DZ-116: Writing Physical Comedy — Transcript

Look, there's a street in Atlanta where I did this once. More successfully, I will say.

Hi, I'm Chas Fisher.

And I'm Mel Killingsworth.

And welcome to Draft Zero, a podcast where two, I was going to say Australians, but one Australian and one almost Australian whenever their number comes up. Try to work out what makes great screenplays work.

And today we're talking about physical comedy on the page. We're talking Bringing Up Baby, the 1938 movie written by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. We're talking about the Happy Endings pilot, written by David Kasp. And we're talking about Bridesmaids, written by Annie Mumulo and Kristen Wiig. And my impetus for doing this is I'm writing a comedy of remarriage. So a feature rom-com that is all about lots and lots of misunderstandings and slapstick and physical comedy. And so I wanted to look at physical comedy on the page.

Yeah, and I leapt at this opportunity. As long-term listeners can hear, we are missing one of our main co-hosts. Stu is away on show, but Mel has very kindly stepped in and not only brought the topic, but also helped in the selection of the homework, which was also assisted by our Patreons. And this is a spiritual sequel episode to one of our very early episodes on white space. And we were looking at how can you use the page, the words on the page, to recreate the feeling of pace. And we saw how, you know, different techniques could make time as a reader to... Feel faster or slower and that there were different ways of doing that and when mel mentioned writing different kinds of comedy i thought all right yes physical comedy and i really we it was hard to like guide our poor patreons as to what we were looking for because i think what is in trend in comedy now is to have physical comedy moments, but there's fewer and fewer of those, you know, like Mr. Bean kind of extended physical comedy, you know, Fawlty Towers, whatever it is. I'm showing my British heritage here. You know, Charlie Chaplin, Marx Brothers, like slapstick still exists, but it's often just in moments to get a laugh. And for me, the challenge as a writer is not those moments we we thought about doing everything everywhere all at once but we're also going to table that for a future episode but so much of those when they use physical comedy in that film it's like moments to to draw a reaction and to me the challenge of just writing comedy in general is making it funny on the on the page to recreate that feeling in the in the audience but writing physical comedy just even when we were thinking about it and mulling homework i was just thinking it must be so hard because you can describe action and a lot of physical comedy is essentially like writing an action set piece. But to write that action such that it is as funny as it looks without saying, it's hilarious.

And that's the director's problem.

So, yeah, I was really excited to get into this episode. Mel, can you let our listeners know the constraints we were putting on in our homework selection?

Yeah. So, we wanted to do, and throughout the discussion of this, we came up with this really interesting thing where we were working to distinguish What is screwball versus farce versus slapstick? Because we came up with a lot of films and then it felt more like they were farce or it felt more like they were a screwball but didn't have the slapstick physical comedy we wanted. And so I sort of was trying to nail down what is different about those. And screwball is something that has language, plot and physicality. Slapstick is physicality. And it may involve language. It may not. It may be entirely silent. and farce is language and plot it may involve physicality but it may not um and so plot involves like you know sometimes people are just barely miss each other going in and out of rooms it's not really physical comedy they're just sort of uh the camera is showing you you know proximity and then there's a lot of language going on um.

Yeah absolutely and i was i mean as someone who was kind of raised in in my drama degree we did a whole semester on commedia de latte so i was like ah slapstick and farce they they go hand in hand and and we got into a debate about it and ultimately you were correct that farces often have slapstick but not all farce is slapstick and and like for a recent example i think veep is satirical but it is farce.

So much farce but.

It's not slapstick.

A few moments yes slapstick and that's fine but it is overall farce um and then you have something like screwball which uh i'm bringing up baby is what we landed on but there were several that i wanted to do so you look at something like charade which is definitely a farce that has some slapstick you look at um one of my all-time favorites his girl friday which is a screwball because it has all of the above every scene has plot language and physicality and they're all going at 100 miles per hour yeah.

And i mean stew and i uh whenever we bring you on mel Like, you're always like, oh, we should do this amazing film from, like, the 1940s. And we're all like, no. Cinematic and screenwriting language has moved on from there.

That's like saying we shouldn't study Shakespeare anymore if we want to write novels. I mean... Yes, there are differences. I do admit there are absolutely differences. But every couple of months on screenwriting Twitter, the argument pops up that like once you learn the rules, you should break them and you should do what works. And so if you're going to do what works and you're limiting yourself to reading stuff that has been written in the last 10 to 15 years, I think that's a massive mistake. And one of the really interesting things although of the scripts that i could find i really wanted to do a scene from charade couldn't find the script of all the scripts that i could find bringing up baby is actually probably the most that is obviously quote-unquote of its time. There's actually a lot of things it does similar to bridesmaids which is really interesting but i do think it's of its time and yet i still got a lot out of reading how it did it and one of the other things that i think with the three scripts we landed on that is really interesting is that we chose three scripts that do three different types of slapstick so bringing a baby is mostly involving vehicles and a car there's there's there's cars going on and things like that in happy endings it's the whole scene has a lot of slapstick moments but it's an it's an ensemble piece and they're small moments and at one moment they involve this item and the other moment they involve a different item and it keeps moving on moving around the room and doing different things and then bridesmaids it's essentially one big event with all of these characters and the event goes for like four minutes so you've got and and it it's physical comedy as opposed to something like bringing a baby which is you know this giant machine being wielded around so it's definitely three that uh i think have had different strengths which is great and.

It was it was challenging for us to find scripts because this is a an episode where there was no point if we couldn't find the scripts for projects. So, Sue and I in previous episodes, we've looked at Game Night, where that entire amazing, you know, stitched together, seeming one-shot chase of the Fabergé egg around the house. In the script, it says, Boomer pursues whoever holds the egg and it turns into a high stakes game of hot potato. You know, like that entire sequence, that's screenwriters enjoying themselves and handballing the problem straight to the director. Um, although I think there might've been right directors on that.

Uh, Stu has a whole breakdown of it on ShotZero and he talks about the previs and a bunch of other things. So, you know, insert plug here.

All right. So the screenplay credits are by Mark Perez, uh, revisions by Dana Fox and Catherine Silverman. Current revisions of the version I'm looking at is Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daly. And then, you know, we've looked at that wonderful bit of clowning that Ryan Gosling does in Nice Guys in the toilet stall where he drops the cigarette and it's brilliant and it looks like he's improvised it. But then when we went to the script, it's actually beat for beat in there. But A, we've done those projects and we want to look at new ones. And B, we, like I said, we want, I wanted in particular extended ones so that you could get that sense of geography what's the movement within the the scene and um and above all how to make something that is going to become more and more technical in terms of what you're trying to explain to the reader is going on and how do you make that funny because i think you can make technical stuff in an action scene feel tense and dangerous quite easily uh you know maybe that's just me betraying my biases as a writer but you know bam dash dash oh no like i feel like you can inject the feeling that you want more easily in straight up action than it is to inject humor into a more technical scene and.

Even with that with the thing you're saying about action right you have the crashing you have you know bam you have gunshots you have things going off you can't just tell the writer haha.

Funny you.

Know you have to it has to be funny.

I mean i can't remember what script it is now if you were here he would remember but i think we did look at one bit of big print which ended with like it's hilarious full stop like it's just telling us how to feel about the what we've just read no.

Pressure on the.

Actors or anything there well uh no pressure on the director in the end of this sequence from bringing up baby so.

No, but if you'd only let me explain. You see, I just gave someone that bad girl and that... I hope you've realised that you've made a perfect fool of yourself in front of everyone. Have you finished? Yes, yes, I have. Thank you very much. Oh. You lied to me. Yes, but just a little bit. I mean, no, no, no. It's a ridiculous story about a leopard. But it is a ridiculous story. I have a leopard. Where is the leopard? In there.

But what I thought we might do for each of these scenes is obviously we've brought scenes from different parts of the of these films. So we have to give kind of a broad summary of the film, where we are in the story. And I think what happens in the scene will probably play audio from the scenes. But the whole point of this is you're probably not, dear listener in this audio format, going to understand necessarily what is going on that we want to describe on the page. And then we'll probably dive into favorite moments and techniques actually on the page in the big print. And I do think in comedy, it's especially challenging to get readers to read the big print. You know, so much of the humour comes from the dialogue, and comedy is such a dialogue. Often, certainly contemporary comedy is so dialogue-driven. I can imagine readers just never reading the action lines at all. All right. Well, Mel, given Bringing Up Baby is your baby, do you want to pitch or summarize?

I'll summarize. This is quite, it's actually easier because this happens near the beginning of the film.

Yeah.

So David, who is played by Cary Grant and Catherine Hepburn, who plays Susan, have met just once before. And this is essentially, you know, it was hate at first sight. And now we have their second big meeting. And so the idea of like first impression, second impression is terrible. So David is out golfing and trying to make a good impression on Mr. Peabody, who will factor into the scene later. And then the scene commences. Uh, if you, the screenplay is available online and it essentially starts on page 10.

We'll put, we'll put links in the show notes.

And this scene starts with very little dialogue. It's almost entirely what's happening and describing all of the physicality and for, for a couple of pages until suddenly the dialogue really starts cracking.

Yeah. I mean, so broadly the movement of the scene, you know, Susan steals David's ball and plays it and he's kind of grumpy and interacting with Susan while Mr. Peabody's getting frustrated that David isn't playing with him. And that is delightful back and forth.

You shouldn't do that, you know. But that... What shouldn't I do? Talk while someone's shooting. Well, anyway, I forgive you because I got a good shot. But you don't understand. See, there it is, right next to the pin. But that has nothing to do with it. Oh, are you playing through? No, I've just driven off the first tee. I see you're a stranger here. You should be over there. This is the 18th fairway, and I'm right on the green. If I think this part, I'm going to beat my record. I'll be with you in a minute.

It's 207... The screenplay's 207 pages, and the movie's about 90 minutes. So it whips.

Yeah. So Susan finishes the 18th hole with David's ball and leaves. And then David resumes playing with Mr. Peabody. And Susan begins, gets to her car and starts driving, trying to drive out of the car park while seemingly crashing into every car in the car park. But in particular, David's.

Hey, mister, I think that's your car. Hey hey oh i'll be with you in a minute mr peabody.

And what i actually love about this is so i'm i'm on page 10 now and what you have is the david is at the first tee and uh susan is in the car park and this is one of those times where like my modern instinct is to establish the two locations and then ease the reader in, you know, and I think this is my big observation from actually how well Bringing Up Baby does on the page is its geography and the sluglines actually help. Because it gives you a mental bit. It's almost like an edit. You know that you're cutting from her to him whenever you see a slug line. And I guess because it's only two locations, you're not having to read the slug line necessarily. You just know you've moved from her to him.

Yeah. And the other thing that's interesting is it tells you, it kind of tells you whose point of view you're in because especially at the start, he ends up walking over to her at the car and then everything's sort of happening there and then you're cutting back to where mr peabody's looking on but at the start david enters and doggedly tees his ball again rather grimly he takes a driver from the caddy so you're with david right and then the automobile starts honking the sound throws him off balance he drops his club he gets startled you're still with him cut to the exterior parking space day so the first time we see there there's a little uh there's a slug line And then under that in all caps is what he sees colon in the parking space nearby. Susan is trying to move. So you are still with him and his point of view.

Yeah.

He's thrown off and he looks over and sees Susan trying to back her roadster out. Then you're back with David exterior at first T day, all these things happen. And then it starts doing that cutting back and forth. And it's, it's quick. It's, it's, there's two lines and then we're back with David and there's two lines and then we're back and then there's four lines and they're back. And so it, you're right, the slug lines mimic the editing and how quickly this is all happening. And it really drives the pacing because yeah, it's just action lines so far, but it's not, there's quite a lot of white space on the page because you're going back and forth between what's happening in each location quite quickly.

Yeah. I mean, so part of my resistance to doing like older screenplays is like the, not just the fashion, the style of how screenplays written have changed since then. So one of the things that seems unusual for me is that there doesn't, they don't seem to use paragraphs within a scene very often in action lines. So at the top of that page, we've got a one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine line. Paragraph but it's still they've still like carefully measured the sentences it reads very quickly they use m dashes like other than breaking up those paragraphs now there isn't much that would change to to update this script and i just want to make an observation on this particular page that we'll come back to i think we'll we'll do it again and again because i think it's important for what's one of my takeaways from writing physical comedy is that the the words on the page. Mimic the repetition that we're seeing in the comedy so you know as he lifts his club for the swing an automobile horn toots nearby he doesn't look around but the sound throws him off balance he drops his club and raises for another swing another horn which distracts him as he raises his club again determinably there is a crash of a bumper against the bumper he lowers his club grimly and looks around so there's lots of words like hooking in from sentence to sentence like they don't try and look for different words for raising his club they use you know repeating the word another um across sentences to tie it together and then going down the page like he raises his club again and this time there is a terrific crash slowly he lowers his club and looks around like and finally uh david suddenly drops his club and strides out so that like the words on the page and the repetition are yeah mimicking the edit we can see we can visualize the humor and the and the repetition of it yeah.

There's the even the like like some of the onomatopoeia words you've got like smacked repeats a few times and like toots and like things like that so you've got the you know and a lot of comedy is you know rule of threes and all that.

And It.

Happens in the writing as well.

I mean, so then it moves from him being distracted from his golf game to her accidentally locking her car bumper with his car bumper and she's like towing his car around the car park and he rushes to try and get in the car. Now, I have seen Bringing Up Baby, but it's been 20 years. So, I can't actually visualize this. I was, uh, what I, what I do appreciate about the script is it very much made me see what is, what I imagine is going on on screen, uh, very well without feeling like it's over explaining, you know, there's some, uh, camera direction and stuff like that, that we probably wouldn't do now, but.

But most of the camera direction in this scene is for things that are actually required because of a visual gag not all of it there is more but there's a couple of visual gags where for example we're in peabody's point of view and the part of the point is that peabody can see what david's doing but can't see that he's on the running board of the car for example and so it shows him so that the camera it says you know camera medium long shot above the hedge that sort of direction is important because otherwise because the humor is coming from the fact that we the audience know what's happening below the hedge but peabody doesn't and the camera rather the camera direction is what's pointing that out to the reader yeah.

Because uh like you said and and what we had before with very firmly in whose point of view are we.

Um so.

Peabody is now at the first tee and now both Susan and David are in the car park in their cars and it clearly says on page 12 what he sees, referring to Peabody, is the shot of head and shoulders of David above the hedge, right? Susan and her car are concealed by the hedge. So we understand the visual nature of the gag is that David is like moving back and forth behind his hedge trying to have a conversation with Mr. Peabody while trying to shout at Susan to let her know what's going on.

Look, let me drive this car. Oh, it's alright. It's an old wreck anyway. It doesn't matter. Well, you don't understand. This is my car. You mean this is your car? Of course. Your golf ball? Your car? Is there anything in the world that doesn't belong to you? Yes, thank heaven. You! Now, don't lose your temper. My dear young lady, I'm not losing my temper. I'm merely trying to play some golf. When you choose the funniest places, this is a parking lot. Will you get out of my car? Will you get off my running board? This is my running board! All right, honey, stay there. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Mr. I'll be with you in a minute, Mr. Peabody.

And less the bridesmaids scene, although it does use a few anti-sees, we here, etc. But the happy ending scene, instead of using camera directions, it says how the characters look. So there's a scene or there's sorry, there's a gag in happy endings where it's really important that the audience hasn't seen something until the camera pans left. And instead of saying that the camera pans left, which is what bringing a baby's done, it says everybody looks to the left. so it's it's getting across the same idea it's just bringing it baby is a little more technical about it.

Yeah and i think if they had written just the action you wouldn't get the framing that is funny right the thing that's funny about this thing yes it's inherently funny that susan is unaware that she's towing not just david's car but david standing she's aware and blithely enjoying it.

But you know.

Yeah, the word blithely is definitely used. But the fact that it says, camera is now on the opposite side of the hedge so that we see clearly David's predicament. David turns and waves helplessly at Peabody as he rolls past. So, you know, we've been given both Peabody's experience of just seeing David rolling back and forth and we've got like-

We see clearly.

The much more kind of dangerous, fun stunt of David being in the car as well. And I do like that, you know, we've got full shot parking space as Susan gathering speed tows David around a lane that brings him past the hedge again. Peabody watches amazedly his head turning. Sorry, I skipped the slug line there, but it allows us to visualize there's the stunt and there's the gag of going, David is back, just zooming across behind the head from Peabody's perspective.

But I think that just demonstrates your point that once you've established the two places, your brain is going, okay, it's almost like we would use intercut now, except it is being very clear. Okay, now we're here. Now we're there. Your brain is kind of, okay, I get that the slug line's there. Now we're with Peabody when you're reading it.

Yeah. And the first time David glides past the hedge, he waves helplessly at Peabody. And then the second time he turns and waves placatingly. So, look, I'm going to be upfront that reading the script, it didn't make me laugh. Whereas reading the other ones, I actually laughed out loud. But what it did do is give me a really clear sense of the geography and it gave me such a good sense of the geography and such a good sense of the edit and such a good sense of the uh framing, that i could see that it would be funny on screen and.

It is i mean and not to uh if you if you read the next scene which we're not doing for this i just want to touch.

On it really.

Quickly if you. Two things that are really great about it is first, it's a complete juxtaposition is a white tie event. So you've got this, you know, these people who are outside doing sport and riding around in cars and doing this. And then the next scene is at a white tie event where they run into each other again. And there's a gag where David slips on an olive like Susan has thrown an olive pit on the floor and David slips on it. And it's clearly written in a way that you it's meant to be funny because you see the feet and then the feet fly up out of out of screen and then whatever. So it's clearly written in a way where you can tell it's David, but it's not meant to perform. And then they cast Cary Grant. So they cast a former acrobat and they shoot it completely differently. It's shot to be like funny in that in that way of like the feet fly out of frame. And then he just actually performs the stunt. So I think, yeah, they're clearly writing with an idea towards helping you picture the final product and how you can accomplish the type of humor that they're going for, which is physicality plus that rapid fire. Because once the dialogue does start with the car, you know, the car stuff is still going. You know, David climbs on the car, student starts to back out and they're going back and forth while he's riding around towards the parking space going, there's no need to lose your temper. David quietly frenzied. I'm not losing my temper. You know, it's, they're, they're giving you the clear idea while the dialogue is establishing their relationship.

Yeah. I mean, so the scene, or the sequence rather, moves from David basically trying to stop his car being towed while keeping Mr. Peabody on the course. Mr. Peabody walks off. And so David can then basically fully engaged with susan he breaks forcing her to acknowledge his existence that she's towing him around and then she wraps his car or uh hits it runs it into a tree separates her car but then also like keeps coming back and banging into him and then david start like it's a lovely character shift that for the first time he loses his temper he looks after her car as it rolls away down the driveway, then on a mad impulse, drops into gear and follows. As she goes out of the gate, he comes round and past her and scrapes her front fender. Her eyes flash. She pursues him and takes off his fender. They keep up this game, ad lib, director, until finally no fenders are left on either car and David is in a ditch. So they do finally, the writers at the end of that, do finally do the game night cheat. Like, yeah, you guys can just sort out how this plays out until there are no fenders left and one's in a ditch, but they've done so well to almost earn that crescendo and- been all the character beats have played out.

I think also um there's an interesting part which i discovered has happened in all three of the scripts that we ended up picking which is that there are pieces of this scene that appear in a different order than they are in the script but the pieces as they are are so written quite similarly but they are edited in quite a different order that does shift the overall arc of the scene and all three of these have scripts have done that where there's bits that have been moved around and not shot in that order if you watch them next to the scene which is quite interesting so they're filming it and they've got these two actors and clearly how it's written is with the physical comedy in mind but then you have these actors in in all of these cases you have these great comedic actors and sometimes when they're in a flow of things actually it works better to do it you know to let this flow and then do this gag this way etc which is quite interesting that we got three that they keep all the bits but rearrange them in post?

I mean, I guess we can credit the editors for making a decision and assume that maybe it was shot that way. Who knows but what in this particular one what was the rearranging what what got moved around.

Um i marked it uh okay so where susan uh toes uh the head and shoulders of david david standing on his car blithely towing him around it happens much later okay so it goes they actually start arguing a bit more and uh you know uh he says i'll be with you in a minute but then he and Susan started having a bit more back and forth. And all of that bit is bumped to a little bit later. So clearly they just wanted to get into the chemistry of the two of them a little bit sooner before they came back with the visual gag.

And maybe it would have been harder to play her being blithely unaware of her towing his car. So, you know, maybe it wasn't, they couldn't sell him shouting at her and her either being unaware or just...

Or feigning unawareness.

Yeah. Oh, what a good word. Fain. That's a word of word that will trip you up.

Yeah. I mean, I've said it, but I'm also very well aware that it might be spelled differently than there. And there's 18 different potential ways to spell it. So I've given up at this point. I'm sure that there's an E in there somewhere that I don't believe there should be.

So as much as I've, you know, rubbished and resisted your 1940s homework selections, this is this is well worth a read like i flew through these 10 pages and well 17 pages uh and the fact that the script is like you said 202 pages long and yet the film is 90 minutes is uh does not surprise me at all and frankly i think the only thing that would change in modern times is just breaking up those paragraphs a little but i don't think the words on the page would necessarily change or their cadence or their repetition. And the big thing I took out of this was actually good use of slug lines, like setting up the geography and the gags and the visualization so well.

I would encourage, I ended up reading the whole next scene and getting a lot out of that as well. And I think they're both so different that if you are really interested, I would definitely say to sort of read the two of them together and see how they do things differently.

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Let's move on to Happy Endings.

So one of the other constraints that we decided in choosing our homework for physical comedy is we both, I think, instinctively wanted to do live action physical comedy, not animation. Because obviously physical humor is a big part of contemporary animation. We're almost in a golden age, particularly of adult animation right now, and there's so much physical humor in there, but I think we both wanted that constraint of writing something that human beings could theoretically do. Now I know we're in the age of CGI.

And we tend to prefer cgi in our action and not in our comedy yeah partly because i think part of the thing is that's funny is the concept of real people potentially getting hurt but not or actually having to land that pratfall yeah whereas when it comes to action you know we just want things to be to be bigger and better but in in comedy slapping someone across the face is still funny yeah and And doing it for real is the only way to really make it funny. And by for real, of course, I mean timing and hoping that your scene partner turns the right way and et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah. But what we were aware of or we felt instinctively is that there were more of these extended comedy sequences in film. Television now than they are in cinema. I mean, that said, we were constrained by scripts. So, I really wanted to do Joyride because I think that has got the cocaine scene in the train and then also the threesome is fucking hysterical. And even if they'd written it's a threesome, it's fucking hysterical. Like, I would have been happy to have read that. But unfortunately we couldn't find the Joyride script other than me learning that it was the original title was the Joy Fuck Club which I wish they had.

Kept they fought for it I had a hard time finding this specific TV scripts that I wanted because I think oh right I want this scene but a lot of times in TV shows there if you can find the script out there, it's not the one that you're particularly after at any given time it's always.

The Emmy campaign.

Ones and sometimes it's later in the seasons whereas with happy endings it's the pilot so if you haven't seen it it'll take you about five minutes to uh you know watch the bit.

The six of us have been friends forever so when alex and i decided to get married it was going to be the greatest day of all our lives instead it turned into a bad matthew mcconaughey movie alex i love you what's happening here come with me i'm sorry i can't do this, I'm sure she's totally regretting that decision. It's going to be okay, I promise you. Huge game changer. Huge. When friends have been together this long, nothing can break them up. It's not even a breakup. I can't believe that you got the white trash tourist braids. You look like Predator. I feel like you're going to rip my spine out and keep my skull as a trophy. I'm sorry. You're the only girl I've ever even liked. I literally can't even picture myself with another woman ever again for the rest of my life. Have you seen my tongue ring? God, I hope I didn't swallow another one.

Originally, I had picked the opening scene because I remember the opening scene, you know, guy and rollerblades and all that. And we ended up, I'll touch on that scene real quick, but we ended up going a couple pages later to Alex and David's house. This is, I just now bumped on the fact that it's Dave and David that we've picked, which is very confusing. I was like, Dave, that's not right. No, yes, it is. um at alex and david's house and seeing how there's this longer sort of uh ensemble physical comedy bits going on over and over but in i do think that the it's worth reading the first couple pages how they set up the guy on rollerblades which sets the entire tone for the show being that you know that 10 more ridiculous and and characters who are willing to go a long way for a joke or an elopement as it were um you know you've got hot guy races through the streets of chicago like the end of a shitty rom-com he whips around the corner and gridlock he's trapped and it both does it sets the tone for the thing but if you're reading there's a every time i'm emphasizing a word it's all caps there's a lot of exclamation points and as a tv script it was interesting that how much they use a lot of all caps and parentheticals and things like that i found that really interesting like very very heavily i.

Mean the that opening scene like i i'm glad you pointed that out because i think what it did really well and i've uh banged on a lot about you know one of brian duffield's early scripts having like the most unfilmable gags in its action line, but they go towards tone, right? So, all that stuff like, you know, the worst rom-com is making you go, oh, this is deliberate, right? This is, satire or spoof, right? You're not reading this thinking, oh, this is the worst rom-com. It's like they are aware that that's what they want you to be feeling, but that it's going to be a funny version of that. So, that goes to great lengths. But there was a particular gag in this opening sequence that you wanted to get to. And so, this is the only one that I've never seen at all. It wasn't available on any of my many streaming services. So, I read it and I was like, you know I was reading through this script and I'm like I've got a good idea of the tone of this I've got a good idea of these characters and I know that it's funny from the dialogue but I was almost about to text you one of my classic like Mel you've picked a you've missed the brief again, but then we got to that amazing scene later.

I do think it's interesting though in the opening scene, that it does tell it also gives us camera movements so it says we slowly pull the camera back away from them and then the camera goes back into the church like it is giving us camera movements as well because that is part of not just the tone but like what we see which which happens uh quite a bit in the next scene now i will note that this is definitely of the three be the most changed from the script. And it takes, it cuts one gag entirely, and it, oh, first of all, interior Dave and Alex's apartment day. It says it opens with Springsteen's She's the One blaring, actually opens with Indigo Girls' Closer to Fine blaring. Excellent choice.

Alex. Oh, hey, guys.

But most of the rest of it is the same, except one of the really interesting things I noticed now, it's not about there are a lot of action lines. There's a lot of physical gags. But what I realized was there's a lot more dialogue, particularly from Dave than there is in the script. It's the same basic content, but they give way more lines. And what I realized is that when they started actually blocking the physicality, they needed him to keep talking to get from one place to the other, from one gag to the other. So on the top of page nine, he has like four lines about, oh, pretty good. I came up with an awesome new drink. And he probably has about 10 to 12 lines minimum that he's riffing on because he has to get up, greet his friends. We have to see that he's in the boxers. he has to walk across pull the blender out of the box so while he's doing all of the physicality that happen as the action lines are written they've realized we don't have enough dialogue to to to make this interesting as it goes so they've had to give more things for him to say as he does things yeah.

I mean that's fascinating and we'll we'll play the the dialogue here is you know pretty good i came up with an awesome new drink who wants to be the first customer to try my world-famous beer float. So that's what's on the page and now we will excerpt what he actually has to say.

What's up? Hey, how you doing? Sweetie. Great, really great. I'm kicking ass. I've been doing lots of stuff. Taking online yoga, meeting great people. They're calling me Bodhi, which is awesome because of Point Break. Been watching that a lot. Totally holds up. what happened to laurie betty right oh i invented a new drink who wants to try a gin smoothie crazy a little bit of this a lot of that sidebar petty thanks to the blender it's awesome.

But what you're going to is the need because they probably could have done it as shot oh sorry as scripted where you've got these short dialogue scenes and cutting to the gag but then that edit would have cut out the physical humour of it. The dialogue was insufficient to have the space to set up the gags. And one of the really good things I think about this scene and how it's written on the page is it has two running... Gags that it sets up on the page very early on in the scene. Now, the first one is the one that develops and develops and develops, which is David has just been left at the altar by his fiance for Rollerblades hot guy. And not only that, she's gone on their pre-purchased honeymoon together. And Dave's been for a week, you know, wallowing, wallowing in their apartment.

And using all of the wedding gifts.

Yeah. So Springsteen, she's the one blares in the messy room. Shades drawn photos, bottles, wrapping paper strewn everywhere. The place is packed with unwrapped slash opened wedding gifts. Find Dave tucks tie undone, disheveled on the couch, blanket over his lap. He sings along as he opens gifts and arranges a fancy place setting on the coffee table with some of them plate silverware napkin etc so it takes a bit of time to set this up but what that then allows is that later in the scene every action line is nothing but him opening and using and abusing a new wedding gift and it it's like they take that time at the beginning of the scene to then allow those like quick physical humor beats to happen later on and.

The things actually So a few pages later, as all of his friends are talking, it continually will just drop a little bit of an action line about what David is doing. Like David blows his nose. David sips the beer float, which which keeps him front of mind because he's the point. But it brings back those items. He literally blows his nose into the napkin that was the place setting. You know, so those. Yeah, it sets the scene. It's something that you would, in theory, see in two seconds on the screen. But all those things come back around, which is which is really great.

I mean, in one of them, like, David drops back down onto the couch, destroyed. A toaster dings. And I was like, oh, it's the toaster in the kitchen. Like, I immediately think toaster kitchen. But the writers know that. And so, they say, a toaster, in brackets, gift, dings. So, now, without them having to say that it's with arm's reach of him on the couch, Just from saying gift in brackets, I now know that that toaster is plugged in and within arm's reach of the couch.

Which is a really good takeaway for me because I've got this one long scene that I've been writing that uses several different things that are around the room and thinking about how sometimes you have to stop and say, oh, you know, the Kleenex box is on top of the Chiffer robot, whatever. If you just set it all up at the beginning, it doesn't necessarily stop your flow. Now, there's a balance to be had there. Sometimes you don't want to know about that. Kleenex box until you need to use it but yeah here because so many of the gags use the gifts having taking that time to set that all up at the beginning really pays off because then it can just flow yeah.

I mean so I'm just going to read through the gags and look maybe we'll we'll, will intersperse the dialogue from the actual show. So half of page eight was basically setting up the visuals of the room, right? So it's doing all that setup. Page nine is pretty much all dialogue other than the beat that you've already pointed out, which he grabs a blender out of gift box, scoops ice cream into it, pours beer over it, then holds it out to them beat.

And it's action, action, action, action, grabs a blender, scoops the ice cream, pours beer. But real quick, before you finish the rest of this, at the very bottom of page eight, it says italics equal baby voice.

Oh, yeah.

And then throughout the next few pages, his friends will sometimes drop into baby voice when they're talking to him. Like, they're trying to be really gentle and not scare the baby. So it sets that up and then it'll just keep using it.

Yeah, because that was the second running gag. And I'm like, initially, I was like, why are they doing that? And then I realized, because, again, that was right in that early setup when the characters have come, the friends have come in. and it says, yeah, in square brackets, italics equal baby voice. I'm like, why have they done that? And then it's because every single character at a certain point uses the baby voice. So it's funny on the page as well, like a line that might not have been so funny. You're imagining without them every time having to go parenthetical baby voice.

Because we've all been there, right? Whichever side of it we're on, we've all either been in the group of friends you've been the one where the group of friends have come before and it starts becoming contagious and you're like oh all of you at some point are doing this to me or you know you you suddenly realized to your friend that oh we're all just oh honey it's okay so yeah they mention it and then it'll keep coming back but they don't need to you're right do the do the parentheticals every time all.

Right so uh forgive me for my uh performance interspersed with the uh excerpts but let's see how this comes out. If I don't do that and these are just the gags, these are the gags done in the action line. Dave pulls out a piece of toast, takes a sad bite. Dave sips the beer float, recoils disgusted, then wipes his mouth with the linen napkin from the play setting. Dave blows his nose into the napkin. This was the one that you were referring to earlier.

Dave, you're giving off a real Howard Hughes vibe here. I feel like you're about 10 minutes away from storing your urine in jars. Let's go get you some food. I just ate three French bread pizzas and most of the world's largest chocolate bread.

They, the friends, look left to see an fao schwartz sized chocolate groom and the disemboweled bottom half of the bride beat i.

Left the hand to hold.

If that's interesting you say that because the next part that whole flashback part is the part that they've completely cut out so it simply continues all right the gags okay it goes to david lays down on the couch defeated and pulls a nice blanket gift tag visible over himself beat the friends don't know what to do so it's actually realized that that flashback scene has interrupted the flow of all of these gags that are going and it skips that entirely so.

What is impressive i think about they've taken the time up front in the scene to set up the geography and the layout of the room and two running gags so the the baby voice running gag but That's a performance one, but they've set it up for the reader. It becomes funnier for the reader because I'm now like waiting to go, who's going to talk in baby voice next. But then by doing all the gifts and setting that up, I am seeing those gags and I'm laughing at them as he uses and abuses each of these wedding gifts one after another. And it's painting a picture for me of the whole room as he moves from one to the other. It's uh yeah it's a this was an excellent scene to pick and i was originally going to say you know you've missed the brief the only funny thing that's in the first scene is the word rollerblades but this one despite being a very dialogue heavy scene does the physical humor on the page perfectly because the physical humor is almost completely disconnected from the dialogue.

Yeah i think in the first scene it's there's a there's a couple of moments and this is about it being interspersed through the scene because i started reading it and i texted you i was like actually we should do the next thing actually no we should and then you were like we should just do the next thing like yeah that one um.

But do you have anything else you want to observe from.

No i think there there are still one or two parentheticals in there and what's interesting to me is like so you get this moment where brad and then it goes parentheses re beer float and parentheses and it's something that's not strictly physical comedy but it's where the lines are telling you what he's referencing, what he's looking at, referring to. You give the actor a moment to sort of really react to that because there's all these bits going. You have a few... Bits again where we a lot of those sort of all caps like when a toaster gift dings a toaster dings is in all caps with an exclamation point yeah so there's a lot of those different things going on like fao schwartz size chocolate groom and the disemboweled bottom half of the bride all in caps yeah you know um and in the actual film scene there's a moment where he that that he's either ad-libbed or they've added in shot list where he says i left the hand to hold he reaches over and holds her hand for just a beat and then takes his hand away looks at his hand and there's chocolate on it so starts licking his fingers uh you know when you've set up so many the toaster the beer the napkin the place setting the tags on the get when you've set up all these things that you've given the actors a lot to play with you've given the set designers a lot of really specific things you you know you you've given so many pieces of the puzzle to play with that that's just an absolute joy and you can see that it's not like oh they ad-libbed because they're better than the writers the writers have set all of that up really well on the page um and so yeah i i got quite a bit out of that as well the.

Quote-unquote sacrifice that they've made in terms of white space is at the opening of that scene there's two paragraphs a three-line paragraph and a four line paragraph. And after that, every action line is a two or a one line paragraph that is a gag. And they've done it so well. And I'm fascinated that they did cut the flashback. The flashback seemed like it would fit, you know, it was very Scrubs kind of thing. Like character talks about funny moment in life, cut to that thing happening. Ha ha, hilarious. You know, it gives you a chance to do more gags so interesting that they that the scene was working so well that introducing that flashback would have um compromised it.

And then it does it ends with a smash cut too so we get another you know sort of direction.

And um it's great yeah i mean they like so in the first scene with the with the wedding they've they're being more explicit with camera movements i think that's another thing that maybe i'm learning and it's like it should be obvious but you know how I love how Craig Mazin like keeps on railing against the gurus who say don't direct from the page and he's like that's our job but it is making me kind of keenly aware that it's, And any comedy writer out there is going to go, why the fuck are we listening to Chaz? But frame is so important for humor. Like comedy might be in the two shot. Comedy might be in the wide. Comedy might be in the close up. And it's important to, you know, perhaps direct the camera a bit more because it might be funnier.

Yep. So many of these gags are visually dependent. Like, so for example, it's really important that we haven't seen the chocolate groom before that gag because it's funnier that way. And so they look left to see or camera sees or whatever in some ways is really important. And sometimes it's important that you only see the top half of somebody because something's going to come in later. And when you're reading it, you only get the one chance to set up in the viewer's eye what they are or are not seeing. And so that camera stuff is helpful.

Now, this is unrelated to the brief, but I think it's impressive. And it reminds me of what they did in the Yellow Jackets pilot. And it's the transition from the bottom of page three from the wedding into the show. And the reason why I just want to call it out is I think it's so essential to a pilot in particular. So, Alex grabs Hot Guy's hand, a rom-com score ignites as they run up the aisle and burst out of the church. We follow them into the sunset as the score crescendos. It's the perfect happy ending to a shitty rom-com. But. And the word but is in all caps, italics and underlined, followed by an ellipses. As they run slash blade towards Bliss, we slowly pull the camera back away from them, ellipses, and then back into the church, ellipses. Interior church continuous. Find Dave on the altar destroyed, flanked by the stunned wedding party. This is the story of the other side of the happy ending. The place is silent. A cough, a whisper. So like that line this is the story of the other side of the happy ending it's it's perfect it's in the perfect place and they they're i feel like they've set that up so wonderfully because of all that camera direction on the page because that's a visual gag the run slash blade towards bliss is.

So good funny yes it's funny as a word it's funny to try to visualize it it's all great and it also like also there's the idea that they're clearly mismatched yeah you know you're getting all of that like she's she's not actually in love with this guy there's just there's a lot of other things at play oh and then those other things at play are dave at the altar surrounded by their friends um this is absolutely one of the most uh underrated at least in terms of you know it didn't get very much awards attention didn't get whatever just one of the most fantastic sitcoms of the last um well it came out the same year as bridesmaids so it has been 14 years so speaking of bridesmaids i.

Mean didn't you i'm not sure did you say on on on mike on air that that episode was directed by the russo brothers.

No i didn't so yes this is directed by the russo brothers which i think would have been right around the time they were directing community yeah so having them direct your pilot it'll just sort of get like again this is a time when pilot season was still a thing um would have definitely guaranteed you'd get it seen so yeah the russo brothers directed Mm-hmm.

I'm engaged! Oh my God! He asked me last night! What? What is happening? So will you be my maid of honor? Of course I will! I don't know what I'm supposed to do. You know, just whatever. Throw the bachelorette party. Yeah. Shower and... Oh my God. Let's go meet the rest of the bridal party. Oh my God. I get to punch it a couple times. You remember my cousin, Rita? They just bought a new house. It is gorgeous. I wouldn't know. I only see the kitchen and the laundry room and the ceiling in my bedroom. Sometimes the floor. This is Becca from work. Is this your husband? Oh no, I don't know him. I'm single. I was so distraught when I was single. I'm fine being by myself. Oh, Becca. This is Ducky's sister, Megan. You must be Annie's fella. I'm not, he's not, I'm not with him. I'm glad he's single because I'm going to climb that like a tree. You have to meet Helen You're so pretty You're so cute Did you come from work?

My kids are getting into rom-coms Love this so much I really want to show them Bridesmaids But I have to keep reminding myself, Not about this sequence that we're going to do The extended food poisoning sequence in the middle of the film Yeah.

They'd probably love this Oh yeah.

They would love this bit You know, I keep having to remind myself of, um, it's, it's actually a piece, a perfect piece of physical performance. I actually want to go to the script and find it. But when, you know, opening on that scene between Annie and, um, like where she's describing how he's like hanging his penis, like near her face, like just strongly inferring that he would like a blow job. And, uh, Kristen Wiig's performance of that is, uh, hilarious.

Eww, you had sex with him. We had an adult sleepover. Oh. Did you let him sleep over in your mouth? Annie. I'm sorry. You're unbelievable. He kept, like, putting it near my face. They do that, don't they? Why do they do that? Let us offer. If we don't offer... Please, you're supposed to slap it away. I couldn't. You don't want to look right at it. No. It's too aggressive. I don't care. Hello. That's my impression. Those are the balls. Yeah. I'm trying to make it round, but I can't because I have elbows.

And yeah, I don't, my nine-year-old and 11-year-old are perhaps not yet ready to find that as funny as I find it.

Speaking of Kristen Wiig, though, I will make a tiny plug that the writers of Bridesmaids also wrote and starred in Bardman, Stargarden, Vista Del Mar, which again speaking of something that is just so wildly underrated um so if you like bridesmaids you should watch that film uh and i read the screenplay but yeah here we go and again this is filmed very closely to what it is however there's a couple bits that the order has changed and there's two gags in particular both of which involving just melissa mccarthy off on her own doing stuff that aren't anywhere at all and i just have a feeling that was just like melissa mccarthy is doing some funny shit so uh let's film it and if we need a place to drop it in we will but for the most part it quite closely follows the page other than again going oh actually the flow here works better if we don't you know cut back to this other room so they they rearrange the pieces okay.

Interesting i had completely forgotten i remembered that this script was nominated for an oscar i forgot that um melissa mccarthy was nominated.

Honestly that we need to do more like ensemble cast and also just like casting like full stop just casting director awards for something like this like putting this team together chef's kiss yeah.

Okay so for for listeners who don't know and are willing to to get spoiled uh bridesmaids is the what did you say 2011.

Yes 2011.

Comedy film uh set uh with two best friends annie and lillian lillian is getting married, Annie is her maid of honour, and the... The drive of the film is around Lillian's new friend, Helen, who is very wealthy, played by Rose Byrne.

Aussie shout out.

And Annie's competition for Lillian's affections gets hilariously and way out of hand. And there's two, no, three additional bridesmaids, Megan, played by Melissa McCarthy, and then there's Rita and Becca.

Ellie Kemper and Wendy McClellan Covey is Rita.

Okay. And look, I feel remiss in not having mentioned that Maya Rudolph plays Lillian.

I was watching this just thinking about, like, if you watch behind the scenes of certain things, Bridesmaid and The Good Place as well. She has so few lines, actually, in this scene. It's really not until the end about her. but every time she does a line delivery it's completely different.

And utterly.

Hilarious she's just phenomenal and she's so good in this.

So um the the setup for this particular scene is that annie has taken like she loves finding interesting little cheap restaurants.

I know it looks a little scary on the outside but the food is really good authentic brazilian i'm telling you this is where Brazilians come to eat. I got to say, and he's really good at this show. He's dragged me to the weirdest places and the food is always incredible. And plus you get a lot for your money too. So that's good.

And then they've gone from the Brazilian place to a really high end bridal shop.

Belle en Blanc. This is the place. Great job. Belle en Blanc. Reservation name. Oh, I don't, I don't have one. we're just here to shop just to try on some dresses. Okay. Well, the next available appointment for bridesmaids fittings is in seven weeks. Absolutely no walk-in. Whitney, it's Helen. Helen Harris? Yeah. Hi. Oh my God. Hi. Listen, I'll buzz you right in. Great. Thank you.

So they're all in surrounded by these very expensive dresses. And as they are trying on the dresses, everyone who ate meat at the Brazilian restaurant, which is everyone except But Helen starts to get horrific food poisoning.

It's our first sign that Helen's actually queer. Just saying.

Okay.

Look, I ship Helen and Megan together. So that's beside the point.

Look, this scene has got a lot of dialogue. And there's some bits where they're using the dialogue to actually paint the visuals. So in some ways it undermines what we're trying to look for here, except maybe if you've got a scene well established enough, Having characters talking about what's happening is the funnier option than doing it in big print. Sorry, for non-Australian listeners, I keep forgetting, every now and then we get a listener go, what is this big print of which they speak? We're talking about action lines.

I do think the action lines, they start foreshadowing things quite early.

This is some classy shit here. Jesus, Megan. I'm sorry, I won't apologize. eyes i'm not even confident of which end that came out of.

A burp escapes megan's mouth like that's you know it's just an action line and then we move on and you just think oh okay so it starts seeding it in before everything really gets rolling.

Yeah i but i would also like to note that the the they don't overdo the big print here like i i can't point to anything that is like oh they did this incredible there's this one line that just blows me away it is largely describing what we see in here but almost every action line was making me laugh out loud on the on public transport um by the time it it really kicks off so yes on page 39 you've got the burp escaping megan's mouth, they start talking about the dresses and how expensive they are. And it's only after a time jump when they've cut to later, they're in the main fitting area. It's on page 40 that the top of that scene is a two line action line. The girls are in different dresses. Lillian is not there. They look great, comma, although Megan's face is beet red. And this is the one thing that I will they do a lot is two clause sentences so they'll do one clause telling you what's going on and then the next clause is a more funny detail.

I do think the um you you mentioned the time jump and that's actually one of the places where they insert Melissa McCarthy doing you know ad-libbing with the sofa and I think it is partly to make it clear that there has been a significant time jump and And it's not because we're otherwise we're going from Annie looking at a dress and a drip of sweat comes down her face to the girls in different dresses. And I think then showing this big wide shot of Melissa McCarthy flopping on the on the couch with nobody else in the room makes it clear that everyone is sort of moving on and doing something else. Whereas if you just went from Annie to the big group, it might take you a minute to bump on. Oh, wait, what has happened here? It's not a huge thing, but it is a small thing that just helps smooth out the time jump.

Yeah. So we get through the rest of page 40 and half of page 41. They are talking in dialogue about it being hot.

This is designer as well. Is anyone else hot? It is like an oven user.

And then I think this is important. The paragraph where it all kicks off is actually really understated. There's no exclamation marks. There's no italics.

No all caps, which we've seen in other places in this script.

But to make us read it, they do interrupt Annie's line.

Lillian. I don't know what to say you look so.

She's halfway through a line says you are and then dash dash by doing that interruption it is forcing us to to read the the paragraph and also the paragraph is four lines long it actually really stands out from everything else in the in the script so far so it is trying to use techniques to force you to read the action line and the action line is megan lurches forward as the contents of her stomach come up into her mouth. She claps her hand over her mouth to stop from throwing up. After a beat, she swallows it and pushes it back down. Looks nauseous.

Asterisk, nauseated.

I do, I think I like how many, they use way more words than they need to, like they're deliberately overwriting, like in terms of using white space, like they're taking their time with it.

And multiple full stops.

The contents of her stomach cup come up into her mouth is more words than you need to describe that. And that is a deliberate comedic choice.

Yeah. It's not she gags or dry heaves or yeah, it's a full line.

Yeah. And then the next paragraph is following Annie trying to deny Helen's accusation. She's caused the food poisoning with her choice of restaurant and the action line is Annie is really sweaty now comma a mark between her boobs and that's what I mean about like you know you could have just said Annie is really sweaty now but now they've just added a little comedic detail into that sentence suddenly Becca politely cups her hand over her mouth to stifle herself from getting sick and sorry i'm just laughing reading it back over right now we've gone to the next page it's clear that rita's also sick but then i do love this so rita says you.

Know i don't really care which dress we get it doesn't matter me i just need to get off this white carpet okay no not the bathroom.

And then we hear a noise it doesn't describe what the noise is and.

It's sent it's just that one by itself.

And then.

There's a paragraph break and then the next action line.

They all stand in horrified silence becca still holding her hands against her face there are faint and loud stomach churning sounds now i love there are faint and in brackets and loud so like contradictory well.

I got annoyed at first because the contradictory but i think what they're saying is that like one or two of their stomachs are faint and then some of their stomachs are loud you.

Know and.

It does make you stop and go oh yeah no okay that makes sense.

And the the churning is in all caps so that one word like they are escalating their their use of the big print here and.

Here's where we've had a lot more dialogue before but then we're getting more and more big print because it's starting to be action like people are still saying things for sure and there's a couple of places particularly when it cuts back to helen and annie um facing off they're having this dialogue.

You don't look very well, Annie. I feel fine. Are you sure? It wasn't that gray kind of lamb, or you ate a lot of that weird chicken. Was it that? No. I'm... I feel fine.

But then most of the rest of the characters are now just in panic mode. And so it's a lot of action and then a lot of yelling.

The knees are toilets! The knees are toilets! The knees are toilets! No. No, Megan. No! No! Look away! Megan, no! Look away!

It's mostly action and interjections now. Blocks of text are picking up a little bit because the dialogue is either lessened or quite terse.

Feel free to read some out. I'm just delighting in this. But then this podcast will be mostly my voice, which is what no one wants.

I think I did more of the, you know, the old fuddy-duddy black and white.

So what we then get is three of the bridesmaids end up in the very small bathroom.

With just one toilet and one sink there's a phenomenal top-down shot okay that it's not in the script but obviously it the actions are all again the writers have set up the actions are all happening it doesn't say there's a top-down shot but when you've set this up and you get this location and then all of a sudden just real quick before it breaks out to go back to the other room where helen and annie are There's just this like two second top down shot of the absolute chaos that the last two pages have spent all this time laying out. And you can see the wreckage. It's great.

And then just to set up like the structure of what happens here is that we've got the bridesmaids in the bathroom. We've got Annie and Helen with Annie still pretending that she's not sick. And that's more dialogue character driven. Although I would say when we get to it, I think Kristen Wiig's performance of eating that almond is... Incredible and.

It's got like four lines four action lines it really dwells on her agonizing about the fact that she has to take this home and and she has to put it in her mouth and she has to chew it she forces it down and swallows the almonds down with a slow gulp like it's it's dwelling on the misery that this is causing.

Her yeah you.

Know not just annie grudgingly takes it like it it it draws it out for you.

Yeah and then finally uh lillian the bride is the uh the cap on the scene as there's nowhere to go so she goes to try and use the bathroom in the convenience store across the street and ends up lowering herself and shitting herself in the middle of the street in a gorgeous very expensive wedding dress now that's me like jumping to the end but summarizing the structure of the scene but then the reason i'm doing that is then we can dwell like that structuring, is important because then we can identify what they're doing in the action lines so i really like again one of the things that i'm taking away from this is in comedy feel free to spend some time in setup because all these all these writers are doing that so the bath the single toilet bathroom is as pristine, pristine in caps, and white in caps as the fitting area. Everything is just right, calm and quiet. Classical music plays softly. BAM! Exclamation mark. All caps. The door bursts open as Rita runs in. She projectile vomits into the toilet. Ellipsis. But the seat is down. Everything sprays onto the back wall. So that ellipsis creates the joke. The visual joke. Like obviously when we're seeing that, we are seeing all that happen in one action and it's funny. But what makes it funny on the page is the ellipsis. the fact that they said into the toilet and not onto the toilet like they've deliberately.

They don't tip their hand yeah they've done.

It they've done a reveal on the page structuring a joke that isn't uh on screen.

But it takes you a beat to realize what's happening on screen too right but yeah it's it's giving the reader the experience of this is funny with and then that not being the technical. She opens the stall door. The seat is down. She doesn't have time to open it. Like that's technical, but it's not funny. This is funny.

Yeah. Uh, Rita slams the top open and heaves again into the bowl as Megan runs in holding her backside. Rita ignores her as her head is in it and she grips the sides, barfing. In desperation, Megan hikes up her dress, hops onto the counter and sits in the sink and sits is in caps and the sink is in caps so they are now like doing highlights.

She sits in the sink yeah.

So yeah we cut back to helen and annie having their um i think it literally says face off yeah helen and annie are faced off annie is sweating.

Profusely and the juxtaposition of you have these two women in these very compromising positions yelling at each other and then suddenly you cut into the room and you have two people completely silent just staring at each other and all they're doing is quote sweating profusely like you get that that big shift you know right there which is really great.

You don't look very well Annie I feel fine.

Now, I've seen this film a number of times, but I can't remember where the top-down shot is. It is that break. It is?

It is this break. Okay. Yeah, so Rita and Megan go back and forth for a few more seconds, just still yelling, no, no, look away, look away, ah! And then you get this top-down shot, and it's like, again, just you realize the actual destruction that they have wrought, and then it cuts back to Helen and Annie sweating.

So, Becca joins Megan and Rita in the bathroom. Becca runs in blindly over the toilet that Rita is still barfing in. Vomit rains down on the back of Rita's head. I did enjoy that because they haven't had to say it's Becca's vomit. They very carefully painted the shot. They've chosen the frame with those words.

Right i know.

From those words that becca is not in the in that shot as it's written on the page i can't remember how they actually shot it but what they've written on the page for me is visualizing, becca not being in that shot it's about the vomit raining down on the back of rita's head while she herself is vomiting.

Um and this is actually where uh they the content is all the same but the order starts changing and edit they give you a bit more time with annie and helen um some of their content that's down on the other page and so instead of cutting back and forth quite so much in between vomit sweating vomit front like they give and i think it's mostly to give the weight of the scene between annie and helen because they really start having a little more of a of a realization you know of what's really happening so again like, everything's the same but the flow of things which is funny on the page and really works like you can tell what they're doing and that thing where you just talked about uh right before becca runs in annie's line is i don't have to throw up interior bathroom becca runs in and blindly throws up like that's funny on the page yeah but the sacrifice clearly became oh you know the actors were really having this moment and and it they wanted you know the flow to go a little bit differently so So, honestly, if I'm writing this and planning on directing this, I go, this is a funny transition. Well, like in the edit, if it doesn't go exactly this way, it doesn't matter. On the page, this is funny. That's what I'm trying to do to sell the thing. So, that stays.

Yeah. And, I mean, we've got the, we finally get the only, we're back with Helen and Annie. And there's one more cut back into the bathroom and there's no big print at all on the script. So, we're on page 44 and it's.

What did we eat? Sinks are gone. What are you doing? It's coming out of me like lava. Don't fucking look at me.

This is the point where I'm like, they've done so much setup that they can create the visual through the dialogue.

I think the reason, I think also the reason they have the, even though Megan has said a line, there are other people in the room and we know that. So saying becca noticing her on the sink is like is just making clear to us because we've done all the setup that it's not rita that she's noticing it's not like this is the specific thing she's noticing yeah because again we've seen so much happen in this bathroom in the last 30 seconds yeah.

I mean if if i if it hasn't been clear over the the life of this podcast i have a very puerile sense of humor this scene is like custom made for me and i'm impressed like if i was writing this i would be like a child i would be doing all of the sound effects um and.

I a few years ago i was at a um some gay event night you know and it's like friday night slash saturday morning at 1 a.m and you've been drinking you and the bar had bridesmaids on playing over the bar and i just like i'd been dancing and i wanted a minute so i went and kind of like was leaning against the bar just to have a breather and bridesmaids was on my friend came over and we it because it was on silence we were watching and we were making at some point this scene came on and we did the sound effects i'm sure it probably wasn't as funny as we thought we were but it's so great because you can watch this scene even this even the conversations right between helen and any even all of those but you don't need to know what they're saying everything that is in those action lines reads and we just sat there for like 20 minutes just watching them interact and watching the physical comedy and yeah making the noises yeah.

And so this this sequence culminates as you've already described you've got the wonderful taking the time with the big print of annie chewing on that almond now the one difference that they've made that i remember from the from the screen is on the page it says annie takes a handful and painfully puts them in her mouth my memory from on screen is it's one.

I think she might i think she might take some and then just pick the one and put it in her mouth you know um yeah where it's like oh i can do i can't there's no way i can do one and then that's it and also i just i love the touch that they're jordan almonds which is exactly what you would have in that kind of bridal dress places so.

I look i figure we should do the the culmination which is um the exterior belle en blanc uh.

The description.

Of of lillian who's turned and bolted away from within the dress shop and annie's running after her.

Annie, everybody's really sick from that restaurant. But it wasn't the restaurant. Oh, no, no, no. Lillian, where are you going? I need a bathroom.

Lillian bursts out of the building and runs across the street towards a 7-Eleven. Cars screech to a halt to avoid the fleeing bride.

Help! Oh, no. Oh, no. Where are you going? Come back. Where are you going? Help, be careful. What are you doing? It's happening. Help! It's happening. It's happening. It's happening.

Annie runs out and watches in horror. Suddenly, Lillian stops running and slowly sinks down onto the ground, embarrassed and unable to move. So again, they're doing the what you can see and then comma and then the second clause giving it humor, character. She throws a helpless look back at Annie. In the doorway, Whitney and Annie watch it all in horror.

And if you watch it, even the fact that the way that she slowly sinks onto the ground is exactly what happens.

That bit of performance is incredible.

She almost does the elevator behind the couch, you know, for a kid. It's just, it's a perfect bit of performance, but it is there in the action line. She stops running and slowly sinks. Although she kind of, she doesn't just stop and sink. She like goes into slow motion as she sinks into the ground.

Well, I mean, what I love about, like, I can see it because Maya Rudolph's performance is so amazing. She captures perfectly the look of someone who does not want to sink to the ground, but their body is betraying them. So it's like, I want to keep walking and I am getting closer and closer to the ground.

I definitely look. There's a street in Atlanta where I did this once. More successfully, I will say, but I literally was, and I could not move for about five minutes, and watching this back, and even just reading it, you're like, yeah, this is... Embarrassed and unable to move helpless like the lines are really great it just gives you that sense of everything and even the the cars screech to a halt we that's that's in the movie like they've written something that's so evocative um you know it's it's all there i.

Mean i did i did go back to the the very beginning scene the description of annie mimicking uh john hams like putting his penis in her face is not in the big print and.

Then when she imitates the.

Penis it just says annie imitates a penis.

Aha so that's yeah hey which also if christian wig wrote this like presumably she's like yeah no i don't know what i got this yeah all right i i i've i've had this one boyfriend in mind i've done this before yeah this is this is what i'll do that's fine um i will say one other thing that i did find interesting real quick at the very end of the line it does the thing that happy endings does okay where helen has come out and goes um and in parentheticals re the expensive dress we'll just take five with the bernese it doesn't have to do that just like brad's line and happy endings didn't have to do that it just helps give a little bit of context because it could it could be referring to a couple other things and And it's reminding you of, you know, what's happening. And the bigger context, you know, we haven't seen Whitney for a few minutes until she was running out, etc. Again, it's something that you probably could delete. But it is interesting that when you've got so much other action going that these scenes do go. We need a few more parentheticals than we would normally use to remind you of, you know, everything.

Yeah, because the line, we'll just take five of the Fritz Bernays, Whitney, thank you. it's clearly that's about the expensive dress like it's not about anything else but they just, decided to orient you that Helen is deliberately not talking about anything of the incredible things that have just happened.

This isn't a joke. This is her actively avoiding everything that is right in front of her. Yeah, exactly.

Cool. So, Mel, what did you learn from this exercise? What are you taking away for you for your pages? Because you're writing two comedies at the moment.

Well, I'm writing one comedy and one, I'm calling it a tromedy.

I mean, I laughed a lot in your tromedy.

What? Most people do when they hear about my trauma jazz.

I mean, we're talking about, I'm talking about mothering.

Mothering is the tromedy, yeah, that is the tromedy. And then one rom-com. And I think that the thing with the tromedy is there's a lot of different genres in it. And that is why we're doing the tonal shift with everything everywhere at once and a few other things coming up. Because, yes, there's a bit of comedy, there's a lot of slapstick, but there's a lot of tonal shifts in different genres. Whereas at one point, there's a scene that's breaking out, and it's this little almost sci-fi Doctor Who type scene for about two pages. Whereas My Current Husband, which is the comedy of Remarriage, it is a rom-com, and there's a lot of slapstick. It's very much a screwball. So there's a lot of very quick dialogue, but there's a lot of comedy. And we're using, you know, different things within the scene, different physical skills that, you know, the characters would have and et cetera. And so looking at this, I would say the first thing, like what you said from Happy Endings, is sometimes a lot of table setting earlier is better than, you know, three or four stops for table setting throughout. And so going back and looking at one scene in particular that maybe, oh, I do take a couple of these chunks and just combine them at the top is pretty good. I think I really enjoyed that, which is not something that I've done. And I don't know that I need to do it. But I think that considering the when certain visual gags should be directed a little bit more on the page and whether I do that like as explicitly as bringing up baby or where I use the characters looks to direct it, which is what Happy Endings does, or whether I do, you know, like you were talking about the scene when she bursts into the stall. And then we don't. She's just throwing up on the back of her head and we it tells you exactly what that shot would be seeing you know any of those techniques might work but I think um yeah which of those is best for the particular scene that I'm in so those are probably my two biggest takeaways I really did enjoy seeing some of the techniques that I've been using in terms of both like there's a like blam you know there's sound effects and and a few things at very key moments but also when they use caps versus when they don't. And I need to be a bit more judicious about my parentheticals, especially, but seeing all of them do it, I'm like, okay, you know, I can scale it back. But if anyone tells me to take them all out, I'll be firmly, I have, I have proof. I'll pull out my, you know, my giant stack of papers and point at my proof.

Yeah. I mean, I was so impressed that Bridesmaids, it ended up doing the blam and the, and the caps and stuff like that but that first paragraph where megan throws up into her mouth how they did none of that they just used an interruption to make you start reading the paragraph and then really took their time with that that paragraph it's.

A great takeaway um especially because in a screwball there are a lot of interruptions but it's usually dialogue that's interrupting and you're right when it's this longer action line suddenly interrupting it does make you take notice of oh even though it's subtle they're not giant you know blocks of exclamation points it's saying this is really uh key uh something's about to happen i really like that that note.

And i i love the the same observation that you've made about taking the time to set up physical humor one of the things that i think it's important to set up is geography of the space especially as they're moving around because all three of these scenes did that very well. Bringing up Baby, obviously, you've got three different perspectives that creates the humor, the framing, but lots of geography and you're never lost in it. Happy Endings, the geography of the room and the gifts. And like you said, that they even... You feel like you can see everything. And yet at the end, they still managed to do a reveal without saying reveal the giant.

FAO Schwartz chocolate figures.

Yeah.

Bridesmaids has different, different people and different combinations in different rooms.

Yeah.

And you know, you are pretty clear where you are at any given point because of who you're with and what they're doing.

Yeah. And, and taking the time to set up the, whatever it is, is it the geography? Is it the running gag about the baby voice is it the the gifts you know but taking the time to set it up then actually allows you to use that those action lines either more for to to make gags or to direct you know you can you can spend that time picking the frame picking the perspective telling us the thing in in action that is going to make it funnier on screen or trying to recreate that experience on screen. Directing from the page, you might say.

Yeah, with differing degrees of subtlety, they all direct from the page a bit. But as a director, when I read a script, I want to be seeing it in my head, you know? I don't, you know, something that doesn't evoke some sort of imagery in your head is probably not that interesting.

Cool. Well, thank you for that. The thing that I'm writing next is not got any physical comedy. There is one character that I want to give a lot of dry wit to. So you know maybe as you continue to write your different comedies we can start doing more exploration into different aspects of comedy i.

Will be making you watch a 40s comedy uh if we do one on on dry wet in comedy because.

Look to be very clear i love cinema from all backgrounds times it's just as a screenwriter that i uh so.

Much to learn.

From all of the.

Screenwriting i suppose yeah if you're talking wit and dialogue we can go there.

Um as always draft zero is brought to you more often by our amazing patrons if you want more draft zero more often you can too join our patrons uh i feel like our most our best attended tier is the minimum tier where you get to choose and vote on homework uh so thank you patrons for doing So this time it's super thanks to our extra special patrons, Alexandra, Jenny, Jesse, Krob, Lily, Millay, Paolo, Randy, Sandra, Thies, Thomas. Thank you so much. And thank you, Mel, for making this happen, for doing the homework. You presented me with options and I'm like, I don't have time. Just choose.

I sent you a whole email with like, here's eight scenes from these four different scripts. What do you want? And I get a text from Jess, pick one.

Okay. So Mel also makes more Draft Zero happen more often. I hope you all feel like arguing with either Stu or myself. About anything on this episode or anything in general. And you can find many ways of getting in touch with us at our website. At draft-zero.com. At the website, you'll also find the show notes for this and all our other episodes. As well as links to support us and spread the word for free via a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Very important for spreading the word. Or if you think that what we do here is worth a dollar or preferably more than a dollar, then you can also find links to our Patreon page to support us getting these episodes to you quicker. Thanks. And thanks for listening.