Danny G Writes Plays: Illuminati in Love

Okay. Now it gets real. Trigger Dandy and Two Guys have been performed enough and enjoyed enough I feel justified in calling them “classics,” and more to the point they’ve been done recently enough that I can remember them pretty solidly. But that’s over for a while. Now we’re at the point of my writing career when we’re not only talking about plays I’m less than fully proud of, but I have to read them first to discuss them properly.

Because I no longer have a copy of Date With an Angel, Coffee With the Devil, that’s why I didn’t read that one first.

Right. So. Illuminati in Love.

What’s it about?

We are solidly into the “wacky premise” period of my writing. So, here goes. Alex Payton is the current chairman of the Destiny Syndicate, a group of five people who form the shadow government that secretly controls the Earth. Alex rules North and Central America. Ariana Rigaldi rules Europe, Arcady Rachmaninoff controls Africa and the Middle East, Kimiko Takahashi handles Asia, and Vincent Hoffman gets what’s left of the southern hemisphere.

PREMISE!
Wacky premise, anyone?

In terms of my classic story structure, 1) Establish premise; 2) Hijinks ensue; 3) With sexy results, it goes like this. 1) Alex is secret ruler of mankind, a fact that is giving his best friend Greg an ulcer; 2) Alex meets Janice, a prosecuter, and they have their first date right as an unknown country tests a weapon of mass destruction unlike any the world has ever known; 3) Alex tries to win over Janice while discovering which of the Syndicate allowed this weapon to exist.

Hoo boy.

So why did that happen?

Two reasons. First, I wanted to create a character for Chris Munroe, who’d proven to be a comic asset in Two Guys and Date With and Angel. Specifically, I wanted to create a brandy-swilling Eurotrash supervillain type character for him, and that became Arcady.

Second, I wrote this back in 1998. I was not yet 22. But there’s more to it than the foolishness of youth. Two factors influenced this script. First, in my early 20s, I was deeply into conspiracy theories. Not in a paranoid, “they’re out to get us,” “chemtrails are mind control” way. I was just fascinated with the idea that the world might be weirder, more complex, and more exciting than we give it credit for. Second factor? I had just founded my own theatre company, which I was learning would put up whatever I wrote. So, I wrote this.

How’d it turn out?

I made it to page three before the cascade of references to pop culture and 1998 current events started to make me queasy*.

I had a problem with pop culture references for a long time. I thought they were funny. I saw Clerks and thought monologues about Star Wars were great writing. I was wrong. So wrong. I know that now. I did not know it then. I never thought about “will this script still work in twenty years,” just “will it be funny in six months.” And even then some of the pop culture references got stale between first readthrough and opening night. It took a while to give up that crutch completely, but it was never worse than this script. I think. I hope. And there are other problems as well.

Years after this, a friend taught me the difference between jokes and humour. Humour is creating a situation that’s inherently funny. A joke is taking a moment and giving it a punchline you hope is funny. Arrested Development is filled with humour. Two and Half Men relies on jokes. These days, if I want a scene to be funny, I go for humour. Back then, I really depended on jokes. Lots of jokes. I wish… man, but I wish more of them were funny.

Also Alex narrates chunks of the story. I have never really mastered narrators. And if I’m barely competent at it now, 15 years later? Just imagine how bad I was at it then. Actually no. Don’t imagine that. At all.

The meet-cute is weak. I put way too much stock in instant attraction (I was engaged to someone at the time, and it was very much a “love at first sight” story) and had little idea how to build an actual romance. And it shows from every step of this thing, from the fact that I’m assuming this relationship is worth fighting for when they’ve only had two-thirds of one date to the rushed way I get them back together in the end.

Yes, in the end she takes him back, thanks in part to a heartfelt speech in a gibberish language from a newt-like alien named Quoxl. Yeah, you read that right. Quoxl the newt-man. Weak sauce deus ex machina, yet possibly the most fondly remembered part of the whole show. Also Vincent built the super-bomb. The southern hemisphere guy. It’s painfully obvious it was Vincent from the moment he’s introduced and I don’t know why I ever thought it wasn’t.

So there we have it. My second solo script? I giant wad of easily-dated references to current events and pop culture surrounding a barely written rom-com. Ultimately I would call this a cautionary tale of every single habit I’ve worked to shake since. We had fun with it at the time, but it was mostly due to the cast. Several of the cast were great. I wish more of them had stuck around. But given the material we gave them I guess I can hardly blame them.

When next we visit this series, things improve with the end of the world.

*Made it to page 30 before I hit a Simpsons quote. That’s something, I guess.

Memories of the Fringe

In 1993 I made my first of two trips to an Albertan theatre camp for junior/senior high school students called Artstrek. Perhaps another entry can discuss my times there, but for now, I just bring it up to say that it was here I first heard about the Edmonton Fringe Festival. An annual event where people from around the world come to perform plays of all description, from dance shows to cabaret pieces (simply singing show tunes rather than doing the play itself) to Shakespeare and big musicals to original works and one-person shows.

Many, many one person shows. Because you see, the less cast members you have to split the door with, the more profitable your show is. But anyway.

That very summer my family went up to Edmonton for the weekend to experience the Fringe, and it quickly became an annual event. I would use the Fringe to gorge myself on theatre. If I saw less than five plays in a day, I thought I was wasting my time. Need to eat? There’s food booths all over the grounds, just gruffle some curry or an Italian sandwich while watching one of the outdoor shows (jugglers and acrobats, mostly) then head to your next play.

And now, some highlights of my two decades of Fringing.

First show

1993.

The first thing I saw at the first Fringe I attended was Atomic Improv. Paul Mather and Donovan Workun. They did the Three Little Pigs as a spaghetti western, they did a scene about stamp collecting in Seussian verse, they scattered the names of every other Fringe show over the stage and had to insert them into a scene about gopher racing. I was, in one go, sold on the Fringe and a new fan of Atomic Improv. Which proved quite handy when they joined forces with Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie to do The War of 1812 some years later.

Paul Mather eventually left Edmonton to work in Canadian television. He wrote for Corner Gas, for instance. Donovan is still there and, last I knew, was still a regular part of Edmonton’s live improvised soap opera, Die-nasty, as well as doing Atomic Improv gigs with Commander Shepard himself, Mark Meer. Those are bound to be funny.

I want in on this

1997.

Remember The Amazing and Almost Accurate Adventures of Trigger Dandy, which I mentioned a while back? Jason and I put that show on, and as a side effect founded Mind the Walrus Theatre Company, as part of a plan to take Trigger to the Edmonton Fringe. I’d been going for four years now, and I wanted in. Now, it didn’t happen right away. Fringe slots are handed out in a lottery… well, it used to be that Edmonton residents were able to line up for a “first-come, first-served” option, and in 1998, a group of us attempted to take part in what would be the final Edmonton Fringe application line-up. See, Yuk Yuks comedy club paid a guy to start the line two days earlier than it normally would, so when we arrived, we were already twenty spots down the waiting list. We abandoned the line-up to take our chances with the “rest of Canada” lottery, and by the end of the weekend, the Yuk Yuks placeholder had become so drunk and abusive that the whole thing was shut down, and never done again.

On the plus side, we got in through the lottery, and the next summer we took Two Guys, a Couch, and the Fate of the World to the Edmonton Fringe. We ultimately decided it was a better choice than Trigger. Less act breaks.

First tour

2004.

The previous year we’d taken one of my scripts, The Course of True Love and the Curse of the Jade Monkey, to Edmonton while taking another show, Knoll, to Vancouver. This decision made some sort of sense at the time. And that’s why I now have a full Board of people keeping me from making unilateral decisions like that, because clearly someone should have tried to stop me.

Anyway, Jade Monkey was not a hit. It didn’t help that we were nearly two hours long and had two noon shows and two midnight shows, but I spent the 2003 Fringe looking at all the packed houses at shows I saw, wondering why we couldn’t have that kind of crowd. I eventually decided what we needed was something shorter, faster, funnier, and more portable. And thus began Heracles: the Mythologically Accurate Adventures. And just in time: that fall we got our first Fringe tour. Montreal, Winnipeg and Edmonton Fringe festivals, then back home for a one-week run in Calgary.

I’ll talk about Heracles and Jade Monkey more when we reach them in Danny G Writes Plays, but for now I just want to mention the wonderful community we discovered. We learned how comp exchange worked, a system where Fringe artists are able to swap free tickets with each other by putting your allotted comps under a password you can share with people you meet. We chatted with other companies, went to the Edmonton Fringe wrap party, and started to feel part of something amazing. I couldn’t wait to get us another Fringe tour to be part of this world again.

It took three years, and by that point I had a grown-up job and couldn’t go on the tour. C’est la vie.

David Belke

I have many influences, writers who’ve taught me something about storytelling through their works, figures whose style has inluenced mine. Aaron Sorkin, Joss Whedon, Steven Moffat, Brian Michael Bendis, to name the most prominent. But as far back as I’ve been writing plays, my idol has been Edmonton’s David Belke.

I saw my first Belke show in 1993. Blackpool and Parrish, a comedy about the impending final battle between good and evil. It changed my life. Hilarious, moving, brilliant character moments, I decided then and there that this was the kind of thing I wanted to write. Not this exact play, but this style, this wit, this razor-sharp dialogue, these wonderful characters.

Okay, and at least once, that exact play, but we’ll get to that. To my chagrin.

In 1994, I realized too late that the author of the amazing Blackpool and Parrish had debuted a new script, April and Peril, and didn’t get tickets in time. But it was finally remounted this year, and I finally got a chance to see it: classic Belke.

He’s done two hilarious mash-ups, in which a film noir private eye solves crimes involving Shakespeare’s characters (The Maltese Bodkin, in which Nathan Fillion first played the detective, and two decades later the sequel Forsooth My Lovely). He’s done plays about improv (Inside the Sandcastle), deals with the devil (Soul Mate), the slog of auditioning (The Headshot of Dorian Grey), and a few plays that are uncomfortably similar to plays I would later write (Blackpool and Parrish, That Darn Plot). Nobody on Earth can both inspire me and make me feel like a copycat hack like David Belke. He’s often been a highlight of my Fringe experience.

This year

This year my Fringing was more compressed. Between GISHWHES and rehearsals for Pastoral Paranoia, I could only spare one full day and two half-days. I still managed nine plays, including April in Peril, and improv show with Mark Meer, a comedy with Ryan Gladstone, and more great shows. I did well this year. It’s still a magical place for me, and someday I may yet bring a show there again.

Hopefully soon, an update on GISHWHES. Or something else if it takes my fancy.

Danny G Writes Plays: Date With an Angel

This week is a strange week. This week is GISHWHES, The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen. As a participant, it means this week is filled with bizarre and brilliant things. Things I can’t elaborate on until the contest closes. But trust me, we’ll get into it.

In the meantime, I present the story of my first solo script. Gonna… gonna get embarrassing up in here. Ladies and gentlemen… Date With an Angel, Coffee With the Devil.

What’s it about?

Gary has a secret: he’s in love with his friend Lacey, but doesn’t know how to tell her. Or how to get her away from her boyfriend Trevor.

Huh. In love with a female friend but keeping it a secret while hoping she magically falls for him. Didn’t I just say last time that nobody likes that guy? And he’s the protagonist? Awesome. Great start.

Anyway. The show is told largely in flashback, as Gary tells his story to a sympathetic bartender after it’s all gone wrong. Gary likes Lacey, Lacey’s with Trevor, Gary unloads all of his problems on his best friend Becky (who harbours inexplicable feelings of her own for Gary, the poor thing)… when he gets an offer of help from an unexpected source: Lucifer, the Morningstar, Satan, the Prince of Lies… who insists Gary call him Ted. Ted’s a nice name.

PREMISE!
Where you going with this, exactly?

So it’s a romantic comedy in which a man seeks romantic advice from the devil. Naturally, Ted’s advice is ultimately less than helpful, Gary learns too late that Ted was never really on his side, souls are at risk, the Bartender turns out to be God, and there’s some kinda flimsy Deus Ex Machina which results in everyone surviving, nobody losing their soul, and Gary very much NOT getting the girl. Even at 22 I was pretty sure Gary didn’t actually deserve any sort of reward when this whole thing wrapped up, and that the real lesson was “Get over Lacey, you moron.”

So why did that happen?

I had decided, after my annual trip to gorge myself on theatre at the Edmonton Fringe, that the Devil always gets the best lines. Thus, I wanted to play the Devil in something, and get all the best lines. So I wrote a play in which I could do that. I’m not proud of this. In theory, it’s allowable to say “I wrote this play, and this is the part I want,” but saying “I wrote this play and this is the part I shall have” just feels skeevy to me now. But anyway. I wrote my show about Gary’s doomed struggle to win over Lacey, filled it with jokes whenever possible, ensured that Ted was getting some quality one-liners, and handed a draft to Jason Garred for feedback.

How’d it turn out?

Jason’s feedback included the most useful thing I’d heard or would hear before I started taking classes. “If you’d written every character to be your dream role, this would be amazing.”

Ted was funny. Gary was decent. Becky was so-so at best. Lacey and Trevor were paper-thin. Looking back I don’t think it was ever clear what Gary saw in Lacey, or what Becky saw in Gary. I think God as the Bartender worked okay, but I wish I could say I was confident in the ending.

I always try to write women as well as I can. I struggled long and hard to improve on that front. And whenever I doubt my progress, I think back to this script, to Becky and Lacey… and I feel better. Because there can be no doubt I’ve improved since I wrote those two. Yeesh.

This show introduced a recurring theme that would haunt me throughout my writing endeavours, one I didn’t even know was there until a friend spelled it out for me 11 years later when he explained it to the cast of a show I’d written. The theme? “Man and woman cannot be friends.” Simply put, create a friendship between a man and a woman, eventually one of them will want something more. I had no idea this was a central theme of my plays until he said that, but here it is, all the way back in my first solo project. “Man and woman can never be friends” is all over this thing. There is not a truly platonic relationship to be found.

It also fits into my preferred three-phase story structure:

1. Establish premise.
2. Hijinks ensue.
3. With sexy results.

Step three is optional, but that there is the bare bones of good comedy. And, in this case, mediocre comedy.

When we return to Danny G Writes Plays, we’ll see how I took “write every character like it’s your dream character” to heart.

Danny G writes plays: Two Guys

Time to continue my look back through my old scripts. Next up, my second collaboration with Jason Garred: Two Guys, a Couch, and the Fate of the World. A play-within-a-play, with the ridiculous turned up to 10.

What’s it about?

PREMISE!
Brace for silliness

Phil and Chris are two friends attempting to write a play together. Phil wants action, adventure, and romance. Chris wants something weighty and philosophic. They settle on a spy thriller: the adventures of Dirk Rhombus, secret agent. The audience watches Dirk and the play come to life as Phil and Chris are writing it upstage. As Phil and Chris fight for control, characters twist and change, plot elements are introduced, discarded and re-written, the occasional musical number sneaks in despite Chris’ protests, but we eventually make our way through the tale of Dirk Rhombus and Canadian agent Janet DuBois’ battle against the fiendish Swedish supervillains Simone Saiz and Bjorn “The Barbecue” Berger.

We did like puns, didn’t we.

So why did that happen?

Simply put, we wanted a follow-up to Trigger Dandy, and we wanted to keep the band together. So we needed something with a similar cast size (bloody huge), similar levels of wacky (again, bloody huge), and that comic energy that had worked so well in the Trigger trilogy. The way I saw it, Jason and I had such differing senses of humour that anything we agreed on must be hilarious. So we hit this thing with everything we had. There were carless car chases (a concept it took three productions to make truly hilarious–the early directors weren’t great at big comedy), a fiendish mad scientist, references to pop culture (me) and Canadian government officials (Jason), and a key sequence in which Phil, having broken up with his girlfriend Tina, starts attempting to kill Trina, the character he clearly based on her, while Chris is forced to keep saving her as she’s become essential to the plot.

There were, of course, those who claimed that Phil and Chris were somehow based on myself and Jason, respectively. These claims were harder to deny when my mother insisted on saying “I watched them write this, and that’s exactly how it went.” This would not be the last time that I’d have to duck accusations of Phil and Tina being based on real people.

How’d it turn out?

It’s silly. It’s incredibly silly. But if you can make yourself okay with that, it’s also a great deal of fun. Of course, as we learned, it requires a director who understands “funny.” The first time we did it, I had to volunteer to block some of the sight gags myself as the director wasn’t quite getting it. The second time was co-directed by Jason Garred, so whenever the other co-director screwed something up (often–she habitually directed away from the joke), I was able to correct it through Jason. The third production I gave up and just directed it myself, despite my insistence on also playing Phil.

Damn it, young me, why you gotta be so stupid all the damn time.

And even I managed to blow one of the sight gags! After being so insistent that only I could wring the maximum hilarity out of this show, I let one of the cast convince me that instead of having a horde of ninjas burst out and defeat the villains (Phil had been trying to get a horde of ninjas into the show the entire time, and finally succeeds in the climax), it would be just as funny to cut to a blackout and bring up the lights on a horde of ninjas standing over the defeated villains.

Well, it wasn’t. It just wasn’t. But it happened because I allowed it to happen. Damn it.

This was my last full-length collaboration with Jason. We’d reunite years later for the previously mentioned Cube Root of Death, but that was it. After Two Guys, I started flying solo.

With initially mixed results.

Danny G Writes Plays: Trigger Dandy

Alright stop. Collaborate and listen. Danny’s back with a brand new edition.

Right. No. Sorry. That was the wrong way to apologize for a lengthy absence from blogging. One writing project sort of eclipsed all others, even though everything else I’m working on has a far better chance of ever seeing the light of day. Still… write what’s in your head, you know?

On that note, time for the first entry in a series I promised back in spring, before the Europe trip, before the rivers rose and the city briefly drowned: a look back at my various plays. To begin, we travel back to the before times, the longago, a time some of you may have read about in school called “the mid-90s.”

The Amazing (and Almost Accurate) Adventures of Trigger Dandy

It began in the room that would, more than any other, shape my entire life to come: my high school drama room, the classroom/theatre where my best friend Sean and I spent most of our time, especially by grade 12. Sean was doing his math homework there over lunch, and muttered something about trig identities. Our teacher, Mr. Stromsmoe, misheard it as “Trigger Dandy,” feeling it was a great name for a character.

Time passes. Our fall production of Waiting For Godot becomes my stage debut, playing opposite drama regular Rusty Bennett. One night, Rusty cut his foot on a bottle that had broken onstage. He didn’t let it hold his performance back, despite the bleeding. In the show’s post-mortem, Mr. Stromsmoe referred to it as the “blood, glass and Rusty” incident. He then turned to Sean and said “Hey, there’s a play for that Trigger Dandy guy.”

“Yes,” I thought. “Yes it is.”

Blood, Glass and Rusty

Before long, I had enlisted Sean and our good friend Jason Garred into the creation of a short film noir detective parody to take to that year’s high school drama festival. We had fifteen minutes to tell the story of private eye Trigger Dandy, trying to solve the abduction of his sidekick, Rusty Buster, and the theft of the Macguffin Diamond. We crammed as many jokes, sight gags and one-liners as we could into it, not wanting to waste a moment of our fifteen minutes. The result? Hilarity. Audiences cracked up at our debut performance at our school and at the festival. At the festival, our cast got a second wave of applause when they came back onstage to clear our set. And it wasn’t just a hit with audiences: our adjudicator also loved us, and gave us an award for writing.

Buoyed by this, we thought the only logical response was to keep going, write a sequel. Well. It’s not like you never made questionable decisions at 17.

Potatoes in the Mist

Sean began to pull back from the process, but Jason and I plugged on and, by the end of our first year of University, wrote our Trigger Dandy sequel, Potatoes in the Mist.

Wacky titles seemed the way to go. Shut up.

An older Trigger Dandy reunites with his old sidekick, Rusty, to investigate a potato cult, planning to summon their Evil Potato Goddess with what turns out to be a piece of an alien starship engine, oddly British aliens working with Trigger’s estranged girlfriend from BGR (as its fans had come to call it).

 PREMISE!
PREMISE! (All of that made perfect sense at the time.)

We attempted to get the band back together, as it were, and stage our follow-up back at the old high school. This ultimately had less to do with rational thought and more to do with anxiety over University, and my failure to research what I might actually have to do for my preferred major. I wanted to be a big fish in a small pond again, and that meant going back to the only place I’d ever felt like a big shot: my old drama room.

Sadly, putting on a show at a school you no longer attend is trickier than it seems. I had yet to master the art of self-producing (the secret is get someone else to be the producer), and it became clear that we weren’t going to get the show up and running by the end of the school year, and attempts to pick up where we left off quickly collapsed the following September. We thought no more of good old Trigger Dandy.

For, like, a whole year.

Cube Root of Death

Jason and I eventually felt the need to be creative and theatrical again. At his suggestion, we answered an ad in Fast Forward, a local weekly newspaper, calling for people to be part of a group doing radio plays. We joined up, went to meetings, wrote a few sketches… and nothing really happened. One of the other members, also frustrated with the general lack of action in the group, suggested the three of us split off and form a sketch comedy troupe, grabbing what actors we wanted on our way out (particularly one Mr. Tebbutt, whose acquaintance was the single greatest thing we gained from the radio drama group). We had some meetings, wrote some sketches… and nothing happened. Jason and I decided enough was enough: we were setting a concrete goal. We were going to dust off and stage our Trigger Dandy plays, and by god we were going to take them to the Edmonton Fringe.

But first, we needed a third entry. Something to make it into a full trilogy. A prequel: an origin story for Trigger Dandy. A spy parody called The Cube Root of Death, in which a young Trigger Dandy gets wrapped up in an adventure with British secret agent Max Forky, out to foil the Australian mad scientist Tarkin Drubik, who is planning the rule the world with hypnotic cube puzzles.

 PREMISE!
We did enjoy our puns.

In June of 1997, The Amazing and Almost Accurate Adventures of Trigger Dandy played for one night only. The laughs were big and frequent, but the triogy had its flaws. Potatoes in the Mist was twice as long and half as fast-paced as the other two, which is not what you look for in a concluding chapter. It would also be the first and greatest warning of my coming struggles with pop culture references: several of our “jokes” boiled down to simply quoting Star Wars while doing something silly. At the time we thought it clever. I would later see it for the hackery it was.

Years later we’d replace it with a new third chapter: Doom’s Pointy Talon, in which an aging Trigger Dandy, retired from the PI game, is drawn back into the field by FBI agent Rusty Buster. We kept the strangely British aliens we’d introduced in Potatoes, devised wacky encounters, slipped in a Matrix fight scene (still had a few pop culture issues in 2002, it seems), and made a far more satisfying trilogy.

It’s still not perfect: it’s tricky to do a three-act play when the acts are twenty minutes tops, and some of the jokes are a touch corny. Some of the others are highly corny. But for something I wrote at 17, or co-wrote in any event, it holds up okay. And it holds a definite appeal for most people who work on it. Maybe one day it’ll be back, but I’m not holding my breath.

When I next return to this series, we’ll look at how Jason and I tried to keep our Trigger Trilogy cast together.

My Night as an Old West Extra

I have, for the past week, been besieged from things ranging from “somewhat interesting” to “so very awesome,” all of which I wanted to write about but also tended to leave me too drained and exhausted to make the attempt.

The first such example: my night as a background extra on the TV series Klondike.

I know almost nothing about Klondike. I assume it’s set during the Yukon gold rush. I know it stars Tim Roth and Sam Shepard (neither of whom will be playing a role in this narrative). And I know that it shoots in Dawson City, the replica 19th century western town located out in the foothills between Cochrane and Banff.

Tuesday night I had agreed to stage manage a one-night show for a friend. I’m killing time before audience starts to arrive and anything needs to be done when another friend tracks me down, asking if I have any experience dealing cards. As it happens, I took a blackjack dealing class back when (I neglected to mention that this was at least 13 years ago and attempted to skim over the fact that I didn’t get hired). Next thing I know, he and a casting agent we know were debating whether I’d be suited to play a croupier on Klondike.

My first thought was “Gee, I don’t know,” but I ultimately decided “Damn it, Me, that’s your answer for everything! Do a thing once in a while!” and agreed, despite the late notice (I would be on set the following night). And despite the fact that the gig took a long while to be confirmed. I got the details of where to be and when to be there about four hours before my call time. But, you know, wasn’t doing much else, so off I went.

After a long ride over dirt and gravel… let’s call them “roads…” I saw the rows of cars and gathering of trailers that indicated I’d found the set. I pulled in at 6:40 PM, twenty minutes early. A lone parking attendant was able to point me in the direction I had to go, that being wardrobe and hair. I was decked out in croupier-worthy old-timey clothes, had some gunk put in my hair, was told that if I needed makeup they’d see to it on set, and was driven up the hill to Dawson City.

Dawson City is an interesting place to see. From the outside, it almost looks like a fully-functional mini-town. Some of the buildings, the hotels and taverns, look usable. Fully furnished, glassware and everything. Others, less so. The Monte Carlo casino, for instance, is nothing but a small room with a roulette wheel and some decidedly modern lighting instruments. I’m guessing any scenes in the casino have to go to a sound stage elsewhere. Above it hang these huge lighting cubes, which give enough light to shoot without making it look less like night. Well, those aren’t there all the time, but they were a defining feature for me.

I was taken to the holding area, a shack with heaters where the extras waited until needed. The men in the room fell into three categories: rugged cowboy (including one guy who was authentically bow-legged: difficult for everyday life, gold for a western background extra), Chinese, and less-rugged (myself and the guy in the muttonchops). Nobody checked to see if I needed makeup, but I was signed in and the crew members in charge of extras made a note that I was there to be a croupier. After 15 hard-fought minutes of sitting in a shed, they called lunch.

Hours pass.

I found out sometime after midnight my shot was titled “Count’s POV.” The Count, as I learned from a quick IMDB search, is Tim Roth’s character. “Cool,” I thought. “I guess I’ll be dealing cards in the background of a Tim Roth scene. There’s a story!”

Yeah, no.

What was actually being shot that night was a scene in which the Judge (no idea, don’t ask me for context) walks into the rain and nails a cross to the roof of a building. The croupier shot was part of this process. When it finally came time for my shot it was between 2 and 3 AM. One of the crew checked my costume. It required straightening. She informed me I had become quite disheveled. “It was a long sit,” I replied, allowing “I’ve been waiting for seven hours, what did you think was going to happen” to remain implied. The look in her eye showed understanding and sympathy, and once my shirt was re-tucked we said no more on it. We made our way to the set, as they gathered everyone for the shot. They asked if I could come back in one or two weeks, when they’d be shooting a scene happening at the same time.

Now, the agent friend I’d spoken to said that if they asked me if I could come back, I should say yes. But they asked if I could come back at a time when I knew for a fact I’d be in Italy. Or maybe Switzerland. I chose not to lie. As such, they decided to use someone else as the croupier. Continuity reasons and all that.

Given that the scene was being shot from the far end of a street, and the Monte Carlo would be as far in the background as it was possible to get, there was some questioning amongst the extras as to how big a deal this really was, but the crew was authentically apologetic, plus I’d made it nearly eight hours without making a nuisance of myself and I wasn’t starting now. Given that nobody told me to leave… or gave me any idea where I should go… I watched the shot unfold. Saw the rain machine fire up to drench the street and felt the temperature drop when it did. Saw the lighting instruments used to simulate lightning. Watched the whole process unfold, or as much of it as I could while trying to remain off-camera and out of the way of people actually in the shot. Eventually they sent us back to the holding shed.

It was now after 3 AM. I was pretty tired, but still nobody had said to leave. So I kept reading comics, kept not volunteering for shots that needed rain gear (I had none), confident that I was getting paid one way or the other. Eventually, they said they needed everyone for the last two shots of the night, so I hopped in to walk back and forth in the shot with everyone else. Didn’t get all dressed up for nothing, after all.

Finally, at just before 5 AM, they called it a wrap. The sun was about to rise, after all, so no more night scenes could be done. I handed back my costume, signed out and tried to get home before the sun crossed the horizon. My time as an extra was done. It went better than my last extra experience, back in the 80s, when my young brain was only able to process “Walk from here to there and back again, then keep doing it,” but not such other key details as “Only when the camera’s rolling,” or “And when everybody leaves you can stop.”

Dull? Yes, for long stretches. Late night? No question. But I never lost sight of how I was but one small cog in this machine. Every extra in that shack was dealing with the same long waits, and pretty much all of them started before I did. And some of them had to be on a different set for Hell on Wheels at 7 AM, whereas I could sleep until Friday if I really wanted. And there was also the crew, who actually had to work for all those hours we were just waiting. Perspective, friends. All about perspective.

See you next time, for either an installment of Dan Writes Plays, a summary of my Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo fanuerism, or, if I can’t update before Thursday, the beginning of Dan and Ian Wander Europe.

Danny G Writes Plays: Prologue

So I’ve always been a creative sort. No, that’s the the wrong word: imaginative. I’ve always been burdened with an overactive imagination. As I grew up, stories and adventures that were at best loosely based on what was actually happening in real life were constantly playing out in my head. Spies and super heroes and fantasy versions of me that were less easy to bully. Also Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. Specifically from the claymation special that runs every year. Don’t ask me why I thought Rudolph needing to be rescued by the Justice League was a tale worth telling over and over. I don’t know anymore. Like you were oh so clever at age eight or something.

Given that, creative writing classes were a perfect outlet. I could take these characters and stories that were flying through my head and put them all on paper, possibly even to be enjoyed by others. Possibly. Not probably. It took some time before I really started learning to make storytelling something I did for the reader’s enjoyment in addition to my own satisfaction.

After junior high, there was a lull in my writing habits. English class may have had the occasional creative outlet (especially under one of my favourite teachers, the incomparable Mr. Bowen), but nothing really devoted to creative writing. In grade 12, though… an opportunity presented itself. I teamed with two friends to write a short detective parody. I learned the thrill of hearing a full audience laugh at jokes I’d written. Of seeing a script of my own creation brought to life on stage.

And I never looked back.

I’m now working on my 30th script, including short plays and things co-authored. Over the days, weeks, and months to come, when I can’t think of any other story I’d rather be sharing with you all, I’ll be telling you about each of them: the basic story, how they came to be, memories attached to the productions. And for the scripts where I came up with a wacky premise and saw where it took me (this happened somewhat often, for good or ill), we’ll be joined by Dave and Kevin of Premise Beach.

Hopefully this will also serve as a chart of how I’ve grown as a writer, and maybe give me some reminders of where I still need to go.

Oh god. I’m going to need to re-read some of these. Including my early work. I’ve made a terrible mistake, haven’t I… well, too late. I said those words on the internet. No going back now.

See you next time, with my first (co-written) full play, The Amazing and Almost Accurate Adventures of Trigger Dandy.

The Writing Process

And after some computer malfunction shenanigans, we are back!

In a little over a month I’m going to be on a stage, talking to a crowd (hopefully) about writing. Creating a story and characters and all of that. And as of now I have no idea what I’m going to say. I mean, there’ll be three of us, so I should only have to cover 15 minutes tops, but still. I suppose I could talk about the various stages I go through as a writer. Let’s review them together, shall we?

Stage one: “Didn’t I use to be a writer?”
I have written or co-written 30 plays, ranging from “They tell me it’s great” to “This had better never see the light of day.” And each time I finish one, I inevitably start to worry that it was my last. I’ll have no ideas, no plans, and the notion that I managed to write down all those words in the last script just starts seeming insane. A fluke. Surely I can’t do that again.

Stage two: Inspiration
And then an idea will hit. It could come from anywhere. Dreams. Conversations. Watching something and thinking “I could do that better.” Usually not the last one because if someone else had the idea first, using it myself just seems icky.

In this stage, the very basics of the idea begin to form. The skeletal structure of the story, just enough to fill a thirty-second elevator pitch (examples from my past work: “Muppet Show murder mystery,” or “Man seeks romantic advice from the Devil”). The core characters will start to take shape. Maybe a few patches of dialogue. I’ll mull the idea over, talk about it with close friends, colleagues or anyone who gets in my radius when I’m “chatty drunk” at a party. Some ideas never clear this stage, and I’m probably better off for that, but if the idea is clicking, I’ll commit to it. Then it gets tricky.

Stage three: Actual work
Now I have to take this rough idea and turn it into a functioning story. This is where I finally figure out what the story is about. Now that doesn’t mean the plot: plot is just what happens during the story. What is the central theme? For example, the Dark Knight is about order vs. chaos. Inception is about letting go, or on another level storytelling itself. The Hurt Locker is about how you can lose yourself in the thrill of danger. Most of my recent plays are about getting out of your own way and letting yourself try to be happy. I don’t know, maybe I think if I write it down enough times I’ll actually learn to do it.

And yes, you also need a plot. Supporting cast. How will this resolve? Will the protagonist learn a lesson and triumph, or either fail to learn the lesson or learn it too late and fail? I prefer the former, a good friend and colleague prefers the latter, but neither is inherently better. Depends on execution. Which brings us to…

Stage four: Write it down
Depending on how long I ponce around talking about that play I’m going to write (do be careful: anyone can TALK about writing something, and it’s easy to get stuck on that step, but you have to move past that eventually) this is the longest part. When the idea’s really clicking, and the characters are well realized in my head, the characters basically write themselves. Sadly, they don’t write themselves in any useful fashion. Creating swaths of dialogue in my head is easy; actually writing it down is much harder and more time-consuming. But with time and focus (each their own brand of tricky), I eventually crank out a first draft. Now we enter the panic stage.

Stage five: Showing it to people
Is the script any good? I don’t know. I never know. First drafts have been called excellent or the worst thing I’ve ever done, and until that moment I couldn’t have guessed which would be which. Everything seems good while I’m writing it, at least for the most part, so I need someone to tell me what is and isn’t working. And the act of giving my script to someone to read is a weird two-step process: first I’m incredibly nervous to show it to anyone (on account of it might be terrible), but as soon as I’ve sent it to them I almost immediately switch to desperate to hear what they thought. From there, the editing begins.

Stage six: Draft upon draft
This one’s pretty simple, really. Get feedback, find out what needs fixing, then fix it. Repeat. I prefer to gather people for workshops, in which we read the script aloud and then people give me their thoughts. It does take a certain amount of guts to go through this process, but until you can hear people say they didn’t like something about your story without wigging out you’ll never improve.

Stage seven: editing forever
Art is never finished, merely abandoned. There will always be something that could be improved. I’ve come up with ways to polish a play while in the middle of a performace. Not an ideal time, because it’s too late to chage anything this time around and dwelling on it can make you miss your cue, but the point is the more you grow and evolve as a writer the more flaws you’ll see in your past work. Scripts I used to be incredibly proud of now embarrass me a little, but come on. I was 21.

There’s always going to be the drive to improve. The need to perfect a story. Because the better it is, the better the odds are that I can use it to trick people into liking me.

Look, I never said my creative process was easy or sane. But it seems to work.