
Mel: he's either ad-libbed or they've added in shot list where he says i left
Mel: the hand to hold he reaches over and holds her hand for just
Mel: a beat and then takes his hand away looks at his hand and there's chocolate
Mel: on it so starts licking his fingers uh you know when you've
Mel: set up so many the toaster the
Mel: beer the napkin the place setting the tags on
Mel: the get when you've set up all these things that you've given the
Mel: actors a lot to play with you've given the set designers a
Mel: lot of really specific things you you know you
Mel: you've given so many pieces of the puzzle to play with that that's just an absolute
Mel: joy and you can see that it's not like oh they ad-libbed because they're better
Mel: than the writers the writers have set all of that up really well on the page
Mel: um and so yeah i i got quite a bit out of that as well the.
Chas: Quote-unquote sacrifice that they've made in terms of white space is at the
Chas: opening of that scene there's two paragraphs a three-line paragraph and a four line paragraph.
Chas: And after that, every action line is a two or a one line paragraph that is a gag.
Chas: And they've done it so well. And I'm fascinated that they did cut the flashback.
Chas: The flashback seemed like it would fit, you know, it was very Scrubs kind of thing.
Chas: Like character talks about funny moment in life, cut to that thing happening. Ha ha, hilarious.
Chas: You know, it gives you a chance to do more gags so interesting that they that
Chas: the scene was working so well that introducing that flashback would have um compromised it.
Mel: And then it does it ends with a smash cut too so we get another you know sort of direction.
Chas: And um it's great yeah
Chas: i mean they like so in the first scene
Chas: with the with the wedding they've they're being more
Chas: explicit with camera movements i think that's another thing that maybe i'm learning
Chas: and it's like it should be obvious but you know how I love how Craig Mazin like
Chas: keeps on railing against the gurus who say don't direct from the page and he's
Chas: like that's our job but it is making me kind of keenly aware that it's,
Chas: And any comedy writer out there is going to go, why the fuck are we listening
Chas: to Chaz? But frame is so important for humor.
Chas: Like comedy might be in the two shot. Comedy might be in the wide.
Chas: Comedy might be in the close up. And it's important to, you know,
Chas: perhaps direct the camera a bit more because it might be funnier.
Mel: Yep. So many of these gags are visually dependent. Like, so for example,
Mel: it's really important that we haven't seen the chocolate groom before that gag
Mel: because it's funnier that way.
Mel: And so they look left to see or camera sees or whatever in some ways is really important.
Mel: And sometimes it's important that you only see the top half of somebody because
Mel: something's going to come in later.
Mel: And when you're reading it, you only get the one chance to set up in the viewer's
Mel: eye what they are or are not seeing.
Mel: And so that camera stuff is helpful.
Chas: Now, this is unrelated to the brief, but I think it's impressive.
Chas: And it reminds me of what they did in the Yellow Jackets pilot.
Chas: And it's the transition from the bottom of page three from the wedding into the show.
Chas: And the reason why I just want to call it out is I think it's so essential to a pilot in particular.
Chas: So, Alex grabs Hot Guy's hand, a rom-com score ignites as they run up the aisle
Chas: and burst out of the church.
Chas: We follow them into the sunset as the score crescendos.
Chas: It's the perfect happy ending to a shitty rom-com. But.
Chas: And the word but is in all caps, italics and underlined, followed by an ellipses.
Chas: As they run slash blade towards Bliss, we slowly pull the camera back away from
Chas: them, ellipses, and then back into the church, ellipses.
Chas: Interior church continuous. Find Dave on the altar destroyed,
Chas: flanked by the stunned wedding party.
Chas: This is the story of the other side of the happy ending.
Chas: The place is silent. A cough, a whisper.
Chas: So like that line this is the story of the other side of the happy ending it's
Chas: it's perfect it's in the perfect place and they they're i feel like they've
Chas: set that up so wonderfully because of all that camera direction on the page
Chas: because that's a visual gag the run slash blade towards bliss is.
Mel: So good funny yes it's funny as a
Mel: word it's funny to try to visualize it it's all great and
Mel: it also like also there's the idea that they're clearly mismatched yeah
Mel: you know you're getting all of that like she's she's not
Mel: actually in love with this guy there's just there's a
Mel: lot of other things at play oh and then those other things
Mel: at play are dave at the altar surrounded by their
Mel: friends um this is absolutely one of the most
Mel: uh underrated at least in terms of you know it didn't get very much awards attention
Mel: didn't get whatever just one of the most fantastic sitcoms of the last um well
Mel: it came out the same year as bridesmaids so it has been 14 years so speaking of bridesmaids i.
Chas: Mean didn't you i'm not sure did you say on on on mike on air that that episode
Chas: was directed by the russo brothers.
Mel: No i didn't so yes this is directed by the russo brothers which i think would
Mel: have been right around the time they were directing community yeah so having
Mel: them direct your pilot it'll just sort of get like again this is a time when
Mel: pilot season was still a thing um would have definitely guaranteed you'd get
Mel: it seen so yeah the russo brothers directed Mm-hmm.
Excerpts: I'm engaged! Oh my God! He asked me last night! What?
Excerpts: What is happening? So will you be my maid of honor? Of course I will!
Excerpts: I don't know what I'm supposed to do. You know, just whatever.
Excerpts: Throw the bachelorette party. Yeah.
Excerpts: Shower and... Oh my God.
Excerpts: Let's go meet the rest of the bridal party. Oh my God. I get to punch it a couple times.
Excerpts: You remember my cousin, Rita? They just bought a new house.
Excerpts: It is gorgeous. I wouldn't know. I only see the kitchen and the laundry room
Excerpts: and the ceiling in my bedroom.
Excerpts: Sometimes the floor. This is Becca from work. Is this your husband?
Excerpts: Oh no, I don't know him. I'm single. I was so distraught when I was single.
Excerpts: I'm fine being by myself.
Excerpts: Oh, Becca. This is Ducky's sister, Megan.
Excerpts: You must be Annie's fella. I'm not, he's not, I'm not with him.
Excerpts: I'm glad he's single because I'm going to climb that like a tree.
Excerpts: You have to meet Helen You're so pretty You're so cute Did you come from work?
Chas: My kids are getting into rom-coms Love this so much I really want to show them
Chas: Bridesmaids But I have to keep reminding myself,
Chas: Not about this sequence that we're going to do The extended food poisoning sequence
Chas: in the middle of the film Yeah.
Mel: They'd probably love this Oh yeah.
Chas: They would love this bit You know, I keep having to remind myself of,
Chas: um, it's, it's actually a piece, a perfect piece of physical performance.
Chas: I actually want to go to the script and find it. But when, you know,
Chas: opening on that scene between Annie and, um,
Chas: like where she's describing how he's like hanging his penis,
Chas: like near her face, like just strongly inferring that he would like a blow job.
Chas: And, uh, Kristen Wiig's performance of that is, uh, hilarious.
Excerpts: Eww, you had sex with him. We had an adult sleepover. Oh.
Excerpts: Did you let him sleep over in your mouth?
Excerpts: Annie. I'm sorry. You're unbelievable. He kept, like, putting it near my face.
Excerpts: They do that, don't they? Why do they do that? Let us offer.
Excerpts: If we don't offer... Please, you're supposed to slap it away. I couldn't.
Excerpts: You don't want to look right at it. No. It's too aggressive. I don't care. Hello.
Excerpts: That's my impression. Those are the balls. Yeah. I'm trying to make it round,
Excerpts: but I can't because I have elbows.
Chas: And yeah, I don't, my nine-year-old and 11-year-old are perhaps not yet ready
Chas: to find that as funny as I find it.
Mel: Speaking of Kristen Wiig, though, I will make a tiny plug that the writers of
Mel: Bridesmaids also wrote and starred in Bardman,
Mel: Stargarden, Vista Del Mar, which again speaking of something that
Mel: is just so wildly underrated um so if
Mel: you like bridesmaids you should watch that film uh and
Mel: i read the screenplay but yeah here we go and again
Mel: this is filmed very closely to
Mel: what it is however there's a couple bits that
Mel: the order has changed and there's two gags in particular both
Mel: of which involving just melissa mccarthy off on her own
Mel: doing stuff that aren't anywhere at all and
Mel: i just have a feeling that was just like melissa mccarthy is doing some funny
Mel: shit so uh let's film it and if we need a place to drop it in we will but for
Mel: the most part it quite closely follows the page other than again going oh actually
Mel: the flow here works better if we don't you know cut back to this other room
Mel: so they they rearrange the pieces okay.
Chas: Interesting i had completely forgotten i remembered that this script was nominated
Chas: for an oscar i forgot that um melissa mccarthy was nominated.
Mel: Honestly that we need to do more like ensemble cast and also just like casting
Mel: like full stop just casting director awards for something like this like putting
Mel: this team together chef's kiss yeah.
Chas: Okay so for for listeners who don't know and are willing to to get spoiled uh
Chas: bridesmaids is the what did you say 2011.
Mel: Yes 2011.
Chas: Comedy film uh set uh with two best friends annie and lillian lillian is getting
Chas: married, Annie is her maid of honour, and the...
Chas: The drive of the film is around Lillian's new friend, Helen,
Chas: who is very wealthy, played by Rose Byrne.
Mel: Aussie shout out.
Chas: And Annie's competition for Lillian's affections gets hilariously and way out of hand.
Chas: And there's two, no, three additional bridesmaids, Megan, played by Melissa
Chas: McCarthy, and then there's Rita and Becca.
Mel: Ellie Kemper and Wendy McClellan Covey is Rita.
Chas: Okay. And look, I feel remiss in not having mentioned that Maya Rudolph plays Lillian.
Mel: I was watching this just thinking about, like, if you watch behind the scenes
Mel: of certain things, Bridesmaid and The Good Place as well.
Mel: She has so few lines, actually, in this scene.
Mel: It's really not until the end about her. but every time she does a line delivery
Mel: it's completely different.
Chas: And utterly.
Mel: Hilarious she's just phenomenal and she's so good in this.
Chas: So um the the setup for this particular scene is that annie has taken like she
Chas: loves finding interesting little cheap restaurants.
Excerpts: I know it looks a little scary on the outside but the food is really good authentic
Excerpts: brazilian i'm telling you this is where Brazilians come to eat.
Excerpts: I got to say, and he's really good at this show. He's dragged me to the weirdest
Excerpts: places and the food is always incredible.
Excerpts: And plus you get a lot for your money too. So that's good.
Chas: And then they've gone from the Brazilian place to a really high end bridal shop.
Excerpts: Belle en Blanc. This is the place. Great job.
Excerpts: Belle en Blanc.
Excerpts: Reservation name. Oh, I don't, I don't have one. we're just here to shop just to try on some dresses.
Excerpts: Okay. Well, the next available appointment for bridesmaids fittings is in seven
Excerpts: weeks. Absolutely no walk-in.
Excerpts: Whitney, it's Helen. Helen Harris? Yeah. Hi. Oh my God. Hi. Listen,
Excerpts: I'll buzz you right in. Great. Thank you.
Chas: So they're all in surrounded by these very expensive dresses.
Chas: And as they are trying on the dresses, everyone who ate meat at the Brazilian
Chas: restaurant, which is everyone except But Helen starts to get horrific food poisoning.
Mel: It's our first sign that Helen's actually queer. Just saying.
Chas: Okay.
Mel: Look, I ship Helen and Megan together. So that's beside the point.
Chas: Look, this scene has got a lot of dialogue. And there's some bits where they're
Chas: using the dialogue to actually paint the visuals.
Chas: So in some ways it undermines what we're trying to look for here,
Chas: except maybe if you've got a scene well established enough,
Chas: Having characters talking about what's happening is the funnier option than doing it in big print.
Chas: Sorry, for non-Australian listeners, I keep forgetting, every now and then we
Chas: get a listener go, what is this big print of which they speak?
Chas: We're talking about action lines.
Mel: I do think the action lines, they start foreshadowing things quite early.
Excerpts: This is some classy shit here. Jesus, Megan.
Excerpts: I'm sorry, I won't apologize. eyes i'm not even confident of which end that came out of.
Mel: A burp escapes megan's mouth like that's you know it's just an action line and
Mel: then we move on and you just think oh okay so it starts seeding it in before
Mel: everything really gets rolling.
Chas: Yeah i but i would also like to note that the the they
Chas: don't overdo the big print here like
Chas: i i can't point to anything that
Chas: is like oh they did this incredible there's this
Chas: one line that just blows me away it is largely describing what we see in here
Chas: but almost every action line was making me laugh out loud on the on public transport
Chas: um by the time it it really kicks off so yes on page 39 you've got the burp escaping megan's mouth,
Chas: they start talking about the dresses and how expensive they are.
Chas: And it's only after a time jump when they've cut to later, they're in the main fitting area.
Chas: It's on page 40 that the top of that scene is a two line action line.
Chas: The girls are in different dresses.
Chas: Lillian is not there. They look great, comma, although Megan's face is beet red.
Chas: And this is the one thing that I will they do a lot is two clause sentences
Chas: so they'll do one clause telling you what's going on and then the next clause is a more funny detail.
Mel: I do think the um you you mentioned the
Mel: time jump and that's actually one of the places where they insert Melissa McCarthy
Mel: doing you know ad-libbing with the sofa and I think it is partly to make it
Mel: clear that there has been a significant time jump and And it's not because we're
Mel: otherwise we're going from Annie looking at a dress and a drip of sweat comes
Mel: down her face to the girls in different dresses.
Mel: And I think then showing this big wide shot of Melissa McCarthy flopping on
Mel: the on the couch with nobody else in the room makes it clear that everyone is
Mel: sort of moving on and doing something else.
Mel: Whereas if you just went from Annie to the big group, it might take you a minute to bump on.
Mel: Oh, wait, what has happened here?
Mel: It's not a huge thing, but it is a small thing that just helps smooth out the time jump.
Chas: Yeah. So we get through the rest of page 40 and half of page 41.
Chas: They are talking in dialogue about it being hot.
Excerpts: This is designer as well. Is anyone else hot? It is like an oven user.
Chas: And then I think this is important. The paragraph where it all kicks off is
Chas: actually really understated.
Chas: There's no exclamation marks. There's no italics.
Mel: No all caps, which we've seen in other places in this script.
Chas: But to make us read it, they do interrupt Annie's line.
Excerpts: Lillian.
Excerpts: I don't know what to say you look so.
Chas: She's halfway through a
Chas: line says you are and then dash dash by
Chas: doing that interruption it is forcing us to to
Chas: read the the paragraph and also the paragraph is four lines long it actually
Chas: really stands out from everything else in the in the script so far so it is
Chas: trying to use techniques to force you to read the action line and the action
Chas: line is megan lurches forward as the contents of her stomach come up into her mouth.
Chas: She claps her hand over her mouth to stop from throwing up.
Chas: After a beat, she swallows it and pushes it back down. Looks nauseous.
Mel: Asterisk, nauseated.
Chas: I do, I think I like how many, they use way more words than they need to,
Chas: like they're deliberately overwriting, like in terms of using white space,
Chas: like they're taking their time with it.
Mel: And multiple full stops.
Chas: The contents of her stomach cup come up into her mouth is more words than you need to describe that.
Chas: And that is a deliberate comedic choice.
Mel: Yeah. It's not she gags or dry heaves or yeah, it's a full line.
Chas: Yeah. And then the next paragraph is following Annie trying to deny Helen's accusation.
Chas: She's caused the food poisoning with her choice of restaurant
Chas: and the action line is Annie is really
Chas: sweaty now comma a mark between her boobs and
Chas: that's what I mean about like you know you could have just said
Chas: Annie is really sweaty now but now they've just added a little
Chas: comedic detail into that sentence suddenly
Chas: Becca politely cups her hand over her mouth to stifle herself from getting sick
Chas: and sorry i'm just laughing reading it back over right now we've gone to the
Chas: next page it's clear that rita's also sick but then i do love this so rita says you.
Excerpts: Know i don't really care which dress we get it doesn't matter me i just need
Excerpts: to get off this white carpet okay no not the bathroom.
Chas: And then we hear a noise it doesn't describe what the noise is and.
Mel: It's sent it's just that one by itself.
Chas: And then.
Mel: There's a paragraph break and then the next action line.
Chas: They all stand in horrified silence becca still holding her hands against her
Chas: face there are faint and loud stomach churning sounds now i love there are faint
Chas: and in brackets and loud so like contradictory well.
Mel: I got annoyed at first because the contradictory but i think what they're saying
Mel: is that like one or two of their stomachs are faint and then some of their stomachs are loud you.
Chas: Know and.
Mel: It does make you stop and go oh yeah no okay that makes sense.
Chas: And the the churning is in all caps so that one word like they are escalating
Chas: their their use of the big print here and.
Mel: Here's where we've had a lot more dialogue before but then we're getting more
Mel: and more big print because it's starting to be action like people are still
Mel: saying things for sure and there's a couple of places particularly when it cuts
Mel: back to helen and annie um facing off they're having this dialogue.
Excerpts: You don't look very well, Annie. I feel fine.
Excerpts: Are you sure? It wasn't that gray kind of lamb, or you ate a lot of that weird chicken. Was it that?
Excerpts: No. I'm...
Excerpts: I feel fine.
Mel: But then most of the rest of the characters are now just in panic mode.
Mel: And so it's a lot of action and then a lot of yelling.
Excerpts: The knees are toilets! The knees are toilets! The knees are toilets!
Excerpts: No. No, Megan. No! No! Look away! Megan, no! Look away!
Mel: It's mostly action and interjections now.
Mel: Blocks of text are picking up a little bit because the dialogue is either lessened or quite terse.
Chas: Feel free to read some out. I'm just delighting in this. But then this podcast
Chas: will be mostly my voice, which is what no one wants.
Mel: I think I did more of the, you know, the old fuddy-duddy black and white.
Chas: So what we then get is three of the bridesmaids end up in the very small bathroom.
Mel: With just one toilet and one sink there's a phenomenal top-down
Mel: shot okay that it's not in the
Mel: script but obviously it the actions
Mel: are all again the writers have set up the actions are all happening
Mel: it doesn't say there's a top-down shot but when you've set this up and you get
Mel: this location and then all of a sudden just real quick before it breaks out
Mel: to go back to the other room where helen and annie are There's just this like
Mel: two second top down shot of the absolute chaos that the last two pages have
Mel: spent all this time laying out.
Mel: And you can see the wreckage. It's great.
Chas: And then just to set up like the structure of what happens here is that we've
Chas: got the bridesmaids in the bathroom.
Chas: We've got Annie and Helen with Annie still pretending that she's not sick.
Chas: And that's more dialogue character driven. Although I would say when we get
Chas: to it, I think Kristen Wiig's performance of eating that almond is...
Chas: Incredible and.
Mel: It's got like four lines four action
Mel: lines it really dwells on her
Mel: agonizing about the fact that she has to take this home and and she has to put
Mel: it in her mouth and she has to chew it she forces it down and swallows the almonds
Mel: down with a slow gulp like it's it's dwelling on the misery that this is causing.
Chas: Her yeah you.
Mel: Know not just annie grudgingly takes it like it it it draws it out for you.
Chas: Yeah and then finally uh lillian
Chas: the bride is the uh the cap
Chas: on the scene as there's nowhere to go so she goes to
Chas: try and use the bathroom in the convenience store across the street and ends
Chas: up lowering herself and shitting herself in the middle of the street in a gorgeous
Chas: very expensive wedding dress now that's me like jumping to the end but summarizing
Chas: the structure of the scene but then the reason i'm doing that is then we can
Chas: dwell like that structuring,
Chas: is important because then we can identify what they're doing
Chas: in the action lines so i really like again one of the things that i'm taking
Chas: away from this is in comedy feel free to spend some time in setup because all
Chas: these all these writers are doing that so the bath the single toilet bathroom
Chas: is as pristine, pristine in caps,
Chas: and white in caps as the fitting area.
Chas: Everything is just right, calm and quiet. Classical music plays softly.
Chas: BAM! Exclamation mark. All caps.
Chas: The door bursts open as Rita runs in. She projectile vomits into the toilet.
Chas: Ellipsis. But the seat is down. Everything sprays onto the back wall.
Chas: So that ellipsis creates the joke. The visual joke.
Chas: Like obviously when we're seeing that, we are seeing all that happen in one action and it's funny.
Chas: But what makes it funny on the page is the ellipsis. the fact that they said
Chas: into the toilet and not onto the toilet like they've deliberately.
Mel: They don't tip their hand yeah they've done.
Chas: It they've done a reveal on the page structuring a joke that isn't uh on screen.
Mel: But it takes you a beat to realize what's happening on screen too right but
Mel: yeah it's it's giving the reader the experience of this is funny with and then
Mel: that not being the technical.
Mel: She opens the stall door. The seat is down.
Mel: She doesn't have time to open it. Like that's technical, but it's not funny. This is funny.
Chas: Yeah. Uh, Rita slams the top open and heaves again into the bowl as Megan runs
Chas: in holding her backside.
Chas: Rita ignores her as her head is in it and she grips the sides, barfing.
Chas: In desperation, Megan hikes up her dress, hops onto the counter and sits in
Chas: the sink and sits is in caps and the sink is in caps so they are now like doing highlights.
Mel: She sits in the sink yeah.
Chas: So yeah we cut back to helen and annie having their um i think it literally
Chas: says face off yeah helen and annie are faced off annie is sweating.
Mel: Profusely and the juxtaposition of you have these two women in these very compromising
Mel: positions yelling at each other and then suddenly you cut into the room and
Mel: you have two people completely silent just staring at each other and all they're
Mel: doing is quote sweating profusely like you get that that big shift you know
Mel: right there which is really great.
Excerpts: You don't look very well Annie I feel fine.
Chas: Now, I've seen this film a number of times, but I can't remember where the top-down
Chas: shot is. It is that break. It is?
Mel: It is this break. Okay. Yeah, so Rita and Megan go back and forth for a few
Mel: more seconds, just still yelling, no, no, look away, look away, ah!
Mel: And then you get this top-down shot, and it's like, again, just you realize
Mel: the actual destruction that they have wrought, and then it cuts back to Helen and Annie sweating.
Chas: So, Becca joins Megan and Rita in the bathroom.
Chas: Becca runs in blindly over the toilet that Rita is still barfing in.
Chas: Vomit rains down on the back of Rita's head. I did enjoy that because they haven't
Chas: had to say it's Becca's vomit.
Chas: They very carefully painted the shot. They've chosen the frame with those words.
Mel: Right i know.
Chas: From those words that becca is not in the in that shot as it's written on the
Chas: page i can't remember how they actually shot it but what they've written on
Chas: the page for me is visualizing,
Chas: becca not being in that shot it's about the vomit raining down on the back of
Chas: rita's head while she herself is vomiting.
Mel: Um and this is actually where uh they
Mel: the content is all the same but the order starts
Mel: changing and edit they give you a bit more time with
Mel: annie and helen um some of their content
Mel: that's down on the other page and so instead of cutting back and forth quite
Mel: so much in between vomit sweating vomit front like they give and i think it's
Mel: mostly to give the weight of the scene between annie and helen because they
Mel: really start having a little more
Mel: of a of a realization you know of what's really happening so again like,
Mel: everything's the same but the flow of things which is
Mel: funny on the page and really works like you can tell what they're doing and
Mel: that thing where you just talked about uh right before becca runs in
Mel: annie's line is i don't have to throw up interior bathroom becca runs in and
Mel: blindly throws up like that's funny on the page yeah but the sacrifice clearly
Mel: became oh you know the actors were really having this moment and and it they
Mel: wanted you know the flow to go a little bit differently so So,
Mel: honestly, if I'm writing this and planning on directing this,
Mel: I go, this is a funny transition.
Mel: Well, like in the edit, if it doesn't go exactly this way, it doesn't matter.
Mel: On the page, this is funny. That's what I'm trying to do to sell the thing. So, that stays.
Chas: Yeah. And, I mean, we've got the, we finally get the only, we're back with Helen and Annie.
Chas: And there's one more cut back into the bathroom and there's no big print at
Chas: all on the script. So, we're on page 44 and it's.
Excerpts: What did we eat? Sinks are gone. What are you doing? It's coming out of me like lava.
Excerpts: Don't fucking look at me.
Chas: This is the point where I'm like, they've done so much setup that they can create
Chas: the visual through the dialogue.
Mel: I think the reason, I think also the reason they have the, even though Megan
Mel: has said a line, there are other people in the room and we know that.
Mel: So saying becca noticing her on the sink is like is just making clear to us
Mel: because we've done all the setup that it's not rita that she's noticing it's
Mel: not like this is the specific thing she's noticing yeah because again we've
Mel: seen so much happen in this bathroom in the last 30 seconds yeah.
Chas: I mean if if i if it hasn't been clear over the the life of this podcast i have
Chas: a very puerile sense of humor this scene is like custom made for me and i'm
Chas: impressed like if i was writing this i would be like a child i would be doing
Chas: all of the sound effects um and.
Mel: I a few years ago i was at a
Mel: um some gay event night you
Mel: know and it's like friday night slash saturday morning
Mel: at 1 a.m and you've been drinking you and the bar had
Mel: bridesmaids on playing over the bar
Mel: and i just like i'd been dancing and i wanted
Mel: a minute so i went and kind of like was leaning against the bar just
Mel: to have a breather and bridesmaids was on my friend came over and we it because
Mel: it was on silence we were watching and we were making
Mel: at some point this scene came on and we did the sound effects
Mel: i'm sure it probably wasn't as funny as we thought we were but
Mel: it's so great because you can watch this scene even
Mel: this even the conversations right between helen and any even all of those but
Mel: you don't need to know what they're saying everything that is in those action
Mel: lines reads and we just sat there for like 20 minutes just watching them interact
Mel: and watching the physical comedy and yeah making the noises yeah.
Chas: And so this this sequence culminates
Chas: as you've already described you've got the wonderful taking the time
Chas: with the big print of annie chewing on that almond now the one difference that
Chas: they've made that i remember from the from the screen is on the page it says
Chas: annie takes a handful and painfully puts them in her mouth my memory from on screen is it's one.
Mel: I think she might i think she might take some and
Mel: then just pick the one and put it in her mouth
Mel: you know um yeah where it's like oh i can do i can't there's no way i can do
Mel: one and then that's it and also i just i love the touch that they're jordan
Mel: almonds which is exactly what you would have in that kind of bridal dress places so.
Chas: I look i figure we should do the the culmination which is um the exterior belle en blanc uh.
Mel: The description.
Chas: Of of lillian who's turned and bolted away from within the dress shop and annie's running after her.
Excerpts: Annie, everybody's really sick from that restaurant.
Excerpts: But it wasn't the restaurant. Oh, no, no, no. Lillian, where are you going? I need a bathroom.
Chas: Lillian bursts out of the building and runs across the street towards a 7-Eleven.
Chas: Cars screech to a halt to avoid the fleeing bride.
Excerpts: Help! Oh, no. Oh, no. Where are you going? Come back. Where are you going?
Excerpts: Help, be careful. What are you doing?
Excerpts: It's happening. Help! It's happening. It's happening. It's happening.
Chas: Annie runs out and watches in horror. Suddenly, Lillian stops running and slowly
Chas: sinks down onto the ground, embarrassed and unable to move.
Chas: So again, they're doing the what you can see and then comma and then the second
Chas: clause giving it humor, character.
Chas: She throws a helpless look back at Annie. In the doorway, Whitney and Annie watch it all in horror.
Mel: And if you watch it, even the fact that the way that she slowly sinks onto the
Mel: ground is exactly what happens.
Chas: That bit of performance is incredible.
Mel: She almost does the elevator behind the couch, you know, for a kid.
Mel: It's just, it's a perfect bit of performance, but it is there in the action
Mel: line. She stops running and slowly sinks.
Mel: Although she kind of, she doesn't just stop and sink. She like goes into slow
Mel: motion as she sinks into the ground.
Chas: Well, I mean, what I love about, like, I can see it because Maya Rudolph's performance is so amazing.
Chas: She captures perfectly the look of someone who does not want to sink to the
Chas: ground, but their body is betraying them.
Chas: So it's like, I want to keep walking and I am getting closer and closer to the ground.
Mel: I definitely look. There's a street in Atlanta where I did this once.
Mel: More successfully, I will say, but I literally was, and I could not move for
Mel: about five minutes, and watching this back, and even just reading it,
Mel: you're like, yeah, this is...
Mel: Embarrassed and unable to move helpless
Mel: like the lines are really great it just gives you that sense of everything and
Mel: even the the cars screech to a halt we that's that's in the movie like they've
Mel: written something that's so evocative um you know it's it's all there i.
Chas: Mean i did i did go back to the the very beginning scene the description of
Chas: annie mimicking uh john hams like putting his penis in her face is not in the big print and.
Mel: Then when she imitates the.
Chas: Penis it just says annie imitates a penis.
Mel: Aha so that's yeah hey which also
Mel: if christian wig wrote this like presumably she's like yeah no i
Mel: don't know what i got this yeah all right i i
Mel: i've i've had this one boyfriend in mind i've done this
Mel: before yeah this is this is what i'll do that's fine
Mel: um i will say one other thing that i did find
Mel: interesting real quick at the very end of the line it does
Mel: the thing that happy endings does okay where helen has
Mel: come out and goes um and in parentheticals re the expensive dress we'll just
Mel: take five with the bernese it doesn't have to do that just like brad's line
Mel: and happy endings didn't have to do that it just helps give a little bit of
Mel: context because it could it could be referring to a couple other things and
Mel: And it's reminding you of, you know, what's happening.
Mel: And the bigger context, you know, we haven't seen Whitney for a few minutes
Mel: until she was running out, etc.
Mel: Again, it's something that you probably could delete. But it is interesting
Mel: that when you've got so much other action going that these scenes do go.
Mel: We need a few more parentheticals than we would normally use to remind you of, you know, everything.
Chas: Yeah, because the line, we'll just take five of the Fritz Bernays,
Chas: Whitney, thank you. it's clearly that's about the expensive dress like it's
Chas: not about anything else but they just,
Chas: decided to orient you that Helen is deliberately not talking about anything
Chas: of the incredible things that have just happened.
Mel: This isn't a joke. This is her actively avoiding everything that is right in
Mel: front of her. Yeah, exactly.
Chas: Cool. So, Mel, what did you learn from this exercise? What are you taking away for you for your pages?
Chas: Because you're writing two comedies at the moment.
Mel: Well, I'm writing one comedy and one, I'm calling it a tromedy.
Chas: I mean, I laughed a lot in your tromedy.
Mel: What? Most people do when they hear about my trauma jazz.
Chas: I mean, we're talking about, I'm talking about mothering.
Mel: Mothering is the tromedy, yeah, that is the tromedy. And then one rom-com.
Mel: And I think that the thing with the tromedy is there's a lot of different genres in it.
Mel: And that is why we're doing the tonal shift with everything everywhere at once
Mel: and a few other things coming up.
Mel: Because, yes, there's a bit of comedy, there's a lot of slapstick,
Mel: but there's a lot of tonal shifts in different genres. Whereas at one point,
Mel: there's a scene that's breaking out, and it's this little almost sci-fi Doctor
Mel: Who type scene for about two pages.
Mel: Whereas My Current Husband, which is the comedy of Remarriage,
Mel: it is a rom-com, and there's a lot of slapstick.
Mel: It's very much a screwball. So there's a lot of very quick dialogue,
Mel: but there's a lot of comedy.
Mel: And we're using, you know, different things within the scene,
Mel: different physical skills that, you know, the characters would have and et cetera.
Mel: And so looking at this, I would say the first thing, like what you said from
Mel: Happy Endings, is sometimes a lot of table setting earlier is better than,
Mel: you know, three or four stops for table setting throughout.
Mel: And so going back and looking at one scene in particular that maybe,
Mel: oh, I do take a couple of these chunks and just combine them at the top is pretty good.
Mel: I think I really enjoyed that, which is not something that I've done.
Mel: And I don't know that I need to do it. But I think that
Mel: considering the when certain visual gags should be directed a little bit more
Mel: on the page and whether I do that like as explicitly as bringing up baby or
Mel: where I use the characters looks to direct it,
Mel: which is what Happy Endings does, or whether I do, you know,
Mel: like you were talking about the scene when she bursts into the stall.
Mel: And then we don't.
Mel: She's just throwing up on the back of her head and we it tells
Mel: you exactly what that shot would be seeing you know
Mel: any of those techniques might work but I think um yeah which
Mel: of those is best for the particular scene that
Mel: I'm in so those are probably my two biggest takeaways I really did enjoy seeing
Mel: some of the techniques that I've been using in terms of both like there's a
Mel: like blam you know there's sound effects and and a few things at very key moments
Mel: but also when they use caps versus when they don't.
Mel: And I need to be a bit more judicious about my parentheticals,
Mel: especially, but seeing all of them do it, I'm like, okay, you know, I can scale it back.
Mel: But if anyone tells me to take them all out, I'll be firmly, I have, I have proof.
Mel: I'll pull out my, you know, my giant stack of papers and point at my proof.
Chas: Yeah. I mean, I was so impressed that Bridesmaids, it ended up doing the blam and the,
Chas: and the caps and stuff like that but that first paragraph where megan throws
Chas: up into her mouth how they did none of that they just used an interruption to
Chas: make you start reading the paragraph and then really took their time with that that paragraph it's.
Mel: A great takeaway um especially because in a screwball there are a
Mel: lot of interruptions but it's usually dialogue that's interrupting and you're
Mel: right when it's this longer action line suddenly interrupting it does make you
Mel: take notice of oh even though it's subtle they're not giant you know blocks
Mel: of exclamation points it's saying this is really uh key uh something's about
Mel: to happen i really like that that note.
Chas: And i i love the the same observation that you've made about taking the time
Chas: to set up physical humor one of the things that i think it's important to set
Chas: up is geography of the space especially as they're moving around because all
Chas: three of these scenes did that very well.
Chas: Bringing up Baby, obviously, you've got three different perspectives that creates
Chas: the humor, the framing, but lots of geography and you're never lost in it.
Chas: Happy Endings, the geography of the room and the gifts.
Chas: And like you said, that they even...
Chas: You feel like you can see everything. And yet at the end, they still managed
Chas: to do a reveal without saying reveal the giant.
Mel: FAO Schwartz chocolate figures.
Chas: Yeah.
Mel: Bridesmaids has different, different people and different combinations in different rooms.
Chas: Yeah.
Mel: And you know, you are pretty clear where you are at any given point because
Mel: of who you're with and what they're doing.
Chas: Yeah. And, and taking the time to set up the, whatever it is, is it the geography?
Chas: Is it the running gag about the baby voice is it the the gifts
Chas: you know but taking the time to set it up
Chas: then actually allows you to use
Chas: that those action lines either more for to to make gags or to direct you know
Chas: you can you can spend that time picking the frame picking the perspective telling
Chas: us the thing in in action that is going to make it funnier on screen or trying
Chas: to recreate that experience on screen.
Chas: Directing from the page, you might say.
Mel: Yeah, with differing degrees of subtlety, they all direct from the page a bit.
Mel: But as a director, when I read a script, I want to be seeing it in my head, you know?
Mel: I don't, you know, something that doesn't evoke some sort of imagery in your
Mel: head is probably not that interesting.
Chas: Cool. Well, thank you for that. The thing that I'm writing next is not got any physical comedy.
Chas: There is one character that I want to give a lot of dry wit to.
Chas: So you know maybe as you continue to write your different comedies we can start
Chas: doing more exploration into different aspects of comedy i.
Mel: Will be making you watch a 40s comedy uh if we do one on on dry wet in comedy because.
Chas: Look to be very clear i love cinema from all backgrounds times it's just as
Chas: a screenwriter that i uh so.
Mel: Much to learn.
Chas: From all of the.
Mel: Screenwriting i suppose yeah if you're talking wit and dialogue we can go there.
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Chas: Thank you so much. And thank you, Mel, for making this happen, for doing the homework.
Chas: You presented me with options and I'm like, I don't have time. Just choose.
Mel: I sent you a whole email with like, here's eight scenes from these four different
Mel: scripts. What do you want? And I get a text from Jess, pick one.
Chas: Okay.
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