Beat Sheets

Beat sheets are a pain in the ass. They’re neither fish nor fowl, everyone has their own particular way of writing them, and anyone who’s not a writer has a really hard time reading them (just try getting useful notes on a beat sheet from a non-writer…I dare you).

That being said, beat sheets are one of the most important tools any writer can use. They are your road map. Writing without a solid beat sheet is just asking for trouble.

How do you learn to write a beat sheet? Well, like screenwriting itself, the best way is to go out and read some beat sheets, then break down some movies yourself. Unfortunately finding beat sheets has always been difficult.

Not anymore.

Welcome to Beat Sheet Central, a collection of beat sheets and breakdowns from recent (and not so recent) films and television series.

Last I checked they had 30+ beat sheets in the archives, and promises of more to come.

A big H/T to Scott where I saw it first.

Newbie Mistakes: Why Your Life Story Doesn’t Make For A Good Film

A couple years back the production company I was working for sent me and some colleagues to Robert McKee’s Story seminar. The seminar took place over a weekend, lasted about 10 hours a day, and was essentially one long monologue by the guru. He waxed poetic on everything and anything, and occasionally even dropped some worthwhile screenwriting advice.

Now I’m not a rabid McKee fan by any stretch of the imagination, but he definitely had a couple of things to say that made a hell of a lot of sense. One of my favorites, and I’m paraphrasing here, went a little something like this:

There are two kinds of bad movie that a screenwriter can write. The “Teenage-Boy-Nonsensical-Orgasm-of-Special-Effects” (ie. Transformers), and The-Personal-Life-Story.”

The first type is problematic because movies in that vein usually amount to nothing more than a series of huge explosions with no story connecting them. They can be fun to look at, but most people will forget them thirty seconds after leaving the theater, or even worse they’ll spend the duration of the movie going “that makes no sense.” Pretty obvious, right?

The second is a little more problematic to explain. A lot of neophyte writers make the mistake of just translating their lives to the screen, the reasoning is usually that they lived it, they know it, and it sure is interesting to them and their friends.

Problem is that it’s rarely interesting to anyone else, and most neophytes don’t know how to trim the boring bits.

The problem with being slavishly devoted to a life story, even if it’s a really interesting one, is that life is messy. There’s rarely and logical progression to it. Instead of having a strong narrative thoughline, most lives tend to careen chaotically from event to event. The events may be interesting individually, but string them together and they just start to feel random.

Instead of just throwing everything up on screen and seeing what sticks, you got to edit it down into a comprehensible story. Screenplays are not reality. The narrative rules that apply to real life have nothing in common with the narrative rules in screenwriting. If you insist on turning your life into a screenplay, at least turn it into a stylized one. Figure out what story you want to tell, the narrative throughline that’ll let you tell it, and then don’t be afraid to cut everything and anything that doesn’t fit on that throughline, regardless of whether it “really happened” or not.

The people that are going to be reading your script don’t know you, and they sure as hell don’t care if the story really happened to you (unless you’re a marketable commodity). Leave that shit out and focus on giving them a well crafted story instead. If you can’t face doing that, if you can’t face fictionalizing your own life, then don’t write it. Make a documentary or something instead. Production companies everywhere will thank you.

Sex in Young Adult Lit

Cory Doctorow recently published his first young adult novel called Little Brother. Apparently it touched off a bit of a shit storm because the lead character in the novel, who happens to be 17 years old, loses his virginity during the course of the book.

That’s a problem for some people.

Sex in fiction, whether it’s in books or on the screen, has always been a bit of a tetchy subject for certain demographics. Personally I’ve never understood why. Sex is a natural part of being human, why shouldn’t it be reflected back at us in our media? Why should we let the fact that it’s a book about teenagers affect what we read in it? Teenagers smoke, drink, mouth off to their elders, and yes, they have sex. That ain’t gonna change, so why should we be so coy about depicting it?

It was these questions that led Doctorow to come up with a “Teen transgressions in YA literature FAQ,” which went a little something like this:

There’s really only one question: “Why have your characters done something that is likely to upset their parents, and why don’t you punish them for doing this?”

Now, the answer.

First, because teenagers have sex and drink beer, and most of the time the worst thing that results from this is a few days of social awkwardness and a hangover, respectively. When I was a teenager, I drank sometimes. I had sex sometimes. I disobeyed authority figures sometimes.

Mostly, it was OK. Sometimes it was bad. Sometimes it was wonderful. Once or twice, it was terrible. And it was thus for everyone I know. Teenagers take risks, even stupid risks, at times. But the chance on any given night that sneaking a beer will destroy your life is damned slim. Art isn’t exactly like life, and science fiction asks the reader to accept the impossible, but unless your book is about a universe in which disapproving parents have cooked the physics so that every act of disobedience leads swiftly to destruction, it won’t be very credible. The pathos that parents would like to see here become bathos: mawkish and trivial, heavy-handed, and preachy.

Second, because it is good art. Artists have included sex and sexual content in their general-audience material since cave-painting days. There’s a reason the Vatican and the Louvre are full of nudes. Sex is part of what it means to be human, so art has sex in it.

That’s pretty good advice for artists in general, but Doctorow doesn’t stop there. He’s got a few more thoughts when it comes to young adult stories specifically.

Sex in YA stories usually comes naturally, as the literal climax of a coming-of-age story in which the adolescent characters have undertaken a series of leaps of faiths, doing consequential things (lying, telling the truth, being noble, subverting authority, etc.) for the first time, never knowing, really knowing, what the outcome will be. These figurative losses of virginity are one of the major themes of YA novels – and one of the major themes of adolescence – so it’s artistically satisfying for the figurative to become literal in the course of the book. This is a common literary and artistic technique, and it’s very effective.

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is all about sex. Kids are going from sexual immaturity to sexual maturity. They’re transitioning from children into adults. Sex is an inherent part of that transition, and denying it, trying to censor it, is a futile attempt to infantilize kids who would otherwise be moving past that point. It’s ridiculous.

Doctorow has a few other things to say on the subject.

As the parent of a young daughter, I feel strongly that every parent has the right and responsibility to decide how his or her kids are exposed to sex and sexually explicit material.

However, that right is limited by reality: the likelihood that a high-school student has made it to her 14th or 15th year without encountering the facts of life is pretty low. What’s more, a kid who enters puberty without understanding the biological and emotional facts about her or his anatomy and what it’s for is going to be (even more) confused.

Adolescents think about sex. All the time. Many of them have sex. Many of them experiment with sex. I don’t believe that a fictional depiction of two young people who are in love and have sex is likely to impart any new knowledge to most teens – that is, the vast majority of teenagers are apt to be familiar with the existence of sexual liaisons between 17-year olds.

So since the reader isn’t apt to discover anything new about sex in reading the book I can’t see how this ends up interfering with a parent’s right to decide when and where their kids discover the existence of sex.

It makes story sense, it makes character sense and it makes social sense to have (tasteful) depictions of sex in YA lit. Time to get rid of these crazy, restrictive, unrealistic social mores and tell real stories.

Reading Is Fundamental

Like Amanda the Aspiring TV Writer, I happen to think that reading scripts is incredibly important.

The best way to learn how to write a screenplay isn’t to take a class, it’s to read as many professional screenplays as you possibly can. You’ll learn proper formatting, how to walk the fine line between too much description and not enough, and all sorts of stuff in between.

It’s easy to tell when someone hasn’t read many scripts. Their formatting will be off. The script will be littered with camera directions, or music cues. Rookie mistakes that could easily be avoided with a little research.

Luckily there are a lot of great resources where people can get scripts for free. Lee Thomson’s digs for TV scripts. Scriptshadow and The Matriarchal Script Paradigm for features. My PDF Scripts has a bit of a mix. Places like Script City if you’re willing to plunk down a few bucks.

Or you could just trot over to my very ownTyping Faster Script Library where I’ve already collected a bunch of scripts from all the places I listed above, plus a few other random places that have since gone defunct. Last I checked I’ve got 600+ scripts, bibles, pilots, pitches and treatments from all sorts of different television shows and features.

Now you got no excuse to not read a script a week for the next two years.

What’s your excuse?

I’d like to introduce you to Emily Hagins. Emily is a writer / director from Austin, Texas. She’s currently prepping her third film. A fan of old school horror flicks, Pathogen, her first film, was a Romero-esque Zombie movie with lots of blood and gore, while Party Killer was a play on the slasher genre.

Oh yeah. Did I mention that Emily started doing all this when she was just 12 years old?

It’s a pretty cool story. Emily just turned 17, but she’s already produced two feature length films that have seen limited theatrical releases. Impressive.

Her story’s also featured in an award winning documentary called Zombie Girl: The Movie, produced by Justin Johnson and Aaron Marshall, which won the Spirit of Slamdance Award at the 2009 Slamdance Film Festival.

There’s a great Q&A with Aaron over at Go Into Story that’s worth the read. And a big H/T to Scott Myers for posting such a cool story.

And it is a cool story. You’ve got a 12 year old girl who decided to go out there and make a feature film. And then she did it again. And now she’s doing it again.

How many of us can say the same thing? What’s our excuse?

If you want to be a director, then you could do a lot worse than emulating Emily Hagins.

Here’s a trailer for Zombie Girl: The Movie

A trailer for Emily’s first film Pathogen

And a Zombie Girl: The Movie Q&A from Slamdance:

No more excuses.

What’s it really like in the room?

A television writing room is like no other place on earth. Whether it’s the overflowing creativity, the joy of making up stories all day, or the fact that you’ve got a bunch of bat shit crazy writers jammed together like cattle, it’s something you’ve got to experience to believe.

But, for those of you who haven’t been fortunate enough to sneak your way into an active writer’s room, I give you this.

Richard Manning has, as they say, “been around the block” a couple of times. And he gives a hilarious, heart breakingly accurate idea of what it can be like when you first step into a writer’s room.

In fact, it’s so funny, I’m just gonna quote the whole thing.

Picture, if you will, perky young Mary Sue, an aspiring TV writer who’s celebrating her first sale. She pitched a dozen ideas to veteran genre-TV producer Sam Showrunner for his new series Space Slayers, in which a ragtag team of teenage misfits travels the galaxy and battles alien mutants. But Mary Sue’s enthusiasm will soon be tested; she has no idea what terrors await in… The Writers’ Room.

Mary Sue’s successful pitch:“Griff and Angela [the series leads] must mind-link with K’Vax [their sentient, female, wisecracking spaceship] after a radioactive nebula erases K’Vax’s memories.”

There was more to her pitch – such as the mind-link forcing the aloof Griff and Angela to confront their true feelings about one another – but Mary Sue never got that far; Sam had interrupted. “Good hook, but amnesia’s soft. Needs more jeopardy. Hey! What if the nebula turns K’Vax evil? And she tries to kill everybody on board! So it’s dangerous for Griff and Angela to go into her mind; they might never come out. Terrific pitch! Sold!”

Mary Sue was ecstatic. “Great! I’ll write up an outline –”

“We don’t do outlines. We – me and the writing staff – break all our stories in the room. Once we get the structure down, you go off and write the script. Come in Tuesday at nine. Bring in a beat sheet. Not an outline, just the big moves. Some rough act breaks. Keep it simple. One page, tops, just to get things started.”

And so it begins…

9:00 am Tuesday. A punctual Mary Sue happily looks around her first Writers’ Room. Cheap, mismatched “executive” chairs surround a coffee-stained table strewn with old magazines, food wrappers, a Slinky, a broken water pistol, various Rubik’s-type puzzles, and other toys. The walls are a crazy quilt of actors’ headshots, set blueprints, costume design sketches, test photos of alien prosthetics… and three large whiteboards.

Two are covered with multicolored scrawls, circles, arrows, renumbering, and crossouts – the story beats for Episodes 5 and 6, in impenetrable shorthand: “5. BRIDGE: G + A expo. K ng 10 min no Froonium. H/L payoff? AB: J zapped.” The third is frighteningly blank – a naked canvas awaiting a plot. It continues to await until:

9:40 am. Two writer/producers saunter in: Madman Moe, a cheerful, inexhaustible fount of wild ideas, and Cyndi Cynic, a jaded naysayer who’s great at untangling plot logic. They get coffee and make phone calls until:

10:15 am. Sam Showrunner dashes in. “Sorry. Problem on the set.” To Sam’s surprise, Mary Sue proudly hands him a fifteen-page outline. “Wow. Lot of work here. Good for you.” He glances at the first page, tosses it aside forever, and hands her a marker. “It’s your story; you do the honors. Ready? Teaser’s easy. Fly through nebula, ship sparks, life support screws up. Act One –”

Sam stops. Mary Sue’s still neatly printing “TEASER” on the whiteboard. “Just put a ‘T’,” Cyndi suggests. “Then put ‘Nebula, sparks, life support NG.”

“Act One, Beat One,” Sam continues. “Ramon runs diagnostics. Technobabble. Thinks he’s found the problem. Fixes it. All seems okay. Beat Two. Spooky stuff begins. Suspense. Scary noises. Like a horror movie. So… hmm… Maybe Trixie’s below decks. Alone. What’s she doing?”

“Taking a shower,” Moe offers. “With Angela. And suddenly the lights flicker and the water turns cold.”

“That’s good.” Sam turns to an aghast Mary Sue. “Put that up. T and A, shower, lights.”

“Can’t do that,” says Cyndi, to Mary Sue’s relief. “I’ve got Trixie showering with Ramon in ep 5.”

Moe’s unfazed. “So make it the sauna.”

“What sauna?”

Sam likes it. “The Cargo Bay, redressed and smoked up. That sauna.”

Cyndi considers. “We could do different color smoke because K’Vax is pumping in poisonous coolant gas or something.”

Sam’s enthused. “Great. We’re rolling now. We’ll be done by six, easy.”

6:45 pm. Act One has seven beats on the board, Act Two has five, Three and Four are still blank, and nobody likes any of it. “It’s flat,” says Sam. “Bland and boring.”

“Excuse me,” quavers Mary Sue. “But I, um… have a thought…”

“Jump right in,” says Sam. “It’s your story.”

“Well… maybe Beat Two should be a character scene with Griff and Angela… because we need to set up their unexpressed feelings for each other…”

All stare at her. “We do? Why?”

“Um… because later, when they mind-link with K’Vax, they confront their feelings and realize –”

“In episode seven?” Sam’s incredulous. “Not a chance. Besides, this story’s already way too soft. We need conflict. Drama is conflict.”

Mary Sue’s getting crabby. “Well, what I pitched had lots of conflict. Internal conflict.”

“This is TV, not some romance novel. I want external conflict. Action. Danger.”

Mary Sue snaps. “Well, if K’Vax turning evil isn’t enough danger, why don’t we just throw in some nasty aliens with guns?”

Silence.

“She’s nailed it,” says Cyndi. “Problem is, we’re missing a villain.”

Moe concurs. “Evil K’Vax is great, but our heroes have to cure her, not kill her, which means they don’t get to defeat a bad guy.”

Sam nods. “But if a Gavork spy sneaks on board and brainwashes K’Vax, now we’ve got two problems – and somebody to fight in Act Four.” He slaps the table. “That’s it. Solved. Okay, everybody go home and think about it and we’ll finish this tomorrow. Nine o’clock sharp.”

It’ll take four more days of this to break Mary Sue’s story. Ultimately, Ramon, not Angela, will join Trixie in the sauna, to follow up on their shower scene in ep 5. Oh, and the mind-link with K’Vax will indeed force Griff and Angela to confront their feelings for each other – but once the mind-link’s over, they’ll forget it ever happened.

Mary Sue will grudgingly concede it’s a cleaner, punchier story than the meandering fifteen pages she came up with on her own.

And then she’ll have two short weeks to turn it into a script that makes it all work… but that’s another tale.

A big ole H/T to Will Dixon where I saw it first.

The Three Building Blocks of Comedy and the Decline of 30 Rock

So I stumbled across this interesting meditation on the elements of a successful comedy, and how they relate to shows like 30 Rock and Will & Grace. Anyways, the article’s stuck with me, and I figured I’d share some of it here with you fine folks.

The three building blocks of comedy that they mention are pretty self-evident (and really two of the three are the building blocks of any scripted show). The building blocks of comedy are “…the premise and the plots that stem from it, the characters, and the jokes.”

What? Premise, characters and jokes? Pretty darn obvious isn’t it? Thankfully the article doesn’t stop there.

A show needn’t have all three of these things functioning at a high level to completely work, but a show with say, a really solid premise and plots, but predictable joke-writing, will eventually stop seeming funny, no matter how well-crafted the plots are.

It’s a question of shelf life. Comedies (and dramas to a lesser extent) can’t exist indefinitely without the audience becoming so inured to the rhythms of the show that it starts to lose a lot of its comedic (or dramatic) potential. If you know what joke’s coming it’s not as funny.

How does one extend the shelf life of your series? With strong fundamentals. You can get a show on the air with two of the three building blocks, but if you want it to last you need all of them to be strong.

The longer a comedy is on the air, the more used to its rhythms the audience becomes, which either results in episodes that are boring and predictable, or a creative staff that goes out of its way to keep from falling into a slump, only to succumb to other pitfalls. Recent examples would include how The Office went astray by making all its characters into big, goofy caricatures in the late episodes of its third season and early episodes of its fourth season, or how Curb Your Enthusiasm could never find solid footing in its often-muddled sixth season. But worse is when a promising or even terrific comedy chases itself into oblivion, like Entourage did after its second season, or Roseanne did in its last three years.

So what does this have to do with 30 Rock? It hasn’t been on the air all that long, and I don’t think anyone thinks its pulled an Entourage quite yet. A lot of people would argue that the fundamentals of the show are strong, so why bring it up in the context of this article? 30 Rock‘s safe, right?

Well, no, not really. The numbers for 30 Rock have never been great. It’s a niche show, and a very funny one at times, but it has yet to break out in a big way. And let’s face it, it’s been more than a little inconsistent ever since it came back from the WGA strike. In short, what this article does is try to take a peek under the hood in an attempt to evaluate the state of 30 Rock‘s fundamentals. What if they’re not as solid as we think they are?

You can coast for a while on great joke- and gag-writing, especially if you have a cast that’s good at delivering those jokes. A good example of this is the now seemingly inexplicable early critical smash Will & Grace. While a lot of the appeal to critics early in the run of that show had to do with just how fresh and groundbreaking its premise seemed at the time, it’s easy to forget that in that show’s first two or three seasons, the jokes were pretty tight. The show’s writing staff was good at coming up with killer one-liners, and the core cast members were all great at delivering these overtly campy punchlines. But all Will & Grace‘s characters were broad types, designed solely to be as big and goofy as possible to wring the most laughs out of every line. None of them felt recognizably human very shortly into the run of the show, and their relationships were just as strained. As mentioned above, all comedies eventually become predictable to their audience, simply because we begin to understand the rhythms of the jokes being told, so once the show reaches a point where we can essentially predict what the next line is going to be, it behooves a series to have strong characters and character relationships to fall back on. Will & Grace didn’t have this, and when the jokes began to become predictable, the show rapidly fell apart and revealed what had always been an empty center. (Weirdly, a very similar thing happened to Family Guy.)

Which brings us back to 30 Rock. I highly doubt 30 Rock will ever get as bad as Will & Grace eventually did, if only because the low ratings practically guarantee its cancellation if the critical community and Emmys ever turn on it in a real way. And unlike Will & Grace, 30 Rock has two and a half well-developed characters to fall back on at any point. Liz Lemmon (Fey) is a subtly new and different take on the career-oriented woman who still wants to have some sort of life – a type pioneered by Mary Tyle Moore in the 1970s – while Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) is a coolly ruthless suit with a host of neuroses he somehow keeps perfectly buttoned up. Both of these characters are so consistently written and portrayed that writers as good as the 30 Rock staff would be able to write funny scenes between them in their sleep. In addition, Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) is fitfully a well-drawn character, when the show is interested in providing some sort of basis for his outright lunacy. His impetuous childishness becomes much more interesting in the face of the fact that he’s a dedicated family man, but the series loses sight of this far too often, choosing instead to make him a manic man-child.

30 Rock quickly learned early in its run that its premise – woman tries to keep things rolling along backstage at a sketch-comedy show – was inherently limited and turned more into a show about people trying to survive working at a network where the mood is frequently apocalyptic. This was probably the right move. But it ended up stranding a lot of characters who no longer served the same purpose under the new premise. Most notable of these characters is Pete (Scott Adsit), a very funny guy who frequently has nothing to do. Also problematic: the awfully written Jenna (Jane Krakowski), who spends most episodes trying to oversell ridiculous material. Rather than develop the loons Liz and Jack work with into actual characters, though, the show chose to leave them mostly as one-dimensional joke machines, like the characters on Will & Grace. In season three, when the show apparently realized it couldn’t live on Liz and Jack scenes alone, the series split the two characters up and sent them into storylines with the show’s various other players, but because of the disparity in development levels between the characters, this often resulted in some weak storylines where, say, Frank (Judah Friedlander) would suddenly be looking up to Jack for no apparent reason. The show has also mostly forgotten many of the bit players in its large ensemble, unable to find space for them in its new premise.

So as it starts its fourth season, that’s where 30 Rock finds itself: in danger of turning into a slightly funnier Will & Grace. (The similarities between the shows don’t stop there either. Both have over-relied on guest stars to patch over poor storylines, and both have been warmly embraced by the Emmys and the mainstream critical community.) There are still plenty of laughs to be gleaned out of the show, especially when Liz, Jack, or Tracy are around, but simply because the show has been on long enough now that the audience can predict its rhythms, it sometimes seems like a series trying desperately to find another gear and failing. 30 Rock is still nowhere near a bad show, but it risks turning into a show where one-dimensional people spend a lot of time shouting at each other.

I’m not sure I’m completely sold on the articles argument, but I’m definitely leaning that way. I’ve felt that a lot of the supporting cast on 30 Rock could use a little more depth, and I definitely think that the shows’ premise has evolved since its premiere. Whether or not it’s going to wind up as the next Will & Grace I dare not speculate. Either way I found the article to be an interesting read (though this post is a bit of a ramble…apologies), and hopefully some of you will feel the same way.

That’s not a cliché, THIS is a cliché

One hundred and eleven of them actually, courtesy of Kevin Lehane (and a H/T to Scott Myers where I saw it first).

It’s a pretty good list, though I was embarrassed to see that I’ve slipped a few of these into some first drafts in the past.

Here’s the list.

1. I was born ready.
2. Are you sitting down?
3. Let’s get out of here!
4. _____ my middle name.
5. Is that all you got?
I’m just getting started.
6. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
7. Don’t you die on me!
8. Tell my wife and kids I love them.
9. Breathe, dammit!
10. Cover me. I’m going in.
11. He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?
12. No, no, no, no, NO! I’m not going. [Cut to them going.]
13. No. Come in. ____ was just leaving.
14. You’d better come in.
15. So, we meet again.
16. We’ve got to stop meeting like this.
17. (Greeting) Well, if it isn’t ____.
18. I’m just doing my job.
19. You give ___ a bad name. Calling you a ___ is an insult to ____.
20. You’ll never get away with this!
Watch me.
21. Looking good. [Said into a mirror.]
22. Now . . . where were we?
23. What the. . . ?
24. How hard can it be?
25. Time to die.
26. Follow that car!
27. Let’s do this thing!
28. You go girl!
29. You ain’t seen nothing yet!
30. . . . Yeah. A little too quiet.
31. If I’m not back in __ minutes, get out of here/blow the whole thing up/call the cops.
32. What part of _____ don’t you understand?
33. I’m not leaving you.
You have to go on without me.
34. Don’t even go there.
35. I’ve always wanted to say that!
36. Ready when you are!
37. Is this some kind of sick joke?
38. Oh haha, very funny.
39. Did I just say that out loud?
40. Wait. Did you hear something?
41. It’s just a scratch.
42. How is he?
He’ll live.
43. I’m . . . so cold . . .
44. Is that clear?
Crystal.
45. What if? . . . Nah, it would never work.
46. . . . and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do to stop me!
47. You say that like it’s a bad thing.
48. Note to self . . .
49. Honey, is that you?
50. What’s the meaning of this?
51. What’s the worst that could happen?/ What have we got to lose?
52. I have a bad feeling about this.
53. Leave it. They’re already dead.
54. Don’t you think I know that!
55. Whatever you do, don’t look down.
56. Don’t you get it?
57. Oh now you’re really starting to piss me off!
58. We’ve got company.
59. Hang on . . . if you’re here then that means . . . uh oh.
60. Oh that’s not good.
61. Awkward!
62. What just happened?
63. We’ll never make it in time!
64. Stay here.
No way, I’m coming with you.
65. This isn’t over!
66. Jesus H. Christ!
67. It’s no use!
68. It’s a trap!
69. She’s gonna blow!
70. Okay, here’s what we do . . . [and cut to a different scene]
71. Fuckin’ A!
72. I’m getting too old for this shit.
73. Wait a minute, are you saying– ?
74. You’ll never take me alive.
75. Okay, let’s call that plan B.
76. I always knew you’d come crawling back.
77. Try to get some sleep.
78. I just threw up in my mouth a little.
79. Leave this to me. I’ve got a plan.
80. No, that’s what they want us to think.
81. When I’m through with you (etc.) –
82. Hi, sis.
83. Impossible!
84. Wait! I can explain! This isn’t what it looks like.
85. Showtime!
86. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.
87. If we make it out of this alive . . .
88. That’s it! You’re off the case!
89. How long have we known each other?
We go back a long way.
90. Well, well, well . . .
91. Aha! I knew it!
92. Done . . . and done!
93. Leave it. He’s/She’s/They’re not worth it.
94. In English, please.
95. As many of you know (yadda, yadda, yadda).
96. Too much information!
97. Yeah, you better run!
98. . . . Unless?
Unless what?
99. What are you doing here?
I was about to ask you the same thing.
100. So, who died? . . . Oh.
101. You’re either very brave . . . or very stupid.
102. Oh, yeah! You and whose army?
103. Now that’s what I’m talking about!
104. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
105. It’s not you, it’s me.
106. This just getts better and better.
107. This is not happening. This is not happening.
108. Shut up and kiss me.
109. I’ll see you in hell!
110. Lock and load!
111. Oh Hell, no!
112. You just don’t get it, do you?

Research In Mad Men

Here’s a great article from the New York Times about the the research process in Mad Men.

THE IDEA “I wanted Betty to get involved in civic matters,” said Matthew Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men.” “That’s what happens after you have a child. When you have a huge group of educated women who are not working, you get things done.” He said that notion was inspired by the short story “An Educated American Woman,” by John Cheever, himself a resident of Ossining. (The Drapers’ address, Bullet Park Road, is also a Cheever homage, to the novel “Bullet Park”; there is no such road.) All Mr. Weiner needed was a cause for Betty, at right above, to get behind in 1963. “My research department discovered that,” he said. “I gave them a very specific task.”

THE SEARCH Brett Johnson, 27, a script coordinator, is the show’s unofficial head researcher, spending hours reading old newspapers to meet the writers’ narrative needs. “We got all the microfiche of all The Ossining Citizen Registers from 1963 and literally read for 50 hours at the public library,” he said. “The task was find something that Betty would need the help of the governor’s office. But not something so big.” Mr. Johnson dismissed a controversy involving Sing-Sing, the prison, deciding that would not interest Betty. A local dust-up over the construction of some sort of plant near a scenic bridge was considered, but its outcome could not be determined in the papers. Then he struck civic gold. “There was a reservoir,” Mr. Johnson said. “The water was decided to not be clean in, like, 1962. They were going to replace the whole thing with this water tank.” He has never set foot in Ossining, but he has looked at the tank via Google maps. And he had a little help on location.

THE LOCAL Norman McDonald, 75, president of the Ossining Historical Society, has become a de facto (and unpaid) props and locations consultant for the show. “They call with the darnedest questions,” he said. “They wanted to know the background color of the street signs in 1963. I told them it was black, and I couldn’t sleep that night because I thought it might have been green. Then I started asking around, and no one knew. That’s the type of question.” Starting with his own vague recollection of the reservoir issue, Mr. McDonald fleshed out Mr. Johnson’s reporting. He also shared his recollections on the layout and appearance of the city’s meeting room, down to the nameplates for the commissioners. Mr. McDonald said he has never watched “Mad Men,” but he did stay up for the Emmy awards, rooting for the show.

There’s a bit more detail in the rest of the article. Definitely a cool way to work!

13 Things Bad Screenwriters Commonly Do (That You Shouldn’t)

Courtesy of Brad Schreiber over at Filmmaker IQ comes 13 Things Bad Screenwriters Commonly Do. Brad’s a former development exec, and judging from my own experience in the development trenches, he definitely knows what he’s talking about.

So what’s on his list?

1. Wrong Format Slug Lines – Personally I’d add improper formatting period, but slug lines are a good place to start.
2. Overly Detailed Character Descriptions – Just give us the bare bones, enough to give us the flavor of a character. We don’t need all the details, especially because your Mulatto midget with a lisp is probably going to get changed in casting.
3. Too Much or Too Little Detail in Narrative – This is a Goldilocks problem, you need to get it just right. Don’t give us so much that the read crawls to a halt. Don’t give us so little that we miss action that’s important to the story.
4. Narrative That Won’t Read on Film – Don’t write things that you can’t film. I don’t care what your character’s thinking. Thoughts don’t translate. Give us things that we can see.
5. Back-to-back Scenes in the Same Location – I’d say this one is more personal preference than anything else, but, if possible, figure out a way to show the passage of time creatively.
6. Deus Ex Machina – Just don’t do it. Please.
7. Clichéd Dialogue – Try to come up with something new and exciting. It’s why we got into the business, right?
8. Camera Angles, Music Cues, etc – Don’t direct the director. You’re just going to piss him off, and it makes you look like an amateur. And besides, there are ways you can imply camera angles without actually using them. Do that instead.
9. Lumpy Exposition – If you’re going to lay pipe, then try to disguise it as something else. Stick it into the middle of an argument between two characters. In an action sequence. Have it come from an unreliable narrator. Do something interesting with it to bring it to life.
10. “Ho-hum” Reaction To Death, Injury – Again I think there’s a little personal preference in this one, especially considering how dependent it is on genre. If you’re writing a comedy, or an action movie then you’ve got some leeway. If you’re shooting for a degree of reality then it better feel real.
11. Poor Creation of Tension and Motivation – Things have to be logical. They have to build. You can’t just have two characters getting along, and then all of a sudden they’re at each others throats. There has to be a reason for it, even if you don’t reveal the reason until later. It has to make sense.
12. Unreal Action – Action in your screenplay has to have an internal consistency. You can’t tell a story in the real world, then all of a sudden everyone can fly. It has to be logical.
13. Show Don’t Tell – Film is a visual medium, never forget it.

It’s a pretty good set of rules to live by. Take a stroll through your own writing and make sure you’re not committing any faux-pas.