Well, I’m not exactly going to stop, but let’s mix it up a little. So, how long has it been since the last time I reviewed one of my old plays? Eight months and a few days? Well, better than last time.
When last we left this series, I’d just written one of, if not the funniest thing I’d ever written. So what to do next? Simple.
Abandon comedy altogether.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Lost Time.
What’s it about?
Years ago, Gabrielle Silverman was the victim of a horrifically violent attack. (Yep, apparently I was done with funny for a while.) After some time in the hospital, she fled Calgary (I was experimenting with setting plays where I lived… hi, hypothetical unknown reader, I live in Calgary, Alberta), leaving behind her best friend, Hal, and her boyfriend, Hal’s older brother Donny… who was secretly in love with Gabrielle as well.
Following the attack, Gabrielle went into seclusion, Donny got lost in his own mind, and Hal had to try to hold everything together. Now, Gabrielle is finally coming home, setting the stage for a reunion between her, her ex-boyfriend, her best friend who’s hiding secrets… and Jackie, one of her assailants. It’s a story of love, loss, violence, trauma, recovery, addiction, faith, antisemitism, the Jewish ten days of repentance, revenge, and forgiveness… all written by a white male gentile agnostic whose biggest success to that point involved men in togas spraying each other with oversized water guns.
Should be fine.
So as you can imagine, the people who sat down to read the early drafts, expecting to laugh, were in for a bit of a surprise.
So why’d that happen?
Like Salvage before it, this one came from a dream. My dream was focused around an absence. The absence of a woman, a woman who became Gabrielle. All the key aspects of Gabrielle’s past were there: the woman was my brother’s first girlfriend, who I’d also loved in my awkward, ineffective, bad-at-saying-it way (…ladies). Like Gabrielle, this woman (who, let’s be clear, does not exist) suffered a horrific assault as a teen and disappeared. She never appeared in my dream, just the void left in her place. Her parents, sleepwalking through life. Her empty bedroom, which I remembered the exact way to parkour into from when I was in high school (I could not parkour in high school, don’t let my subconscious tell you different). And above all of that, the way her absence weighed on me and my brother. No matter what the dream tried to become (at one point I was a Mountie, and another Doctor Who, and yes, I made that a line in the show), the absence of this woman haunted everything.
When a dream triggers an emotional response that strong, I feel a need to capture it. And so Lost Time was born.
How’d it turn out?
…Why is this Hal’s story?
Overall it seems… fine. Decent. The characters are well realized, the climax is solid, I think the basic premise is engaging. It just has two issues. First, it’s incredibly talky. Incredibly talky. Most of the show is people talking about things that happened years earlier, rather than anything happening now. And secondly, I reiterate…
Why is Hal the main character?
I mean I think the answer is “The Hal role was the POV character in the dream, and it was just easier to make him the POV character in the play.” That’s the obvious answer, but it’s not a good answer. Let’s be real, Gabrielle is the one on a journey here. She instantly becomes the most interesting thing in every scene she’s in, and not making her the focus of the story was folly.
It can still go the way it went, sure, I don’t think the overall plot needs to change. But this should be Gabrielle’s story from the word go.
Would you stage it again?
Not as is. As you may have noticed, I’ve discovered kind of a major structural flaw here. Overall I think maybe, but the central character would need to shift before I sent it back out into the world. And it could also use some further digging into Jackie, the ex-thug who turned his back on his friends when he realized what they were. But why did he end up with them to begin with? Why did he go along with the violence and the crime as long as he did? As Dylan Marron puts it, hurt people hurt people. I kind of skimmed over what, exactly, pushed Jackie to join a gang that became white pride thugs without him, born and raised Jewish, noticing.
Overall, it might be worth trying to brush up at some point, because I think this world could use some more discussion of forgiveness and redemption.
Repeated theme alert:
Let’s sit and exchange backstories for twenty minutes like that doesn’t kill the pacing! That describes more of this show than it doesn’t. Most of the show’s action took place in the past.
Fun with pop culture: There’s a reference to not knowing if a character’s trauma is from being hugged too much or not enough. Borrowed that from Con Air.
Not a repeated theme, but a repeated character… Theresa from Quarter Centuryis back as Hal and Donny’s therapist and a friend to Jackie. Which means she’s been in two of my plays but has somehow yet to have her own plot.
The phrase “Fair point” is used so often that nine years later I’m still hearing about it. It’s become a stage in my editing process: look for the “fair point,” the phrase that gets over used.
A failure’s just a success you haven’t thought through.
Okay let’s take a break from the stroll down Doctor Who’s memory lane. I’d like to tell you a little story.
Long-term readers might recall that during my oft-neglected look back at past plays, I discussed the worst first draft I’d ever written, Quest, which given how I tore into some of my otherearlyworks is quite the damning statement. Yet still somehow earned, because this attempted blend of Ocean’s 11 and Lord of the Ringswas basically unstageable.
I also mentioned that, years later, there were elements of the concept that I still kind of liked. I liked the idea of most of the characters, if not the execution. There was a moment, a key turning point for several characters, that could have been beautiful. That should have been beautiful. It was there, in my head, a moment of joy and perfect happiness right before things were scheduled to go wrong. I felt an overpowering need to try and do that moment justice.
And there began ConQuest.
Know Your Medium
When I started this mad project way, way back when, I had some friends who attempted to softball their disapproval of the script by saying that maybe stage wasn’t the venue. Maybe this was a novel, or something else.
I said no, I can make it work, because I’d seen Fringe plays that made weird or minimalist choices work and assumed anything is stageable if you’re determined. Well, that’s part of the truth. It’s a little true but underneath that was the fact that, having been running community theatre groups for nearly a decade, I knew how to get plays staged. I had no successful experience with film or with getting novels published. Or written. Not super at prose if I’m being honest.
No, this isn’t prose, this is conversational exposition. There is a difference.
Nothing said “This isn’t meant for stage” like the fact that everything interesting happened off of it. Everything. Every single thing. Because exposition and talkiness are so much easier to stage than magic and battles. Or the cons that should have been the central story mechanic.
So step one… if this story was going to work, if my one, perfect moment had any chance of existing, I had to write this thing for a genre that could actually support it. And while I’m still bad at prose, I had recently been seduced by Sweet Lady Film. So maybe it was a movie.
And when it passed the 150 page mark, maybe it was a series. So that’s what I turned it into.
Know Your Story
When writing the stage version, I had characters in my head, though only partially realized. I had a vague notion of the world, enough to fuel far too much exposition. But did I have a story? Only kind of sort of. I just started writing some stuff down and tried to build some rising action and threw in a sudden yet inevitable betrayal just to try to add value to the supposed lead, and none of it landed.
So this time I did a bit more legwork.
Know your story. Know where it’s going. Know how to tell it. If your story is about a con artist fighting a magic war, have cons. And action. The Fellowship of the Rings didn’t become The Fellowship of the Rings by standing around and talking about how cool they all were when the cameras weren’t running.
Now there are twists, turns, rising dangers and diminishing safety, action and cons. Plus characters people actually like, and moments that elicited gasps at the first reading.
Telling your story right is step two. But before you can tell your story right, you have to know what it is.
Get Good Advice
The first readers of the play version did their best. They tried, they really tried, to warn me away from it. But they also softballed it a little. They said “I don’t know if this will work” rather than “It will not work.”
Fortunately I had other friends willing to say that in no uncertain terms. Less fortunately, in a far more public venue.
So before I got attached to this new version, I called three close friends (including the two most vocal opponents of the stage version, you know, the ones from that last paragraph) and said “I need feedback on this on a level I would classify as ‘unflinching.'”
And to my mild surprise and deep relief, they dug it. Sure they had notes, of course they had notes, do you have any idea how few scripts nail it on draft one or two? But overall, I was on to something.
Soon this went from a project I’d only talk about after at least four whiskeys into something people were anxious to hear news on, something they wanted to be part of. That was a good feeling. Almost good as I imagine filming it will feel.
That’s not true. Filming it would be WAY better.
Question Assumptions
BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg wrote a great post about gender in comedy in response to a question on his Tumblr. Basically, he called attention to the fact that when casting a character for a simple gag, we assume the character will be male. Example, the Minions are genderless yellow blobs but all have male names. And the only way to break this assumption is to notice we’re doing it and fight against it.
And that’s how the main character’s partner, Freddy, changed from “Frederick” to “Winifred.” And once that was done, I analyzed every choice: am I only doing this because she’s a woman now? Is this the right choice for Freddy, beyond the question of gender?
The most important choice, and the one everyone was very relieved to hear, was that Toby and Freddy do not end up together at the end of the season. That would not work at all.
Weird that a man and a woman being friends and colleagues without any sexual history needs to be a revolutionary concept.
So when will this hit screens? No idea. Doing my best, but scrounging up filming money is a new field. But for now, it’s just nice to know it’s working.
“Wait, it’s been how long since I blogged about my old plays? Twenty-five months? Wow. And what have I been talking about in the meantime? No, aside from The Flash and Arrow.”
…
Huh.
Someone really took “My blog, my rules” to heart, I see.
Well, back to it. I mean come on, Dan, they were finally getting good.
Ladies and gentlemen, join me on a trip back to 2008, a time of antiquated things like hope, optimism, and American democracy… a time when I decided to take a crack at a genre I’d long enjoyed, but never experimented with… farce. And then I made it a murder mystery. I do like slapping murder mysteries onto things. This is Dying on Stage.
What’s it about?
Call it “Murder at the Muppet Show.”
Who here remembers my go-to graphic for “Wacky premise?”
The Comedy Invasion is a struggling sketch/variety show (picture a non-televised Saturday Night Live, or a Muppet Show with humans and a musical guest) hosted by its creator Johnny Rayner and produced by his long-time business partner (and to his chagrin, only business) Mera Lucas. Tonight they’ve gotten a windfall that could turn their fortunes around… star of stage and screen Gareth Gardner has agreed to guest appear. If the show goes well, they’re on top.
So imagine their dismay when their asshole lead actor dies at the end of the opening sketch, apparently poisoned. It’s up to the remaining cast and crew to figure out who the killer is without Gareth or the audience noticing anything’s amiss. Cue hijinks!
So why’d that happen?
…I’m not sure I even remember.
I certainly am a big Muppet Show fan, but in the end it didn’t have that big an influence. There might be some traces of Kermit the Frog in Johnny’s occasional flustered ranting and role as MC. Resident comedienne Finnian Shale (an early case of me defying the “comic characters are men” stereotype and saying “Well, why can’t this role be a woman?”) certainly owes a debt to Fozzie Bear, especially given her big joke routine is a direct homage to one of my favourite Fozzie bits.
Maybe it had some influence from my love of sketch comedy in general, really. Back then I think I was using Kids in the Hall as background noise while writing. That would make sense. The continued presence of Premise Beach on my blogs prove I’m a bit of a Kids in the Hall fan. Maybe fondness for the brilliant and sadly forgotten late 90s show Viva Variety drove the notion into my head. Maybe it just came to me. I used to write sketches, especially back in the days of my old company, Mind the Walrus, and had some funny ones lying around that I felt I could be seen more.
No, wait, now that I think about it, I reused old sketches because I hadn’t written sketch comedy in several years and had slightly forgotten how. Hmm.
I guess at some point “Murder at the Muppet Show” became a fun idea and I decided to chase it, even though farce is a whole different animal than simple comedy.
I’m not positive when I decided to combine murder mystery and farce, but it works pretty well. The thing that drives a farce is high stakes. There is a secret, or a crisis, and any second it could come out, and if it does, lives will be ruined. And from there comes our pace, the desperate dance of lies and cover-ups that fuel the comedy. Hiding a body, or a series of bodies, while trying not to be the next victim provides those stakes.
How’d it turn out?
Really, really funny.
The opening scene was the biggest challenge. I needed a scene of pure pre-show chaos, where everything’s crazy and everyone’s high-energy and trying to get prepped, and at the same time it needed to accomplish two key things. First, introduce the cast of ten characters (well, introduce nine of them and hint at Gareth, who would show up in the next scene), and second, give as many of them as possible a motivation to kill Frankie, the lead character and first victim. Tricky juggling act but I think I got there.
Gareth Gardner works well as a hybrid of two archetypes: he’s every Very Special Guest Star from the Muppet Show (above this nonsense but still having a good time), and the Suspicious Constable from British farces, constantly spotting the holes in the protagonists’ cover stories.
Not all of the cast is super well developed, but given how fast some of them need to die I don’t see how that’s my fault. This thing needs to hit the ground running, so I don’t have unlimited time to spend teaching everyone what vain actress Veronica Horne’s hopes and dreams are. I just need you to know she’s narcissistic, weaponizes her sexuality, and the shier actresses don’t love her.
Bucky, the long-suffering intern, is as funny as he needs to be. Especially if you get someone hilarious in the role, like we did. Cliff the stage hand’s forced transition to leading man is a nice arc. I enjoy Finn. She’s so earnest and so bad at keeping a secret. Her habit of saying exactly the wrong thing at any given moment might be a bit of Fozzie Bear slipping back in.
Also, I got to end it with a line that had been in my head for a while… “If we spirits have offended, think but this and all is mended… No refunds. Goodnight everybody!”
There is one odd thing that happened. Some of the sketches didn’t get the laughs I expected, at least not at the workshops. And it’s not because the sketches weren’t funny, they were tried and true material. I’ve gotten laughs with Lost and Found and Celebrity Where Are My Pants before and since. It’s just that compared to the more rapid fire off-stage scenes, the sketches slowed the pace some. A weird effect that doesn’t really help.
But that might be more of a staging issue.
Would you stage it again?
Absolutely. That said, there were a couple of issues that came up during rehearsal, that we never got around to smoothing out. See, if I’m at a rehearsal and not on stage, I like to read. And the director took that to mean that I couldn’t be interrupted or asked questions. Which… makes no sense to me.
But anyway, it works. The major comic set pieces are reliable and not difficult to pull off. The pace is solid, and the full-on Agatha Christie Poirot-style “It was YOU!” revelation of the killer is enjoyable.
Man, why haven’t I done this one again…
Repeated theme alerts
Man and Woman Cannot Be Friends: Of course there’s a romantic C-plot between Johnny and Mera, because why not.
Writing about writers: I mean, there’s not a lot of discussion about it, but Johnny probably writes the show, doesn’t he? Someone must.
Something something pop culture reference: Well I mentioned the “Good grief, the comedian’s a bear!” homage, but here’s an obscure one. Bucky the intern’s real name is Hubert. This comes from the first “An Evening With Kevin Smith” DVD, in which one of the fans asking questions introduces himself as “My name is Hubert but everyone calls me Bucky,” and Kevin runs with it. “BUCKY! You don’t even need to ask a question now, man… what was your real name?” “Hubert.” [Kevin chuckles] “Bucky!”
Next time… how do you follow up the funniest thing you’ve ever written? You abandon comedy and get dark.
And so our first season comes to an end. Team post-production has been mourning the lack of new episodes to cut together for days. But it’s time for one last look behind the curtain. If you haven’t seen our double-and-a-half length season finale yet, check it out, and I’ll wait for you in the next section.
Building a climax
Yes, fine, I heard it as soon as I said it, maybe we could just get our minds out of the gutter.
When we were breaking the season, one of the questions was what balance to strike between, as they’d say on Supernatural, “mythology episodes” and “filler episodes,” or in our terms, which episodes will contribute to longer character arcs (say, Love is Blind or Deconstructing Phil) and which will be simple one-offs (In the Depths or Night Moves). We decided that for season one, we’d stick to primarily one-offs. But I still wanted a finale that represented some sort of closure for what arcs we had. Which meant that the first thing that I had to do when writing it was establish what those arcs were: Becky’s rocky relationship with Ted, Jeff’s trainwreck relationship with Claire, Phil’s inability to act on an attraction (with the exception of Zoe). Which I felt was also a great opportunity to bring back Duane Jones as Brent.
This old charmer.
It gave us a chance to see the impact Brent had on Phil, Jeff, and Becky before his death. Which also let me underline a key difference between Becky and the lads. Phil and Jeff both need guidance in their flashbacks: they need advice on what to do about Olivia (a character from the original play that may well turn up in future seasons) and Claire. Becky just needs acceptance. She knows who she is and what she wants, she just wants to say it out loud and not be judged, and that’s what Brent gives her. That’s what he always gave her. You can see the same thing in episode two.
Which is what spurs her to begin confronting her relationship with Ted, just as Brent’s advice spurs Phil and Jeff into action.
Now… I mostly write plays. Ending a play is a whole different thing. You need a complete, definitive ending. Well, to a point. In a lot of cases, the original Writers Circle included, I steered away from the big, rainbow-wipe, happily-ever-after ending, instead crafting a conclusion where the protagonist(s) doesn’t necessarily get everything he/she wants, but instead overcomes something and allows him/herself to attempt to be happy. Which is initially what I went for here, including one sequence where Zoe snaps and lays out everyone’s issues in full.
It was determined to be a little too much closure, because unlike a play, in a TV series you want to leave some threads open for next season. So I had to tone that down some. Zoe’s still the one calling people out on stuff (especially Becky, after all the private sniping she’s been doing in Keith’s episodes), but she’s not providing a series-ending monologue.
Sound wizardry
The facts are these. We are, all of us behind the camera, fairly new at all this. So, mistakes get made. One of them is particularly bizarre. Every shot in the season finale that reached take five, the fifth take has no sound. What’s bizarre about that, other than the consistency? This never came up before. No other episode had this weird problem. And the finale was not the last thing we shot. In fact, it was shot on ten different days scattered between August and a couple of weeks ago (did some pick-up shots of Becky). The scene with all four leads in the writers’ room was, of course, shot during August’s Super Fun Happy Good Times Week (literally the only time that could happen). The airport scene was shot over a month later, and in between there were other shooting days, including nearly all of Night Moves. So it’s honestly beyond me how this take five issue only affected scenes from this episode.
But there’s more.
Some key sound recordings also went missing from the airport scene. Most notably, the sound from every take we’d picked for the rough cut. Every. Single. Take. Using the camera audio, filled with nonsense from the surrounding airport, wasn’t an option. We tried that, and Ian actually threw his headphones away in disgust hearing the result. Ian tried putting together a new cut based around the takes we knew had sound, but… it was not as good. Missing all the touches that made the original work, including an ad lib from Ryan that turned out much funnier than what I’d written.
I hate it when that happens. There is one thing on this show I do well, and I do not need Ryan doing it better than me.
Anyway. We weren’t happy with the new take, but we couldn’t use the camera audio, and given that Ryan was out of the country for another month, ADR was out of the question. As was waiting a month to release the finale, given that it was already two weeks late. Three if you count the blooper reel. Which I don’t, as we planned on using that as a buffer. As such, it looked like we were going to have to use the new, lesser cut, as much as it killed us to do so.
And then our sound designer, Pat “DJ Murr-mur” Murray, did a thing.
He spent gods only know how long pouring through the sound takes we did have, cutting them apart and then patching them back together, often one word at a time, to match the original cut. He rebuilt the missing sound takes out of scraps and made the new franken-cut sync up with the footage.
We don’t often like to say nice things about Pat in public, as he is a monster in the form of a man, but that… that’s pretty impressive right there.
Fun at the Airport
We had expected to have to get creative about finding a way to put the team in an airport. Like, sneak ourselves an establishing shot by filming the airport without permission (you know, like a crime), then film the actual scene at the Greyhound station. But it turns out the Calgary International Airport is actually super cool about filming there if you ask them nicely. Hell, they didn’t even charge us, just picked a relatively out-of-the-way spot for us to shoot in, and… well, there was one catch… told us we could shoot there at 6:00 AM. Which, in theory, was going to be a low-traffic time. In theory. there was still a decent amount of people checking in to fly between six and eight, and a (possibly) homeless woman nesting in the back corner, who had questions about launching a web series of her own. Questions I was more than happy to let Ian field. I’m the best friend anyone has ever had.
Within a couple of weeks of shooting this, I flew to Prince George for my grandmother’s 90th birthday. Looking around the nigh-deserted airport, I couldn’t help but think “Forget 6 AM, we should have shot this at 7:30 on a Thursday night.”
Now, the arrangement with the airport meant that we were locked into our shooting date. So it didn’t matter if my birthday party was that night and 22 hours of consciousness didn’t really appeal (I don’t nap). It also didn’t matter if one of our cast happened to have a severe case of either food poisoning or the flu. Try to guess which one.
You can’t, can you? No, you can’t. You know why?
Because Stephanie Morris is a goddamn champ, that’s why.
If the cameras weren’t rolling, Steph was down. Like, collapsed. Pale, weak, and if she wasn’t sprinting for the washroom she was lying half-dead in a nearby chair. But one we got set up, and Steph was in place, something a little magical happened. Sick Steph vanished, and ready-to-party Becky emerged. As long as the cameras were rolling, she was in peak form. Soon as Keith said “Cut,” she collapsed.
But damn, that was some dedication right there. Well, okay, I did have some suspicions… I may have suggested that her supposed illness was an elaborate ruse to bail on my birthday party. But either she was fine, and pretending to be that sick, or really was sick and pretending to be healthy on camera, and either way, that was some talent.
Random Observations
We didn’t do the most thorough job of transforming my main floor into Becky’s apartment. Aside from some mess (which I think actually helps sell the transition into flashback), we didn’t clear any of my posters from the hallway. As such, there are no less than four Doctor Who related prints or posters visible in Becky’s hall. So I guess Becky likes Doctor Who. Because why wouldn’t she? It’s great.
On that note… everyone’s final words as they leave for the check-in desk are a reference to one of my favourite episodes, the 50th Anniversary special, Day of the Doctor. The episode teams up David Tennant’s 10th Doctor with Matt Smith’s 11th, as well as a previously unknown incarnation known as the War Doctor, who served an interesting purpose. He spoke for Hartnell, Pertwee, McCoy, all of the Doctors from the original run. The War Doctor reacted to 10 and 11 the way any of them would have. That is, with confused annoyance at things the new series introduced, such as wielding sonic screwdrivers like weapons or saying things like “Timey-wimey.” So in the climax, as the three of them fly their Tardises into battle, 10 and 11 shout their catchphrases, and the War Doctor responds appropriately:
11: “GERONIMO!”
10: “Allons-y!”
War: “Oh, for God’s sake!”
So I went ahead and gave that exchange to Phil, Zoe, and Jeff. Because I’ve gotta be me.
Also visible in Becky’s apartment: a box reading “Pastoral Paranoia.” Pastoral Paranoia is a play by American playwright Jeff Carter that my company, Scorpio Theatre, put up in the fall of 2013. Both Duane and I were in it. The box was something that our Jimmy-Dave/Douche/one-time 1st AD/man of 13 titles Matt Pickering built as a silent auction item for the play’s opening night gala, which I ended up buying. He’d brewed some beers that came with the box. I wanted those beers.
From her conversation with Ted, we also see that Becky’s a fan of Shortpacked!, the (now ended) comic from David Willis, in that she also bought one of the limited edition posters Willis sold as a vacation fundraiser. It’s not impossible that Becky would enjoy Shortpacked!, but I suspect she’d be more of a fan of Willis’ current strip, Dumbing of Age, in which Willis took all of the characters from his four previous comics and rebooted them as freshmen (mostly) at the University of Indiana. DoA, as it’s known, focuses more on the ladies, and thoughtfully tackles a large number of race, LGBT, and feminist issues for a comedy strip written by a straight white dude in the flyover states. Maybe Becky liked Dumbing of Age enough that she bought a Shortpacked! poster to support the artist. Or maybe she has a secret love of Transformers: the Movie (the 80s cartoon, I doubt Becky’s a Michael Bay fan), which the poster homages.
The omelette Jeff’s eating in his flashback was disgusting. I mean, I find all omelettes disgusting, something about the texture of eggs makes me gag, but this one was especially bad. Most film food is. When you watch Cracked: After Hours, nobody is eating fresh, warm, food. It doesn’t even come from the diner where they shoot. Ask Daniel O’Brien, he’ll tell you. So it was with Brent’s “ham and cheese omelette with hot sauce.” It’s actually just eggs in omelette shape that Ian cooked up before we started shooting, covered in whatever Ben (whose home we were shooting in) had that resembled hot sauce. So Aaron is eating a cold, spongy, nada-omelette covered in thousand island dressing. Which Keith finished in the name of solidarity.
Dinner at Ted’s Mom’s house was actually shot ridiculously early, and at the home of Cynthia/our lead costumer, the almost supernaturally delightful Tawni Barton. Which meant asking her neighbour to please stop practising the saxophone for a few hours. At one point, Ian needed to adjust the lights, and Tawni was busy elsewhere in the building, so left to our own devices, our Production Manager Daisy Pond and I alphabetized her movie collection. Because we’re those sorts of people.
I like a good gag credit. By way of a for instance, every single episode of Robot Chicken has gag credits for both Mila Kunis and Sarah Michelle Gellar. I decided to do something similar, and add a gag credit to our YouTube credits.
Like so.
So for those who don’t read the full descriptions on YouTube, I present… the Many Titles of Matt Pickering.
The Vicious Circle: “Little known fact, also dope on the mic” Funeral for a Friend: “Records in VHS” Brent’s Non-Replacement: “Wants to build a snowman*”
“*It doesn’t HAVE to be a snowman” Origin Stories: “Must become someone else… must become someTHING else” Deconstructing Phil: “Georgia peach” In the Depths: “Otherkin Consultant” Love is Blind: “Grinding your Tinder” Night Moves: “Workin’ on mysteries without any clues” Favour For a Friend: “Yaris Wrangler” Stonebluff Road: “Auteur of atrocities” Jeff’s Head: “Needs an adult” Who You Gonna Call: “Ready to believe you” Decisions and Denouements: “Shot JR”
That’s… that’s about all I can think of to tell you about this episode. Which brings us to the end of the season. I’m quite sad to have no new episodes to review, to post, to write about… but it’ll be a while. In the meantime, I’ve watched 21 episodes of the Flash in two days, so… that helped.
Here’s to season two. Hurry along, now.
I have a band of wonderful weirdos to reunite, after all.
Hasn’t really sunk in yet that this is our penultimate episode. Gonna miss talking about this show with you every Friday. Well… here’s the episode…
Let’s get to it.
Where it all began
This is the first episode of Writers Circle that was ever written. It’s also the shortest, and those two things might go a little hand-in-hand.
People close to the show must be getting tired of me mentioning the train in Switzerland, but it’s not only where the series started, but where this episode was written.
It’s not a short train ride from Venice to Zurich. And while Switzerland is really pretty to look at, all mountains and lakes and waterfalls… god damn it somebody start paying me enough money that I can take off to Switzerland on a whim, ’cause I really want to right now… sorry, I’m back. Anyway, as I’ve said before, when I’m far from home with little to do but think (Ian was napping or journalling or a combination of the two), it tends to spark creativity. In this case, I thought of all the videos Ian and I had shot together, and wondered why we hadn’t started doing more stuff. Especially given all the times Keith had said “We should be shooting stuff for the internet.”
So I decided that the three of us should make a series out of Writers Circle. And, since we were still somewhere other than Zurich, I decided I may as well break out a notebook and do a proof-of-concept episode. I just needed something to write about. And what I came up with was giving Jeff a crazy on-again, off-again sex-buddy named Claire.
So before Ted, before Brent, before our fourth lead Zoe… there was Claire. Which is why it feels a little odd it’s taken this long for everyone to meet her.
That’s why Phil drags Becky along and not Zoe, by the by. Because Zoe didn’t exist when I wrote this.
The episode’s a little short, all told, and I’d like to blame that on the fact that I wrote it by hand on a train, and was trying to keep the premise as short and simple as I could because, well, internet. It did turn out shorter than I expected, though. It’s… kind of a simple bit.
I also could have done another pass on the episode to reflect the strained relationship of Phil and Jeff, or at least acknowledge that things were weird, but that Phil is still Jeff’s first phone call in a crisis. But honestly, I liked the simplicity.
Creating Claire
The “crazy girlfriend” is kind of sadly cliche. There needed to be something specific to why Claire was seen as “crazy.” So I picked a specific adjective to define Claire, and that adjective is “volatile.”
Claire likes to live on the edge, like a less self-destructive version of Danny Devito’s character from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. She’s into things that are crazy and dangerous. She likes a thrill. And simply calling Jeff and asking if he wants to hook up is way too boring, so she’ll spend untold weeks breaking into his apartment and screwing with his watch and clocks, until she’s ready for the endgame. The endgame involves boning.
But I also wrote that final conversation between her and Becky to show that as volatile as she is in her personal life, she’s actually very together and successful in her professional life. Crazy Claire isn’t some nigh-homeless bunny-boiler, she’s actually really good at her job, and simply likes to blow off steam with terrifying things and her dysfunctional relationship with Jeff.
We’ll see how well that’s going next episode.
Sex Ponchos
As soon as Keith wrote the words “sex poncho” into Stonebluff Road, it was clear what Jeff had to be wearing when Phil and Becky arrived. Well, mostly. The bow tie was our costumer’s idea. Aaron didn’t necessarily approve.
He fought the good fight, but was outvoted by basically everyone.
Aaron happens to own a bright purple poncho. This, we knew, was clearly the sex poncho we required. Sadly, there were only two of us gathering up all the equipment we needed to drag down to our friend Ben’s condo, and in the bustle of collecting the camera, tripods, spare batteries, lights, and sound equipment, the purple poncho was neglected. This we learned once we started getting the actors into costume. That is, at a moment when fixing the problem would have actively cost us shooting time, as the poncho was a half-hour round trip drive away.
This is the closest I came to losing it on set, which is something we try rather strenuously to avoid.
While I was stressing that there was no point in shooting without a poncho, Ben wandered up and said “Why don’t you just use mine?”
There was a brief pause.
“You… have a sex poncho?” I asked, confused that this idea might have existed somewhere other than Keith’s, let’s call it, “special” mind.
“Yes,” he replied. “Is that not why you wrote that?”
“It was not. But… thanks. That’ll help.”
He also attempted to provide some assistance when our sound equipment started overheating and shutting down when we tried to record, but that’s a whole other… thing I’d rather not go into. Instead, it’s time for…
Begrudgingly saying a few nice things about our sound guy
We didn’t have a method of creating convincing punch sounds on set that day, save for actually having Ryan wail on Aaron for three minutes, which Aaron was not super in favour of. So they simply created a placeholder sound by having Aaron smack his fist into his arm over and over.
Which our sound guy, Patrick “DJ Peens” Murray, had to replace with foley. Manually.
Over eighty times.
He made sure we knew that wasn’t a simple process, and that maybe in the future just don’t make noises and let him foley stuff in later.
He also puts a lot of thought into our ringtones. Each ringtone is a joke he’s thought up, found a song, and cribbed just enough of the music to make it recognizable if you paid attention, while still being A) subtle, and B) short enough to not get us nailed on copyright. He claims to care more about the first thing.
Listen closely, see if you can figure out what’s playing when Jeff calls Phil. Or, more amusingly, when Ted calls Becky.
Final facts
I filled Phil’s bedroom with geek stuff, only to have us shoot it so that only the comics and the plush Cthulu were visible. Well, what can you do.
Jeff in the bathtub is the only shot of Jeff’s apartment not filmed at or outside Ben’s place. He’s in my guest bathroom, wearing the pants from my pimp suit as pyjamas. Yes, I own a pimp suit. Do you not?
It is distressingly easy for me to find comics to festoon Phil’s shots with. Even on location.
Next week, blooper reel. In two weeks… the big finale.
And pop by here in the next couple of days if me talking about DC’s Legends of Tomorrow is of interest. Which I choose to assume it is.
The arcs in season one mostly came about in the same way: Keith would write something (Phil and George, Becky and Ted), I would think “That’s neat,” and throw in additional references to it, leading to the finale where everything blows up.
Jeff, on the other hand, went a little differently.
This week, we meet Jeff’s on-again, off-again sex buddy Claire. Through flashbacks, primarily. And through Phil’s description. At the risk of joining spoiler culture (a call ahead reference to a blog I haven’t written yet), this is not the last we’re seeing of Claire. But the point is, the first Claire episode I wrote is yet to come.
I’ll tell the story of that episode soon enough. The relevance here is that it created a writing challenge for me. I wrote the payoff to Jeff’s arc for the year, then had to find a way to build the set-up into the rest of the season. The major part of which happens this week, as the name “Claire” is said for the first time and Victoria Souter makes her debut.
So when writing this episode, I was both following up on moments Keith and I had written from Night Moves and Favour For a Friend, while setting up things I’d written in episodes yet to come. Well, in one episode. I hadn’t written the finale yet.
More to come on Claire as it develops.
The Brain Trust Screws Up a Little
This episode has what might very well be my favourite shot of the whole season. This one, right here.
Look at all that fancy camerawork and whatnot.
Like it? We really, really hope you do. Because along with “renting the space for the writers room,” it is one of the two biggest expenses for the whole damn season.
And not even for a good reason, like permits or fancy cameras or buying a proper boom mic instead of MacGyvering something together for me to hold while Ian and I ran a lap around Aaron. No, it was possibly our largest expense because we were a little dumb about getting the shot.
That’s the roof of our friend Ben’s building. Hence Ben being found in the “special thanks” portion of the end credits.
There he is.
Everyone in this shoot had been on that roof multiple times. We used to watch fireworks from that roof. It never occurred to anyone, even Ben (who had let us shoot in his home despite not being present), that we weren’t technically supposed to be up there, given the lack of railings and whatnot.
We did a few takes, from a few angles, and once we were convinced we’d gotten the shot visually, gathered around to test whether the sound had recorded properly. A not-exactly-top-of-the-line microphone on a slightly windy roof, there could have been issues.
Let’s call that “Things we could have been smarter about #1.”
While we were packing up the equipment, someone emerged from the staircase, along with either a superintendent or a member of the condo board. Turns out that Keith yelling “action” and Aaron kicking the door open over and over drew a level of attention that fifteen intoxicated people watching fireworks never did. Whoever this basically-pyjama-clad authority figure was, she was super curious who we were and what we were doing up there. Not friendly curious, either. We tried to explain that we had a friend in the building, and he let us on the roof. Ian, ever helpful, even told her which unit.
“Things we could have been smarter about #2.”
I mean, she wasn’t a cop, she couldn’t legally detain us. We could have just left. Darted down the stairs for a few floors then doubled back to Ben’s place. All these things we thought of after Ian had sold out our host.
Turns out knowing a resident was insufficient, as for insurance reasons, he wasn’t allowed up there either. As a result, they changed the locks on the rooftop door. And sent Ben the bill. Which we paid, as we’re not sociopaths, and are capable of recognizing when we’re at fault.
If we’d done the sound check inside, or if we’d been even a little clever dealing with Angry Building Lady, maybe this could have been avoided.
The shot’s pretty as hell, though. Just pretty as hell.
Trash the set
The writers’ room has one episode left to air, but this is the episode where we wrapped it. Which obviously called for a celebratory photo.
That’s a wrap for our most frequent location.
(I’m wearing a jacket because I’d been rehearsing Frost/Nixon next door while they’d been shooting)
There is a very simple reason that this episode included our final shot in the writers room. Bet you can guess what it is.
Hint: he flipped the bitch.
We deliberately scheduled the table flip to be the very last thing in this room. Because we suspected that when Jeff flipped the table, we were going to break the shit out of it. So before we let Aaron flip it we made sure that we weren’t going to need it again, save as a possible breakaway set piece in Cry Havoc 3 (that poster with Jeff’s head on it). It meant shooting that scene in two goes on two different days, but we were right. That table be broken.
Phil and Zoe
For Phil and Zoe’s relationship, we borrowed a trick from Dan Harmon, creator of Community. On that show, he decided he wanted to try something not normally seen on TV with Jeff and Britta: they’d bang once, to resolve some tension, but wouldn’t become boyfriend/girlfriend. They’d just continue having sex without romance, and that would be fine. But the only way that he could sell that on an American sitcom was to keep it a secret (save for some subtle hints along the way), then reveal that it had been happening the whole time.
So it went with Phil and Zoe. They have their moment back in Origin Stories, a moment that couldn’t help but be ridiculously cute as Ryan and Anna are, in the words of the age, “totes adorbs,” but then next episode George shows up and we forget all about it… until Becky starts to suspect in Favour For a Friend. The reason for this is exceptionally simple.
I will not do “will they/won’t they.” Ever.
Classic 90s sitcom Newsradio had my attention when they cast my favourite Kid in the Hall, Dave Foley, in the lead role. They had my respect when they skipped over “will they/won’t they” and had Dave and his rival Lisa hook up in episode two.
Because will they/won’t they is narrative death. Get two characters into a will they/won’t they situation, and you’re stuck with three equally doomed outcomes: 1) the characters get together but become boring, since the thrill was in the chase (Ross and Rachel from Friends, Sam and Diane from Cheers); 2) your audience gets so frustrated waiting for the characters to get together that they tune out (what actually happened to Moonlighting, no matter what you’ve read); 3) it turns out nobody gives a fuck if they get together, and all the teasing is barely more than dead air (Jeff and Britta).
Will they/won’t they is an invention of narrative devices like comics and four-camera sitcoms, which present at best the illusion of change since they thrive on stability and predictability. When your characters’ relationship is based around almost but never quite getting together, because either hooking up or losing interest in each other damages the status quo, there’s nowhere for it to go. It will go stagnant, because that is the only option. To paraphrase the Master from Doctor Who… that relationship was born out of death. All it can do is die.
So I will not write one. I hope to launch other series in the future, in addition to more seasons of Writers Circle… I hope to be telling stories ’til eternity claims me… but I will not succumb to will they/won’t they. I hate it and it’s awful.
So, yeah. Zoe and Phil banged. Wasn’t a big deal. They might do so again, and it still won’t be a big deal. Relationships have so many more shapes and faces to pursue than “These two are perfect for each other but just won’t see it (until the finale)!” That includes casual sex between friends, exes who get along despite ugly breakups, the bizarre debauchery of Jeff and Claire, and… well we won’t get into what’s in store for Becky. Because that’s just more fun for everyone.
Random fun facts
I meant to write a scene for Jeff and Tina into this episode, because more Tina is always welcome (because we like the character, not because Kirstie’s a delight to have on set or anything), but the page count told me that I was running out of time and had to get to the punchline. Which, for the record, was Ian’s idea. He’s quite proud of that. As it turns out, I may have been wrong, because this one’s relatively short, but it is right in the sweet spot we’d been aiming for when we set out on this venture, so I stand by the choice overall.
Jeff’s therapist tells him not to do a Tree of Life thing because Tree of Life is terrible and shouldn’t even be considered a “film.” You probably knew that, but it’s been a while since I mentioned it.
I have started to type a fun fact about this episode no less than three times before realizing, each time, that the scene I’m thinking of is next week. Probably a sign that I’m done.
Next week… an interlude in the growing tensions, as Jeff drags Phil into what he’s described as a ghost problem.
Fresh from its debut at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo (shoulda been there), it’s the latest episode of Writers Circle!
And fresh from “me writing it all down yesterday,” here’s your peek behind the scenes.
Writing Zoe
Keith has spoken, here and elsewhere, about how he felt challenged coming onto the project and writing characters that I had created, had written on multiple occasions, and was quite close to. The exception, of course, is Zoe. Zoe’s not in the play. We created her together. Wove her out of whole cloth as a unit.
And yet… and yet in my eyes, she ended up Keith’s character.
Sure, I wrote plenty of Zoe episodes. More than Keith, even, but that has less to do with our connection to Zoe and more to do with “When you write two thirds of the season, you write damn near everybody more often, that’s how math works.” But on the other hand, it’s episodes like this (and next week) when Zoe really gets fleshed out, because in my episodes (with the possible exception of the season finale, which is coming up just WAY too soon for my tastes), I really lean into the “Zoe is afraid of everyone” aspect of her character, while Keith created the Zoe/Becky hostility angle in this episode, and then continued to explore it next week.
In fact, now that I think about it, the “Jeff can’t remember Zoe exists or notice she’s in the room” running gag was Keith’s as well. I only wrote it into In The Depths after seeing how well it worked in Keith’s episodes.
We want more Zoe in season two. We want more EVERYBODY in season two. That’s gonna be a challenge. But I’m hoping we get to know her better.
Comfiest shoot ever
Take a look at Zoe’s car. It’s in, like, the first seconds of the episode. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Alright. See it? That’s a, forgive the product placement, Toyota Yaris. Belongs to our Yaris Wrangler Matt Pickering. That isn’t the story, it just seemed the best time to mention it. The point is, it’s not a super big car, is it? The answer I’m looking for is no, no it isn’t. Which is fine for the ladies, it’s super roomy up front… but what you can’t see, thanks to Ian’s thorough work at angling the camera, is that he and I are wedged into the back seat.
I was directing this episode (the first one that Keith 100% wrote and I 100% directed; there’s not really a story there, just thought it was worth mentioning) from the back seat, while hunching down out of sight. I am known as many things… writer, actor, director, malcontent, Mass Effect fan, traveller, Mass Effect obsessive, son, brother, uncle, last sane man left standing, recovering Mass Effect addict, or my most common label, “Oh right, that guy…” but “small” and “easy to fit in compact spaces” do not make the list. Not like fun-sized Stephanie, taller but slender Anna, or my co-exec Ian, who while certainly not much more comfortable crammed back there, has been charitably described as of superior height to an Oompa-Loompa, and makes a token effort to keep himself in better shape.
I also make a token effort. It just yields very gradual results. Anyway.
I was not what you’d call super comfy back there, and most of the actual direction got done during the rehearsals in my dining room. Let’s just say this was a good shoot for my barrel-chested co-director Keith Kollee to be out of town with his family.
Ian has often accused me of calling “cut” too soon, something he’s not wrong about, since one of our favourite things to do is to just keep rolling on our delightful band of weirdos and see what comes out of them. And in the case of this episode, there were a few comments in post-production about “do we have to cut this bit so short,” followed by “Yes, because Dan kept yelling ‘cut’ super fast.” But you know what? Pressing my head into the car door for entire takes was giving me a killer headache, so if it sounded like we’d finished the scene, I was shouting “cut” and sitting up straight. That was what happened next.
Also, stopping the car short tended to kill our sound recording. So, there was that.
Big fans of law and order here
We split the shoot into segments, each with its own slice of my neighbourhood to drive through. We stuck to suburban streets (as you can tell from the shots outside of the car) because we had kind of a complicated camera setup.
“Complicated?” you ask. “No, you just strapped GoPros to sides of the car, right? Seems obvious to me.”
No. No, that is not what we did.
“Complicated” may have been giving us too much credit.
Lacking GoPros, what we did… or rather, what Ian did, let’s not throw plurals around unnecessarily… was follow this tutorial to build a simple wooden rig that we could attach our camera to and affix to either window of the car. So we were driving along with a camera-bearing wooden square hanging out of either the driver’s or passenger’s side window, depending on the angle. We… we think it was street legal.
We think it was.
Super legit, that’s us.
Because of this, and also not knowing if our home-made camera rig was going to survive at over forty kilometres per hour, we decided to keep to the quieter suburban streets of my neighbourhood, ending in the strip mall where we shot Night Moves. Encountering less traffic seemed to be the best option, even if it ends up implying that Becky just lives super deep in suburbia. You know, like those people you visit who are ten minutes from major roads, and you need directions both to their house and how to get back to any street that will take you out of the neighbourhood? Which doesn’t feel like Becky, she seems like a “build up not out” person, but… I don’t know, maybe she got the house super cheap because there was a bunch of murders or something.
Next time… after two weeks off, Jeff’s back in Stonebluff Road. See you back here.
A first for us on this series: with the exception of Phil’s side of the opening phone call, this episode was entirely exteriors. Which, given our budget (basically nothing), was a challenge, since getting a park closed down for a shoot costs hell of money. Now… we meant to shoot this in August. We meant to shoot many things in August. But due to scheduling shenanigans, we had to push this back to September.
Now would be a good time to remind you that we live in Canada.
One of these people is dressed appropriately.
Now, Calgary’s not that bad, weather-wise. It can still be nice out in September. But only during the day. Come late August, once the sun’s down it gets colder, and fast. And since all of our exteriors had to take place at night, we made sure to have at least one crew member on blanket duty. As soon as I said “cut,” Tawni (our costumer/slate girl) would step in and get the blanket on Stephanie. Daisy, our production manager, would offer warming rubs as well. And then Steph, who is a trooper, would shrug it all off and do another take. Of our first attempt at a long shot. Not a several minute long shot where Matthew McConaughey has to escape a gang war or Daredevil fights like a dozen Russian mobsters, so, you know, not worth trying to take a bow over or anything. Just saying it was a long time for Steph to act like she wasn’t cold.
The merits of planning ahead
I wasn’t used to writing for film. Or directing for film. Or thinking about “how this should look” when writing basically anything. So it wasn’t until we started shooting Phil’s half of the phone call that it occurred to me that it might be neat to do the call in a split screen. Which Ian seemed confident he could do, in theory, but in practice… since we’d just thought of that, Steph hadn’t been called that night. Ryan was recording his half alone.
Alone-ish.
And to do a split screen conversation, you kind of need both people there, at least for the first half, to nail the timing. So that, as you’ve seen, didn’t happen.
Welcome back Matt
This is the third time that occasional guest star, one-time production manager, and to the observant, perpetual presence in our YouTube episode descriptions Matt Pickering has come up in these blogs, and thanks to the magic of non-sequential shooting, the second time he was on set. And fortunately for us, he is no more attached to his dignity than I am, because grunging him up into Jimmy Dave the hobo was a bit of a process.
Nothing this majestic is easy.
We needed multiple coats. We needed to sacrifice a pair of jeans on the altar of Jimmy Dave. And we needed to make him dirty. Well, physically dirty. The other kind just happens. We tried a few things, including rubbing his face in the grill of my barbecue…
Or, rather, vice versa.
…which proved ineffective, so it came down to grabbing a handful of dirt from my back yard and smearing it in his face.
Oh, yes, this whole park scene at the end? That’s just my back yard. Right outside what viewers will come to know as Becky’s kitchen. And it’s a shared back yard in my condo complex, so… while we were sure to get this scene shot first, before it was late enough that Steph yelling “BECKY RULES” as loud as she could would get cops called on us… we did get a few curious looks from my neighbour as we set up lights, a camera, and apparently a homeless man lurking in a tree.
That said, in the end, I’m really the only one Matt startled. In the long take of Phil and Becky walking past the shops, Ian, Daisy, and I were walking backwards: Ian shooting, me observing, Daisy trying to make sure Ian didn’t walk into anything or fall down a staircase. Matt, half convinced this shot was going to get him arrested, would loop around in the background, swing through the parking lot, and catch up with those of us behind the camera. And every time this happened, I would see the shambling form of Jimmy Dave out of the corner of my eye, and every time I would panic for a second before I remembered it was Matt.
Says good things about the outfit, really.
“Character wine”
Basically, Becky’s scenes were shot in reverse order. First the park, then the walk, then the phone call. Steph, in what I’m sure was commitment to her craft, had brought an entire bottle of wine to help her get into character, as it were. However, she drank it all very early in the process, before being handed a plate of rapidly cooling and increasingly spongy perogies to eat and a bottle of sparkling water to drink. So Becky gets drunker and drunker as the shoot went on, yet we got further and further from the character wine. And Steph, for the record, claims that the cold killed any sort of buzz she’d had pretty quickly anyway.
Once we were done with the backyard, it was time to wander over to the shopping center near my house, hoping that the parking lot would be quiet enough at 11 PM that we could get this thing shot without incident. Which we… sort of did. Unfortunately, the best-lit stretch of sidewalk ended precariously close to the liquor store, which was open until midnight. So at the point where they stop walking and Becky throws up, we were right near the spot where dudebros were pulling up to grab some last-minute alcohol on their way to… stuff. I don’t care what they were doing, I was just trying to make sure Ian didn’t physically fight any of them for yelling “You guys shooting a movie” at us.
Some of the customers were cool about it, though. One gentleman sat quietly in his car, not opening or closing the door, talking, or starting the engine until I yelled “cut” and Daisy gave him the go-ahead.
Transformations
My favourite part of this whole shoot had to be Phil and Becky on the bench, talking about loving your characters. It was a simple moment when I wrote it. Just Becky reassuring Phil that he wasn’t being crazy, by talking about a character she decided to let live at the last minute. A simple moment, not about anything specific… FINE, Mass Effect, it was a little bit about Commander Shepard in one of the various Mass Effect endings. The point is, it wasn’t supposed to be my favourite moment in the episode.
Then Stephanie got her hands on it, and what was supposed to be a simple moment suddenly became this… beautiful little speech. This sweet little glimpse into her worldview.
That’s one of the beauties of what I do. The text transforms itself it the right hands. Moments you never knew you wrote spring to wonderful life when the actors get into it. It’s right up there with audience reaction (which writing for the internet kind of robs you of) as far as perks of the job go.
Next week… the ladies take an awkward car ride. Which is even more awkward for the crew.
Did you miss us last week? Well, we missed you. Both Ian and Keith are joining me today, and there’s a lot to discuss, so let’s get going. Here’s the new episode…
…and here’s an awkward yet frank discussion about crossing lines in comedy.
Touchy topics
This is one of Keith’s episodes, so I’m-a let Keith talk before I get going.
This was the first episode I wrote. Taking characters that were very near to another writer’s heart is a daunting task. Even one misstep can be a disaster. After sending the first draft out to Dan, I nervously awaited his feedback. After reading three pages, he messaged me: You’re killing this dialogue. I would like to tell you that I coolly celebrated this vague affirmation, but the fact of the matter is, I think I sent him a dozen messages confirming that his sentiment was indeed positive. It was not cool at all. It was at that moment that I knew Dan and I had a synergy. We were on the same page, and understood these characters on the same level. It was incredibly gratifying.
Now, after talking about how awesome this episode was for me, I would be a fool if I didn’t realize there was an elephant in the room, so allow me to address it. I think that literally everything in the world can be funny. In my opinion, it is one of the most important things that have sustained us as a species. That ability to look at everything from the silliest gaff to the grimmest tragedy and decide that the only way to get through it was to laugh. I really feel like that’s the only way we get through this existence. I only mention this because Love is Blind came out this week. As I mentioned, I wrote this episode, and debated it with nearly everyone close to me, including my wife, my two co-executive producers, and the two female leads. I used the same argument I outlined above: You can joke about anything, as long as it is legitimately funny. Luckily, I think it is (thanks, in no small part, to Stephanie), though, if I’m wrong, I imagine you’ll let me know…
Okay. My turn.
Hi, I’m Dan, I’m a straight white male, and this is my blog post about rape jokes. Won’t this be fun.
So, as we recall, at the end of this week’s episode (which of course you’ve watched, why wouldn’t you have watched it, it’s right there, and if you haven’t, I… why? Why are you reading this if you haven’t… watch the episode, then read the commentary, I, honestly, I do not know how to make that any clearer), it’s revealed that Becky, having had too much wine, performed a certain oral act upon Ted against his will. We play this revelation as a joke, and in our defence… it’s a pretty funny joke. At least so people keep telling us. It was funny when I read it, Steph’s delivery of “I might have raped him a little” makes me laugh every single time… and given that during post-production I watch these things so many times the words lose all meaning, that’s saying something… and all the way from writing to casting I never considered that there might be something wrong with it. Hell, I wrote a follow-up joke (that you’ll see next week), and that was funny too, so we’re good, right? Right?
Somehow we managed to take what few scenes referenced this less-than-voluntary-blowjob and use them and very nearly only them as audition sides when we were casting Zoe and Phil. To an outsider, which of course our auditioners were, it seemed like our show was just going to be jam-packed with rape jokes. Which made some people cautious about signing on.
On that note… Ian, enlighten the folks, will you?
Back in the early days of the project when we were still casting, the bookend scenes were one of the sides chosen to see how the group dynamic would flesh out. I had brought Anna on board to play Zoe as I never could imagine anyone but her when I read the scripts.
After a couple days Anna had spoken to me about the scene, worried that we were making a joke out of rape and rape culture. (A concern echoed to me months later by Steph). Until she brought it up I had honestly not seen the problem. It became kind of a large concern for her and for Keith, Dan, and I. They will tell their sides of it but for me my major concern was making sure that we handled her concerns well as in this stage of casting it would have been very easy for her to decide she didn’t want to be a part of the project.
I agreed with Anna’s concerns that we shouldn’t make rape funny, but also with Keith’s view that addressing something with humour was the best way to take the fear of addressing it away.
We had a meeting with Anna to try to allay her worries, and while I’m not sure she was entirely convinced of Keith’s philosophy, it was enough.
In another world we might have handled this all with less open communication and Anna would have walked away from Zoe. I’m glad it worked out. I’m told she ended up quite liking the episode.
Thanks, Pond. Back to me, then.
This is a tricky subject. Smarter, funnier people than I have pondered the issue of rape jokes, the danger of their potential contribution to rape culture, and if/when they’re okay. Here’s one of them. Click that link for a lengthy but well-thought and informative essay from Patton Oswalt on joke theft, hecklers, and rape jokes. You don’t have to. I’m-a borrow some thoughts from him, though, and I wanted to be clear where they were coming from.
Comedy should not have boundaries. Of this, Keith was super certain when we started discussing the joke in question. Like, shouty-certain. And he’s right, because as Mr. Oswalt states in the aforementioned essay, comedy can be a way of confronting something horrifying and lessening its power through humour. Humour is a great way to discuss serious subjects in a way that makes people pay attention. Look at Aziz Ansari talking about creepy dudes. Here’s John Oliver trying to make people care about government surveillance by framing it as a discussion about dick pics. Hell, there’s a reason John Oliver’s ex-boss, Jon Stewart, was able to turn a comedy show on basic cable into one of North America’s most trusted news sources.
There is such a thing as a funny and non-offensive rape joke. Like, say, this one by Ever Mainard. Or this one by Louis CK. But it remains a tough issue, because our perspective can taint our views of these topics. Patton Oswalt, in that linked article, talks a lot about that. So does Cracked.com’s Daniel O’Brien in this post about how the second season finale of his series Rom.com was accidentally racially insensitive: in one place because of casting (a powerful female calling an underling “Boy” wasn’t offensive until they cast a black guy in the underling role), and in one part because he just didn’t see it. Sometimes, when you’re part of the most privileged group of people in the history of the Earth, things that less historically privileged people might find offensive can be hard to see.
That said. Regardless of the topic, I believe that there are only two defences any joke needs: is it funny, and were you punching up? Punching down, ie. making fun of people less powerful than you, is always a little mean. In this case, is the joke targeting the victim? Because that’s where jokes fuel rape culture, and that’s not something I’d want to be a part of. However, I posit that it is not what we did. That Becky, the perpetrator, is ultimately the punchline, both now and in the future.
Yes, the obvious thing to ask is “What if the genders were flipped? Would you still be defending the joke?” Please don’t ask that. If you do, I’ll be forced to say “If you flip the genders, it’s not the same joke.” Because it isn’t. Context is everything.
I hope you laughed at the joke. If you didn’t, I’m sorry, but we stand by it.
Let’s… let’s move on.
Harsh light of day
Here’s Ian again.
Though I forgot to include myself in the credits as such, I actually did some directing for this one. Dan was out of town and Keith was unavoidably commited the morning we shot the dates. Yeah, morning. After a night of rehearsing a bunch with Keith I dragged the actors and the rest of the crew out to a pub at 6:00 in the morning on a Saturday so we could shoot some of the worst first dates I was not personally a member of. This would not be the last time I organized a location shoot at unreasonable hours.
Shooting on location comes with tricky realities. You want to shoot in a pub? Don’t have enough money to pay them to close the joint? Well, guess what, you’re shooting at 6 AM, because that’s when they can accommodate you. So you’re going to have to drag your entire cast of volunteer actors to set at the crack of dawn.
And then not be there yourself because your cousin’s getting married one province over that weekend.
I would love to tell you all sorts of stories about shooting this episode. Like what Ted’s first day on set was like. Yes, we cast a guy named Ted as the character named Ted. It means when his friends make statements like “Ted getting raped was a highlight of the episode,” it’s extra funny. (See? We’re laughing about it already. Comedy cures all.) I’m sure Keith would have liked to do that as well, but he also had family commitments that morning. The burdens of loving your children, I suppose. So for this episode, Keith worked with the cast at our usual rehearsal space (down the hall from the writers’ room set) on Friday night, then everyone tried to remember what he told them to do as Ian directed the actual shoot.
Don’t tell him, but I’d been looking forward to having Ted on set. He’d just been the lead in a Doctor Who tribute play I directed called Who Knows (along with Tawni, our costumer/slate girl), which was one of the most fun theatrical experiences I’d had in years, and having any of the Who Knows gang around is something to enjoy. And then when he finally makes his debut, I’m in Golden, BC, watching a wedding. Okay, sleeping. I was sleeping. Look, I couldn’t be on set, I didn’t see the point in getting up at 5 AM out of solidarity.
Random observations
Becky’s wine is white grape juice. Probably the only time Steph used “stunt” wine. But hey, before noon. That said, Steph hates white grape juice. Makes it awkward when she has to drink a lot of it on camera.
Ginette, who plays Jeff’s date, also played the stripper (or at least her legs) in episode three. As such, that sequence was also shot that morning. You’d think they’d have shot that first, to make sure it was done before the pub had to open. Apparently not, though. Guess they decided wrapping Chelsea and Ted was the priority.
Remind me… down the road, we’re going to talk about how Keith and I write Zoe. I think there’s some interesting thoughts there, but there’s a better episode to look at them.
Ian: In previous episodes whenever Jeff hands a girl his card it is actually the card of this pub’s manager, an old friend of mine from Junior High who helped me secure this location.
Next time: night shoots and stunt food with Phil and Becky.
Okay. So. Normally this would be when I’d pull out another instalment of Writers Circle Confidential. We’d watch this week’s episode, have some laughs, and then I and possibly a guest star would tell you all about it. But as you may or may not have noticed, we don’t actually have a new episode this week. We have a blooper reel.
And while there’s still plenty of laughs to be had, there isn’t much scintillating behind-the-scenes storytelling to be done on a blooper reel. Save that it’s a little clear Anna never quite got or embraced our Star Wars Phonetic Alphabet. (A=Anakin, B=Bespin, C=Coruscant, etc.)
So instead, let’s hop into the old Wayback Machine, head to 2009, and look at the original script of Writers Circle: the play. Yes, that means jumping the queue a little where Danny Writes Plays in concerned, but we’ll just look the other way on that. Agreed? Agreed.
What’s it about?
Phil Payton (returning from Two Guys and U-Boat of the Soul), Becky Porter (also from U-Boat), and Jeff Winnick (he was new) are the house playwrights for Taranto Theatre Company, working under producer and Phil’s ex-fiancee Tina Gellar (also from Two Guys and U-Boat). The end-of-season gala is approaching, and they’re all expected to turn in a draft of their latest scripts so that Tina can announce the coming season. There’s just… a few problems.
Perpetually lovesick and depressed Phil is attempting to write yet another romantic comedy, but can’t focus on it, because he’s in love with his friend Olivia and can’t figure out how to tell her. Seemingly happy go lucky Jeff, on the other hand, is trying to write the latest in a series of epic tragedies, but is unable to find passion in anything, even his string of one-night stands, until he meets a woman named Monica, who seems reluctant to enter into anything long-term. Becky, who is working on a big-message period piece about Victorian society trying to pretend it’s something it’s not, has been keeping a secret: her boyfriend Alex that she refuses to introduce to the others is actually her girlfriend Alex. Alex, meanwhile, is easily triggered by the thought of life in the closet, something that Becky refusing to introduce her to her friends is setting off.
Whether he likes it or not, Phil is befriended by a stripper named Amber, who has decided to peel back the walls of his repression and find out why he can’t simply tell a girl he likes her.
Becky finally introduces Alex to Jeff and Phil, revealing to all three of them that’s she’s bisexual. Try to guess which of them takes it the worst. If you guessed the girlfriend, have a gold star.
Jeff and Monica repeatedly argue over religion: Jeff’s a strict atheist, Monica’s more spiritual… and when Jeff finally learns what’s been keeping Monica from committing to something long term… well, let’s just say it gets worse before it gets better.
And ultimately, with no plays written and everyone’s jobs on the line, everything comes to a boil at the launch gala.
So why’d that happen?
I was on a three week vacation through Asia: Singapore, Malaysia, and Tokyo. I find vacations, especially solo vacations like this one, are good for two things: reflection and creation. Far from home, away from my typical distractions, and if on a solo trip, no one to talk to, I either have revelations about my personal life, or come up with a new script idea.
In this case, both.
I’d been wondering if there was a way to weaponize the ridiculous banter my friend Ben and I get into. Close friends that, due to vastly differing philosophies, can look like arch enemies. Thus did Jeff Winnick come into being, named after Judd Winick, one of my favourite comic writers (would have been Jeffrey Bendis, named after Brian Michael Bendis, but there was some concern people would connect him to the cowardly soldier who dies at the beginning of the Firefly pilot). And what the hey, let’s bring Becky from U-Boat back, make it a trio.
As to the other thing… I’d also come to examine one of my close relationships. Came to see it more clearly. Came to realize that I wasn’t the hero of my own story, which is never an easy thing to come to terms with. And if there’s one thing Phil Payton proved to be good for five years earlier, it’s serving as a vessel to exorcise some demons. And so did Olivia become a stand-in for… someone else. Someone I discussed in an open letter to long ago.
Jeff and Becky’s plots required more creativity. Originally, she was going to be too open about herself, aggressively so, but it wasn’t until I reversed that idea that I felt I had a plot. Oh, and as for why I made Becky bisexual? We’d just done two really male-heavy plays. I felt somebody in the company had to serve up some female roles. So I gave Becky a girlfriend just to write in one more woman, and made her bi so that her crush on Phil in U-Boat could stay canonical.
How’d it turn out?
Overall? Pretty well. The three leads work. Their banter is staggeringly fun and easy to write. I think we’ve been proving that on a weekly basis lately. That said… there are some things that could stand to improve.
First off… it’s long. Super long. There are three protagonists, each with their own one-act worth of plot. It adds up. It adds up until a friend and I had to spend an entire night cutting whatever we could to get the runtime down to a mere three hours. It is the single longest thing I’ve ever written not intended to be episodic. Which, perhaps, is why the characters adapted so easily to an episodic format.
Phil’s story is 90% exposition. All the key details of his arc, from meeting Olivia to falling in love with her to her relationship with another guy to, most notably, the past trauma that has made Phil the way he is, all of it happens in the past and is described to Amber. And she’s only giving him a lap dance the once. The webseries gives more opportunities to explain Phil in ways other than lengthy backstory monologues.
It was explained to me by the good people at the Alberta Playwright’s Network that Jeff’s plotline lifts right out. Phil and Becky’s stories are all about honesty. They share a theme. Jeff’s doesn’t. But it would make for a decent one-act. So it may as well lift out.
And what the hell theatre company, in the world, has three in-house playwrights on staff? You find me that theatre company, and then you pop that company in the mouth. Or see if they’re hiring. One of those.
Would you stage it again?
It’s been a temptation ever since the first staging, since I wasn’t convinced the production was 100% worthy of the script, but it’s begun to occur to me…Why would I want to?
Yes, I could cut Jeff, or at least his plot, streamline Phil and Becky’s stories, punch up the exposition… but why? In the end, I’d have a (hopefully) two-hour show about Phil and Becky… but no Jeff. No Zoe. Nobody says “For Brent” even once. I’ve found a new vehicle for these characters, one that’s treating them way better than a single, if savagely long, play did.
So instead of dusting it off and taking another crack at a stage version, I’m giving myself (and the others) license to crib whatever I want and bring it into the webseries. Not, like, word for word or anything… I did that once and now it’s my least favourite episode… but plots and characters, those I can pinch whenever. This does not, thus far, include Jeff’s love interest Monica, and when we approach the end of the season you’ll see why, but I’m thinking Olivia is going to make an appearance down the road. And Alex is a strong maybe.
Repeated theme alert
The quiet protagonist the ladies inexplicably love: Phil’s a sad sack, but he almost married Tina, slept with Becky, and draws the interest of Amber the stripper. Bravo, me.
Something something pop culture reference: The play (like the series) opens with the leads arguing about Batman and Spider-man. I think that’s the worst of it.
Something something pop culture reference Into Darkness: Olivia, Phil’s crush, is named after Olivia Wilde. Becky’s girlfriend, Alex Hadley, gets her last name from Olivia Wilde’s character on House, Dr. Remy “13” Hadley. I like Olivia Wilde is what I’m saying.
“Let’s swap backstories for fifteen minutes like that’s not pacing Kryptonite!” Every. Single. Phil scene.
Writing about writers: This was, for obvious reasons, the worst example of this one.
Next week… an actual episode, and some frank discussions about crossing lines in the name of comedy.
