Writers Circle Confidential: Night Moves

Working on our Night Moves…

Tryin’ to make some front page drive-in news…

Fun with exteriors

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Writers Circle Confidential: Love is Blind

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.

Danny Writes Plays: Writers Circle

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.

Writers Circle Confidential: In The Depths

You know the drill. Watch this, then we chat.

Okay. Here goes.

Finding it as you go

The beginning of this episode shifted somewhat between casting and production. Originally, it was Zoe who’d failed to notice that Jeff was in the room. And when Anna (who plays Zoe) and Aaron (who plays Jeff) read that at Anna’s audition (Aaron having been cast some time earlier), it was certainly funny… but as you may recall from two weeks ago, we had a running gag building in which Jeff was habitually unable (or unwilling, maybe?) to tell that Zoe was in the room. Or recall her name. Zoe not noticing that handsy womanizer Jeff Winnick wasn’t in the somewhat small writers’ room would be a) weird, and b) actively contradictory to the other bit, which had more legs.

(Yes, I shift between actor name and character name a lot. Yes, I know it’s potentially confusing. No, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop.)

So while it always pains me a little to cut a joke, I rewrote the opening of the episode to reflect this new status quo that several other episodes established. And hey, the new joke turned out possibly even better. Because as funny as Anna’s reaction was to Aaron sneaking up on her, that pan over to reveal she’s been in the room the whole phone call just killed me the first time through. Hopefully you agree.

There’s a lot of this. On network television, they’re producing episodes from August until April, and get a chance to react to audience expectation. Play to their strengths, work on their weaknesses… well, in theory. Lord knows the writers of Gotham haven’t done much to make Barbara Kean less of a train wreck, but Arrow certainly adapted. Other shows, like House of Cards or Game of Thrones, film their entire seasons in one go, then release afterwards. All 13 episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt come out in one burst, so if there’s oh, I don’t know, a controversy about how they handle their minority characters, there’s not much they can do about that until season two.

We’re in a similar situation (he said, desperately trying to avoid saying “We’re like Game of Thrones,” aka. the most egotistical thing he could say in this context), in that the entire series finished photography three months before our first episodes went live. We didn’t even shoot episode by episode… as I said earlier, anything involving all four writers in the Writers’ Room had to be shot during Super Fun Happy Good Times Week. So it’s not like we could shoot a couple of episodes, review the dailies, learn what we could do better and brush up the next episode before we rolled cameras.

It’s a learn-as-you-go process. You just hope the seams don’t show too much. This topic got away from me a little. Let’s move on.

Like, Share, Subscribe

I probably watch the most internet videos of any of the executive producers (he said, his tone implying this wasn’t so much a brag as a shameful confession). This means that I put the most thought into little things like the difference between YouTube, Vimeo (YouTube’s pretentious cousin), and DailyMotion (the cousin from a dysfunctional family that YouTube and Vimeo don’t like to talk about), or more relevantly, how to do a good “Like, Share, Subscribe” short (or, as we call them, LSS) to run under the credits. Vlog-style channels like Jenna Marbles will just sign off for the week by reminding you to subscribe to the channel; more production-intensive channels like Cracked Studios and College Humor (spelling it without the U kills me a little, but that’s how they spell it, so…) have to run actual credits, so they fill that time with a quick bit to encourage you to like and share and subscribe, those things that don’t seem important until you’re on the other side of the video, when they become everything.

Now there’s a couple of ways to go here, and my two examples use both interchangeably. You can do an LSS custom tailored to the video… examples include Cracked’s Rom.Com (season two, anyway) and After Hours, or at least half of College Humor’s Adam Ruins Everything videos… or you can shoot something quick and generic that you can slap on the end of basically any video. Cody from Cracked or Emily from College Humor pointing out the like, subscribe, or “Watch more videos” buttons. Effective, but I find something disengaging about Cody saying “Thanks for watching… whatever that was.” I’d rather the request to subscribe be accompanied by Daniel O’Brien explaining that Soren Bowie wrote “Everyone is eating pie” into the stage directions for no reason other than he wanted pie.

I sort of split the difference. On occasion, our LSS bits are tailored towards the specific episode… most notably Brent’s on episode two… but for the most part, I wrote LSS bits for all of the main characters, and we figured out the best episodes to pair with each one. For instance, an episode about the horrors of the comments section fits well with an LSS about Zoe being traumatized by the comments section (one of my two favourites).

Random facts!

I directed the section with Zoe and Jeff locked in the side room. Which, let me tell you, was a bit tricky. The side rooms aren’t very big: we needed room for Zoe, Jeff, lights, the camera, the sound equipment, plus me and Ian, and possibly Tawni, who was typically on slate, but might not have been there that day. So I was cramped into one corner, directing the shots while running sound, with no chair. I have had old-man-knees since I was 15. I would typically lose all feeling in my legs during the shot.

The poster you can see on the window (albeit backwards) is for a band we know called Thwomp. They do rock covers of video games. They’re pretty awesome. You can find their music right here if metal covers of Mega Man music appeal to you, and how could they not.

I needed something for Zoe to be listening to on her way into the building, to cover the fact she didn’t notice Jeff’s ranting, or, as it turned out when we actually staged and shot it, Becky waiting in ambush. Zoe seemed the exact type to enjoy Jonathan Coulton. Because she’s on the geeky side and has a heart and feelings, so of course she likes Jonathan Coulton.

The trick about punchlines

In the punchline of this week’s episode, Jeff asks if Zoe deals with this sort of thing on her blog. After saying “I’m a woman. On the internet,” she decides he’s had enough for one day, and says that, no, everyone who comments on her blog is totally respectful.

Wasn’t the original punchline.

Because I spend a lot of time online, and have these crazy thoughts that maybe every woman I’ve ever cared about or will ever meet shouldn’t have to deal with a misogynist culture or live under the constant threat of sexual violence from men, I am well aware about what Zoe would have to deal with on her blog.

Jeff gets mean comments that his film might not be very good. Zoe gets threatened with rape and death if she expresses an opinion about a comic book.

And this episode was written before the real-life horror movie that is GamerGate got started, and “doxxing” and “Swatting” entered the common lexicon.

So I considered having the punchline of the episode be a little different, acknowledging what I was sadly confident would be part of Zoe’s day-to-day life. But we decided that might be a little too dark. Dark’s all well and good in the set up, but if you’re working it into the punchline, you’d better be confident your audience is going to be okay with that. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia trains its audience to expect a dark punchline to a dark premise; we didn’t have that expectation. So I went the other way. I think it works better. Provides a nice end moment instead of something that would just get Jeff spun up again.

Which is not to say that we shy away from controversial jokes. As we’ll see next week, when we talk about the yelling fight Keith and I had in a pub about… well, I wouldn’t want to give it away.

Seriously, like, share, subscribe, and comment on the videos. YouTube pays attention to that stuff.

Writers’ Circle Confidential: Deconstructing Phil

Okay. Who’s ready for their internet comedy series to get real?

Caught up? Let’s get started. Joining me this week are both of my co-execs, Keith Kollee and Ian Pond.

Letting Go

Ian: I always imagined that the super dramatic scene that is being rehearsed at the top of the episode is actually part of a laughably melodramatic sci fi play. Maybe about immortal cowboys.

As I’ve stated before, I started writing Phil Payton way on back in 1997. He’s been the main character, or at least amongst the main characters, in three plays of mine. I’ve used him as a vehicle to… exorcise some demons more than once.

So imagine, then, the trust involved in having the principle writer of Phil’s big solo episode be my co-exec Keith Kollee.

This isn’t the first episode Keith wrote. That’s coming in two to three weeks. And Keith’s first episode showed us that we’d achieved something important: we wrote the characters consistently. Super consistently. To the point that the cast–including Aaron, who’s been following my writing for years– couldn’t tell at first glance which episodes were mine and which were Keith’s.

That is an excellent thing to pull off. That Keith could write these characters as well as I could was a relief (part of why I dragged him into this was so that I wouldn’t have to write the whole damn thing  for his writing talents). That he could write them as the same people as I do was a blessing. Because there’s little worse than when a show is so inconsistently written that you can tell who wrote it by how the characters act.

Ahem.
Ahem.

Aside from, you know, opening with a tragic death, thus far we’ve kept things light and funny. As you’ve no doubt seen (and if you haven’t, what the hell, the video is right at the top, what is keeping you, here be spoilers!), Keith went a different way with this one. When we were plotting out the season, the rough summary we came up with was “Phil has a crush on an actress, but can’t ask her out because he can’t stop picturing all the ways it could go wrong.”

Me, I pictured a series of brief fantasy sequences in which Phil does indeed envision a dozen different tragic outcomes of asking out the actress who eventually became George, because as we discussed, I am goony for cutaways. Keith, not sharing my demented and annoying-to-film obsession, tried something different.

…You know what? Let’s let Keith himself take over for a bit. Ladies and gentlemen, Keith Kollee.

Keith’s take

Deconstructing Phil was not the first episode I wrote for season one, but it is the first to see air. That will ensure that it always has a special place in my heart. It is also the darkest and least funny episode. Why is that? Why did I feel like this was necessary? Despite Dan’s half-hearted protests, I know that Phil was based on him in the original iteration of Writers Circle. (I half heartedly protest! -Dan) What Dan doesn’t know is that once upon a time, Phil Payton was also me. I suffered the same insecurities and self-sabotage. Writing those awful things for Sydney to say (sorry Syd!) was easy because I had thought those same things about myself a thousand times. Because I could see so much of myself in Phil, I felt it was important that he not be some buffoon that we propped up and poked fun of. We will, of course, still laugh at Phil and his foibles, but we will also understand that he is a real person, and that his pain comes from a real (if ridiculous) place. I feel like this will actually make him funnier in the long run. Who knows? Maybe I’m wrong. I just feel like all the great sitcoms over the years had these kinds of episodes (MASH is the one that immediately springs to mind), and the characters were always stronger after being forged in that fire. I hope the audience agrees.

Heart rips

This was also a special episode because it book-ended the shooting of the season for us. It was the episode we shot on the first day, and again on the last. I remember standing outside the theatre, looking at these two other people (Dan & Ian) that I had decided to embark on this journey with. It was not unusual for the three of us to sit around and talk about the awesome things we could do, under the right circumstances. But we made a plan, set one foot in front of the other, and were on the verge of creating something real. I had never been more proud of us. And I had also never been so scared. I had no idea what I was doing and I was sure that was evident to everyone. In hindsight, I still don’t think I’m wrong about that. But then we flash forward to the last day of shooting. We were all so much more comfortable with ourselves and each other. I still didn’t know what I was doing, but I had made my peace with that. And no one was impolite enough to call me on my bullshit. We had become a family. I remember feeling a profound sadness that last day. An emptiness. What was I going to do when I didn’t see these people everyday? It was soon filled with the flurry of post-production and other projects, but it was not forgotten. It fuels the fire for season two.

Ian: This episode was shot on two separate occasions MONTHS apart. Being that the first day was THE FIRST DAY of shooting, the day after first read through (and a party) when we were first trying to figure out how shoots would work, Keith ended up noticing that he wanted more wide shots. Add to this that at some point I accidentally deleted half the footage from the day. All this culmintated in scheduling a reshoot day some time in October. By this time the theatre we were shooting in, which was empty for the summer, now had a set built in it. Also by the time we were scheduling reshoots Ryan had grown a beard for another shoot and couldn’t shave down for our show until he was done with that. Heh. Good times.

Anytime someone says “See you next week” I think “See you next Tuesday”. I’m not proud of it. But I doubt I’m alone.

Getting Real

Thanks, guys. Now, to elaborate on some things Keith brought up…

This episode is brutal and unflinching in a way I’m not sure I would have delivered on, and I do have some experience chasing Phil up a tree and throwing rocks at him. And it’s important that it happened this early in the season (would have been earlier if someone hadn’t shoehorned in Origin Stories, but here we are).

Keith named MASH. I cite Scrubs. Which may seem like a less impressive reference but too late it’s happening. Scrubs started its run with broad, zany comedy, and while they toned down the foley a little after the pilot, that’s primarily where Scrubs lived. Then in episode four, they gave each of the three lead doctors a patient, announced they were going to kill one of them, got you invested in the patients and their stories… and then killed all three. In a montage set to a cover of “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, just to make sure you were every bit as depressed as they wanted you to be.

Why? Same reason I’m glad Keith wrote this episode the way he did. As a warning shot that we’ve got this in our toolbox, and while we’re primarily a comedy show, we are not afraid to get heavy when that’s where the story goes. Last week was hilarious, next week will be too, but this week we pull a knife and go for the heart. Because we can.

Plus, you know, all the stuff Keith said. About Phil’s pain coming from a real and difficult place.

We could just phone it in, have a punchline for every setup, end on the laugh track, never grow and never challenge anyone…

AHEM.
AHEM.

But I’d rather be Scrubs. I’d rather be Community. I’d rather be Bojack Horseman. I’d rather be the show that makes you laugh but can still stab you right in heart, because you care so much about the characters that their pain becomes your pain, their triumphs all the sweeter because you’ve been rooting for them this whole time.

Fortunately, Keith agrees, and this episode is the result.

First Day on the Job

Like Keith said, this was the very first episode we ever shot. Our first day on set. One day after our table read, we set up in the Pumphouse Theatre and rolled camera for the first time.

Lights, camera, excitement!
Lights, camera, excitement!

That wasn’t a small thing for us. Keith, Ian, and I had been working on this for over a year. Thirteen months since the train in Switzerland where I told Ian this was what we were doing now and started writing what became episode twelve. Ten months since Keith, Ian, and I had a drink on my balcony and started breaking the season’s stories, defining the characters, divvying up episodes. And now we were filming. It was a good feeling. And having an entire episode in the can by the end of our first day? A great feeling. We wouldn’t get an entire episode done in one day again until the first day of Super Fun Happy Good Times Week, when we managed to shoot all of Stonebluff Road (episode 10, coming in April).

Not that having an episode in the can lasted. As it turns out, we were forced to reshoot chunks of this episode, hence it also being one of our last days on set (I’m honestly uncertain which was last, the reshoots for this episode or Becky’s flashback from episode three). Not ideal, but hey, there was symmetry.

Also reshoot day was the last time all five leads were in the same room, as that was the day Dave Moss of Abby + Dave Photography came by to take the character photos you can see on our website.

Astute viewers will recognize Matt “Coffee Shop Douche” Pickering in the lower left of that photo. This was Matt’s one day on set as AD/Production Manager, a role we talked him into through no small amount of charm on Keith’s part. Sadly, health issues forced him to step down from the position, but if you’ve been watching/reading carefully, you’ll find the signs that he’s still with us in spirit.

And sometimes with us in the flesh, getting tormented by Becky.

Such torment.
Such torment.

And he wasn’t the only casualty…

Ian: The thing about shooting a passion project is you tend to do it for free and have to get people to do things for free. As such it’s kind of a dick move to be angry when someone takes paying work over your thing. Such was the case of our short lived camera op Alexis Moar who started early in the project shooting auditions, test shoots and up to the first full day of photography but then went back to working in television and film once they started calling again. I’ve worked with her plenty in the corporate AV world and seen many of the things she has worked on. If you get a chance to work with her, take it but for gods’ sakes pay her or you run the risk of losing her to someone who can. 

My favourite moment from day one? That is, aside from our talented and adorable costumer/slate girl trying to keep up with some of the trickier shots?

And we didn't even use that one.
And we didn’t even use that one.

While filming, Keith paused, turned to me (or someone, I forget, I mean I replied but people tend to forget I’m in a room so he could have been talking to anyone) and said “We haven’t had any good bloopers yet.”

That’s right, his big complaint from day one on set was that things were going too well. But I was right there with the reassurance.

“Don’t worry, Keith,” I said. “Once Aaron and Steph are on set, that’ll change.”

Rumour has it a blooper reel is heading our way which should prove I was right.

Ian: This episode was a nightmare for me and Pat. (“Pat” being Patrick “DJ PEENS” Murray -DG) The two shooting days with different equipment made post production incredibly difficult. Matching colour was a huge problem as on the original day we used some of the theatre’s existing house plot for much of our lighting. By the time we shot a company had moved in for a show and hung and focused their own light plot. And then there’s the matter that Pat needed the sound equipment we’d been using for another shoot that day so we were forced to use my far lesser equipment. What followed was some of the most hurtful and mean spirited criticisms I’d ever read in Keith’s post production directorial notes. We could but try. He’s a monster.

This also marked the last day I used a soft box for lighting. I had one bulb for that thing and when it broke had no money to replace it.

On a personal note, this was Nathan Iles’ one day on set as Ian (the actor), which turned out to be just excellently timed. See, partway through the shoot, I lost a cast member from the production of Frost/Nixon I was directing. As I was exchanging messages with my stage manager about it, I looked up and said “Hey Nate, wanna be in Frost/Nixon?”

“Sure!” he replied. “I was wanting to find a show to do.”

“Awesome,” I said. “But… remember how you were excited to get your hair cut?”

“Yeah…”

“Not so much.”

Next week we’re going to talk about internet trolls. So the episode will be funny, but the commentary might get dark. Circle of life, man. Circle of life.

Writing a Play Part 4: Workshops

Okay. You’ve had your inspiration. You’ve written your first draft. You’ve sucked it up and let people read it. Now let’s take it to the next level… reading it out loud.

Sounded better in your head

There are things you can’t know about your script until you hear it out loud. Sentences that seem hilarious on paper can fall flat when you actually have to read them out. Dialogue that seems fine in your head can be awful coming out of someone’s mou–there has to be a better phrasing… can sound awful spoken out loud.

Why yes, I do have examples.

One of my favourite webcomics is Something Positive. Like most webcomics I follow, it has a strong wit and a unique voice in its dialogue. What I didn’t know is that it wouldn’t really translate from the page. And then some fans did a short film based on one of the earlier stories, and some of my favourite lines from the story… fell flat. Now you could say that it’s because the film was shot by amateur fans and not Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but honestly, spoken out loud, the lines got clunky. Super clunky. Because they move a lot faster when you’re reading them in your head than actually speaking them.

Which is something to look out for when you have my unfortunate tendency to think wit can be accomplished with excessive verbosity. Um… “bein’ all wordy.”

The second example comes from something I did, instead of a well-meaning fan film that came out a little clunky.

It was one of the earliest drafts of Salvage. I handed it to two close friends for a review, got notes, came back with a second draft, and was chided for not cutting a section of dialogue that one of my readers had advised me to be rid of. I attempted to defend the section, at which point my friend decided to prove his point in the swiftest way possible: reading the lines aloud. My reactions were as followed:

“I don’t think it’s so– Well, if you read it like that, it– maybe it needs to– STOP IT! STOP IT!”

Took, maybe, 15 seconds to be utterly broken by my own dialogue. Needless to say, it got rewritten pretty thoroughly.

The Reading

So gather your friends, hand out scripts, read it out loud. It’s hard to predict how you’ll react or what’s going to happen. Me? Frequently, my nose runs. No idea why. It’s like the emotions triggered by people enjoying something I wrote set off leaks in all of my face-holes. Kind of annoying, not gonna lie.

When they laugh, how it sounds, it’s all hard to predict. Personally, I swap between trying to savour hearing the words out loud and following along in the script so that I can catch the more obvious flaws. And then… down to business.

Once the script is read, you need people’s reactions.

It’s, at best, organized chaos. You have a room full of people (depending on how many people you invited) that hopefully will all want to sound off on what they thought, and keeping it all orderly can be a challenge.

Now, in my case, I had a fiction writing class back in University with novelist Aritha Van Herk. Aritha is a nice person and an impeccable teacher, but part of her technique is that she is merciless. Aritha Van Herk will tear you down to rubble and rebuild you, stronger and better than you were. And the way this happens is that everyone reads each other’s stories, then in class everyone tears into the story to discuss what’s wrong with it. And maybe, if you’re in the second or third year, what’s right with it, but the focus is on the former. And the writer just sits there and takes notes. Because it’s not like you can find everyone who reads your book and explain what you meant to say.

Clem Martini, my playwriting prof, believed more in positive enforcement. He’d still spend the bulk of the time on how a script needed to improve, but would open by discussing what worked.

But back to Aritha. The most valuable thing I got from two years of fiction writing class was a thick skin. By the time I started playwriting class with Clem, I wasn’t afraid to have people read my stuff and tell me what they thought. In fact, I was starting to thrive on it. However, the flip side is that I also sort of got into the habit of being a passive observer in the commentary portion, which some people find baffling.

Results

Steer into the chaos. Mine your readers for everything you can; which characters work, which don’t. If it’s a comedy, do the jokes land? If it’s a mystery, how obvious is the ending? Do people care about the story? Get everything you can, because there is going to be a lot. Unless your draft is miraculously rock-solid this early in the process (I have managed that precisely twice, similar to the number of plays I buried never to see the light of day), there will be a lot of stuff to work on. More people means more opinions and more flaws you never saw and strengths to play up.

The most recent example. My last workshop, for the farce I’ve been working on, went exceptionally well. It got the laughs it needed (if a farce isn’t funny, that’s the ball game), the main characters all worked, it was a hit. People enjoyed it, some wanted to direct it, some might even consider staging it, but there was still an ass-ton of rewrites necessary. One character had to be cut, and a full third of the cast had to be completely rewritten. Only two characters escaped without needing tweaking. Fortunately, my two favourites, so go me on that one.

Workshopping isn’t an easy process. You need a strong stomach, a thick skin, and a tough… neck, or whatever? Ran out of body part analogies. But the insights you gain on how your script is doing are invaluable.

And if you can get past the “What if nobody likes it” fear, it’s also a hell of a lot of fun. Me, I can’t wait to finish this draft so I can think about doing another.

Guess I’d better get back to that.

See you all Friday for Writers’ Circle: Confidential, when we’ll be talking about handing one of my oldest characters over to another writer.

Writers’ Circle Confidential: Origin Stories

You know the drill. Here’s the episode…

…now let’s get to it.

Hark now to the tale of how I, as head writer, made everything complicated for the production team forever and always.

“Forever and always” in this case being defined as for a few more weeks, but still.

So the episodes did not get written in anything even approximating production or airing order. One of our first priorities when we kicked off the project was to plan out the entire season, figure out what stories we needed, what stories we wanted, try to give all the characters decent coverage, plot a couple of long-term arcs. We then divvied up the writing between me and Keith, with my plan being to write the season finale last so that it could properly pay off everything we’d done.

And then having done all of that, I suddenly decided “Wouldn’t it be neat if we did an episode about how everyone became writers in the first place?” And despite the fact that we had a full season, decided to just go ahead and write it anyway, because I’m the head writer and give zero fucks, apparently.

Fortunately, it turned out pretty funny, and a planned two-parter read way faster than we expected, so it all worked out. It just… it created a little problem.

See, by then, every other script was written. Written and numbered, from one to thirteen. And since renumbering 10 shared files felt like a lot of work, I just went ahead and numbered Origin Stories episode 3.5.

So it’s episode four to the audience, and 3.5 to the production team. Which, you know, is just a bundle of laughs when the production team is chatting.

Fortunately, we’ve worked out a good solution all around. We just keep referring to episodes by their script number (which will soon enough bring us to episode 6/7), and since I handle the YouTube copy and the social media posts, only I have to worry about their broadcast numbers.

Which, you know, is basically just counting.

Episode observations

I don’t have too many set memories on this episode. It fell during one of the days in Super Fun Happy Good Times Week when I had rehearsal for Frost/Nixon, so it was 10:00 by the time I was on set. But there are a few random notes and Easter eggs I can share.

There are those who imply that Phil, the playwright, might have some passing resemblance to Dan, the me. This is, of course, nonsense and slander, and officially I have no knowledge how this rumour got started. But those who spread it tend to point at the supposed fact that I gave Phil three of my old jobs.

Which is, of course, madness. Sure, okay, regular readers or those willing to troll the archive will know all about my brief time at Canada Post and some snippets of my time as a projectionist, but I only trained as a blackjack dealer. Never actually worked as one. So there.

Goth Phil
Goth Phil judges you and your assumptions.

Moving along… due to the wonders of the filming process, Phil and Becky’s halves of their phone call were actually shot around two months apart. July was our “no Stephanie/Becky month,” meaning no Becky scenes, which was tricky, because there’s only one episode in the whole season that Becky’s not in. So in July, we knocked off just as many non-Becky moments as we could, including Phil’s side of the phone call.

Although it occurred to us in the moment that it would have been better to have both of them in the room… could have opened up some neat split-screen opportunities… but we’ll just call that a lesson for next season.

Now, while the halves of the phone call are separated by time, they were actually shot only 20ish feet apart. See, we didn’t have a lot of budget for locations… or anything… so with the exception of the writers’ room, we mostly hunted down what we could get for free. Like, say, my house. Which quite fortunately has two very distinct floors. Phil lives in my basement, and Becky on my main floor, although we mostly only see the kitchen. And yes, that’s my pimp chalice she’s drinking out of.

Speaking of my stuff… it was really simple turning my basement into Phil’s nerdy living room. It is probably not surprising that I own a fair amount of nerd paraphernalia. It was simply a matter of scouring the upper floor for Dr. Who merch, webcomic geek art, and the statue collection I call my nerd reliquary.

I'm comfortable with who I am.
I’m comfortable with who I am.

Most of which you can’t even see. We’d even gotten permission from Joel Watson of Hijinks Ensue to use his “Doctor is In” print, in exchange for reminding people that you can totally buy your own at his store, and it didn’t even make it into the shot. Redecorated the entire basement for nothing. Except that the table totally works better there.

Blast from the past

Shifting to the flashback to movie night at casa del Winnick… we needed audio for whatever awful movie spurred Jeff to launch his moviemaking career. But even if there was a movie we could think of that no sane mind would ever consider to be less than fully terrible…

Ahem.
Ahem.

… if it wasn’t something we owned, we couldn’t use it. So as a placeholder, our sound engineer, Patrick “DJ Peens” Murray, used the dialogue between Zoe and Tina from the start of episode three, because it amused him to have Jeff complaining about how bad the dialogue was in something I wrote. And it’s not that the rest of the team didn’t see his point, just that if we used dialogue from last week’s episode, we thought people might notice.

So we found another way, a way that makes this scene even more self-referential.

Jeff, Becky, and Phil of Writers’ Circle: the Series are watching the DVD of Writers’ Circle: the Play.

In a perfect world, we would have used one of Jeff’s scenes, so that Jeff was complaining about having to watch the Jeff Winnick Story, but I got Peens the DVD late and didn’t have time to find a good scene. So we just grabbed scene two (which I thought was a Jeff Winnick scene, having forgotten we cut that one for time), aka. the first scene not reproduced nearly word for word in our first episode.

Insignificant tribute

The… well-fed missionaries that Becky chases off in her flashbacks are, as the credits reveal, myself and Keith, with Ian completing the “executive producer cameo” set elsewhere in her flashback. We are not holding bibles or books of Mormon, as I don’t really have either, but are instead each holding one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books. Some of the only and easiest to find hardcover books I own.

Because man I love Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.

It began as a simple fantasy parody novel, but grew into something much, much more. The Discworld is a fully-realised fantasy world that acts as a mirror of our own through twisting and subverting storytelling tropes. It’s filled with incredible, lovable characters I could never wait to read more about: angry detective Samuel Vimes and the rest of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch; conman turned unwilling civil servant Moist Von Lipwig; Granny Weatherwax and the Witches of Lancre; the bumbling wizards of Unseen University; Death and his adopted family. Forty novels, each designed to delight new and old readers alike. Terry Pratchett was a uniquely gifted writer, comedian, satirist, storyteller, and world builder. Since I first read Good Omens twenty-ish years ago, an end-of-the-world tale he wrote with Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett’s books have been an endless source of joy for me.

He died yesterday at the age of 66. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. The world… my world… is lessened by his absence.

Next week… Phil goes solo in Deconstructing Phil. Be well, everybody.

Writers’ Circle Confidential: Brent’s Non-Replacement

And welcome to another instalment of Writers’ Circle Confidential, your ticket behind the curtain of your new favourite webseries. You heard me. It is your new favourite now. Unless you just discovered Cracked: After Hours or something.

Just me this week. My cast are thus far shy about sharing their recollections with my tens, nay, elevenses of readers. Seen the latest episode yet? Well, what’s keeping you?

A lot to talk about this week, so let’s get to it. Allons-y!

Meet Zoe

As I said last week, a good way to hook your audience into your premise is through a new arrival. A character who is as unfamiliar to the setting as the audience, thus allowing us to discover the characters and status quo through their eyes. WKRP had Andy Travis, Cheers had Diane Chambers, Brooklyn 99 had Captain Holt, and we have Zoe, brought to ridiculously adorable life by Anna Barker.

It was a bit of a trick adding a new character to what was, for me, an old and familiar dynamic. I wrote three hours of play script based around Phil, Jeff, and Becky bantering with occasional interjections from Tina. Figuring out a fourth person and making her fit in was a challenge. We decided we wanted a geek girl, especially since she was going to be our blogger (that being a field of writing not already represented by playwright Phil, novelist Becky, and screenwriter Jeff), but Phil has his nerdy side as well*, and we didn’t want Zoe to just be “Girl Phil.” That’s not an interesting dynamic to add, and would be shortchanging our second female lead.

So Zoe gets to be the awkward one. The one who doesn’t quite know how to make herself part of a group. Phil is held back by depression and self-doubt, but Zoe is just adorably clueless at socializing. Well, hopefully adorably.

Keith's notes on next week's episode show we're pretty confident.
Keith’s notes on next week’s episode show we’re pretty confident.

And thus, as Tina briefs Zoe on the group, we get our new introduction to the characters. A bit more thorough as to who they are, a bit more fun as Tina imagines them at… not their best. And results in a delightfully hilarious banshee-wail from Matt Pickering as the Coffee Shop Douche.

Some of us have started using it as a ring tone.

*Phil’s nerdy side is evidenced by the fact that when Phil and Becky enter the writers’ room, he is trying to explain why, in man of Steel, Krypton’s atmosphere has the same basic effect on Superman as Kryptonite.

Cutaways

Now, the method with which we re-introduce the main trio at the top of the episode brings us to a point of controversy amongst the Writers’ Circle Brain Trust (aka. myself, Ian, and Keith).

There’s an easy shorthand to figure out who wrote each script. If it’s just two (maybe three) people in one location, odds favour Keith being the primary writer. If it’s filled with cutaways (or has Tina in it), you know it’s one of mine.

I love cutaways. Ian, our director of photography, hates them. And me for writing them, which I will quite unapologetically continue to do whenever it suits me. See, I’ve been working in theatre for 20 years now, and that means dealing with the limitations of stage. There are simply things that can’t be done, or at least not done well, on stage. One of those is little comic asides like the ones you see in the stairwell sequence. Lord knows I’ve tried to work some conventions that are meant for the screen into stage plays, with what could charitably be called moderate success. Now that I’m writing for the screen, I see no reason to write things that could easily exist on stage. So I cut away. I include flashbacks. We see both sides of a phone call. And I’m loving it.

(Also watch that scream from the Coffee Shop Douche again and tell me it isn’t worth it.)

This, however, lead to an interesting complication. The cutaways are basically never shot on the same day as the rest of the episode. Since we don’t shoot episode-by-episode, we just figure out when and where we can do each shot, and fit them all in.

As a result, episode three basically encompasses the entirety of our shooting period. Phil’s flashback in the stairwell was shot in June, on our very first shooting day, the day after our first table read. Becky’s flashback was shot months later, in November. Look at that shot carefully. Most of this was shot in summer (as will become clear next week in further cutaways), but it is winter out there. The first half of the episode was shot on a completely different day than anything in the Writers’ Room, which was shot in a… very special time period. Let’s talk about that now.

Clearly, the staircase scene was tiring enough to shoot on its own.
Clearly, the staircase scene was tiring enough to shoot on its own.

Hell Super Fun Happy Good Times Week

Like I said, most of this was shot in summer. Which meant one dreadful thing: working around people’s vacations.

Well, I don’t know what we expected. We made the shooting schedule in June, of course people already had vacations booked, I already had a vacation booked and it was a last-minute travel deal. But still, this proved more challenging than we’d guessed.

We gathered up everyone’s availabilities, from the leads to the recurring characters to the one-off guest appearances, and having done that, discovered something horrifying.

There was only one window when all four of our leads (not counting Tina, who is credited as a lead, but has the least screen time) were available at the same time: a five day stretch in early August. This meant that every single scene where Phil, Becky, Jeff, and Zoe are all in the writers’ room (and some that only had three of them) had to be done in this one five-day period. And on four of those days, we’d only have four or five hours of shooting time, since people had day jobs.

We swiftly branded it Hell Week. And then I swiftly re-branded it Super Fun Happy Good Times Week, so as not to get people into more of a negative frame of mind than we needed to. Also because I loved shoot days and really wanted that to be infectious.

One 13 hour day on the Sunday, then whatever we could get done between 7:00 and 11:00 Monday to Thursday nights, typically followed by production chat with Daisy. And beers. Keith and I usually wanted beers by then.

(Once he wanted me to stick around for a beer specifically so that he could blame me personally for the title “Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice.”)

The minor miracle? We got it done in four days. We had five, but we did it in four. Our cast are that good.

Now, that’s not to say everything worked that smoothly. A lot more scenes got pushed into September than we wanted. Our October launch date got pushed back to January (not wanting to compete with Christmas) as we were approaching our planned launch date and still hadn’t finished principle photography. As you may have guessed from me mentioning that scene we shot in November.

But still… getting through all the Writers’ Room scenes with the four leads took a chunk out of our to-do list, and let me saunter off to direct Scorpio’s production of Frost/Nixon with a clear conscience. Although not being on set for shoot days made me sad every time.

Next week! “Introducing the characters” enters week four in Origin Stories. Watch the episode on Thursday, then join me here on Friday.

Writers’ Circle Confidential: Funeral for a Vicious Circle

Hi, and welcome to Writers’ Circle Confidential, the place to go for a look into the bizarre, chaotic, and hopefully entertaining shenanigans that happened behind the scenes of the hilarious new webseries Writers’ Circle. Which, yes, I was involved with, now that you mention it. Joining me this week, in the form of a series of italicized interjections, is co-executive producer and director of photography Ian Pond, who regular readers may know as the “Ian” in “Dan and Ian Wander Europe,” still available on the YouTubes.

Making the Vicious Circle

We’re going to be talking about both of our launch episodes, starting with The Vicious Circle. So, if you haven’t watched it yet, what the hell has been keeping you here it is.

I was hoping to have covered this in Danny Writes Plays by now, but I’ve been lazy busy lately, so I’m afraid I’m still a few years short… I wrote the play Writers’ Circle way back in 2009, featuring the hijinks of Phil (from Two Guys, a Couch, and the Fate of the World and U-Boat of the Soul), Becky (also U-Boat), and Jeff (he was new). Four years later, I decided these characters were too much fun to confine into one three-hour play that a lot of people might not see, because you try to convince people to stage a three hour script that they’ve never heard of.

Ian: The napkin dispenser is from a play Keith Kollee directed. It was the simplest of props and yet took the most work to acquire for its 5 minutes of almost complete non-interaction. When it was repurposed for this show I added a piece of tape on the side that reads “Significant prop.”

There’s a lot in the play that doesn’t come up at all in season one of the series, and indeed may never come up, because the leads have gone off in very different directions. We can talk about all that when I finally do a “Dan Writes Plays” blog about the play. This episode, however, is the only one thus far to be taken from the original script.

Ian: Almost this entire episode is adapted from the opening scene of the original Writers Circle play by our head writer and EP Dan Gibbins.

Indeed it is, Mr. Pond. See, when I wrote the play, this scene was my intro to the characters. Throw the audience into a middle of an argument by these three friends who sometimes act like enemies, get them caught up in everything, and away we go. I have, in the months since, begun to wonder if it’s the best way to introduce the characters in the new format, a format which will not involve the audience spending three hours with the characters in one go… but in the end, it enabled us to work in something the play hadn’t needed but the series did: an inciting incident.

Ian: The sign on the glass door (barely visible) at the far end of the writers’ room leads to Ars Poetica magazine, the eponymous location of a play by Arthur Holden which Dan directed in 2012. It’s also the name of the magazine on the table whose cover is a photo by Tim Nguyen of Citrus Photography.

Ian explained it to me in Europe, while we were bouncing around having adventures and Keith, while still being lured into joining us, was stuck back in Canada as assitant director to a play by some schlub who– oh, yes, that was one of mine, wasn’t it… Anyway. He explained that sitcoms typically kicked off by adding a new character that helped explain the status quo to the audience. We, the viewers, learn about the setting and characters because we get to view them through the eyes of the newcomer. Cheers started with Diane arriving at the bar and taking a job there; we learned all about struggling radio station WKRP in Cincinnati by watching Andy Travis’ first day running it; Brooklyn 99 opens with the arrival of a new captain; 30 Rock began with the arrival of Jack Donaghy. So what we needed was something to put events in motion and result in the arrival of a new member.

Ian: The poster above the couch is from the play Cry Havoc 3 which was in production during the filming of this episode and closed the day before Episode 1 first went live on YouTube on the 22nd of February, 2015. That play was directed by Aaron Conrad who plays Jeff Winnick. His face is also on the poster. It was decided this poster would make sense since Jeff is a huge narcisist who would probably keep a poster of a play he was involved in if it had a giant picture of his head.

Hence creating/killing Brent Lambert, group founder and role model to the cast. Also, the existence of Brent gave us a basic throughline to follow: each of the writers are trying to be the person Brent believed they could be, and are encouraging each other to do so by–well, let’s say you’ll see next week. When we’ll also discuss “introducing the characters” more.

Ian: Aaron is pouring real booze into his coffee. Actually I’m pretty sure there was no coffee in that cup. Pretty sure he was just drinking rum.

This was actually one of the last episodes we shot. Shooting over July and August (and not offering money up front) meant that we were competing with a lot, and I mean a lot, of conflicting vacations, so getting Ryan, Steph, and Aaron in the same room was… challenging. Will it be less so in season two? How the hell should we know? Keep watching season one, I don’t even know why we’re talking about season two this early. Who brought it up? Was it Ian?

Ian: The scripts in front of Phil were actually script pages from old drafts of
other episodes of this series.

Funeral for a Friend

At one point this episode was called “Three Writers and a Funeral.” And then at some point, a switch flicked in my head, and without me even realizing it had happened, the title changed to “Funeral for a Friend,” same as the second act of the 1990s Death of Superman story. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that we’re not doing “Reign of the SuperBrents.”

I have another project in mind, a superhero-style story, in which all episode titles are somehow a reference to other superhero movies, comics, or lore. But we’re not talking about that until I figure out how to pay for it.

Ian: The funeral scene was shot at the home of a woman named Terry Ann who haslong been a supporter of our theatre company. She is also the mother of Sean Broadhurst, who played Jeff in the original stage play.

It is an ambition of mine to get Sean Broadhurst into this series, as he’s one of the funniest men on the planet, but he is really committed to this whole “Living in Hong Kong” thing.

Ian: Whereas the rest of the funeral is shot at one location, the scene where Tina scolds the trio at the end is shot at Matt Pickering’s house. Matt was the original production manager and first AD before he had to back out and have Daisy Pond take over.

I’m not gonna lie to you. It’s only been recently that we behind the scenes figured out what the hell Phil and Becky are talking about at the top of the episode. “Preeing?” Is that what she says? Apparently that’s a thing. Anyway, I mention this because it became policy in season one that we’d never yell “cut” when the planned shot was over. We’d just sit back and see what happened when we let Stephanie just… go. This is a fine example.

Ian: This episode, while being the second one released, has the last shot taken of the season. In fact it was done twice. The shot is the close up of the urn and photo of Brent. The first time it was shot their positions were flipped. Upon discovery of this error, several months into post production, I had to reacquire the props, return to the location and redo the shot. It took less than 10 minutes to execute (including a beer) but about a week to coordinate.

That goddamn shot.

As we ramped up to release the first two episodes in the weeks following our launch party (where we got the chance to watch the first four episodes with a crowd), my one thought was “Swear to god, Pond, if I see the word ‘Placeholder’ over that urn one more goddamn time…”

Ian: While all the extras were cast basically by calling in random people we know from our day jobs and from community theatre, it turns out that Ryan, who plays Phil, had long ago actually dated Jemma, who plays the long haired blonde he’s hitting on/traumatising with serial killer talk.

So watch the episode again and marinate on that. Marinate on staring your ex-girlfriend in the eye and implying she was going to be serial killed, possibly by yourself or Jeff Winnick.

Fun fact: I played Phil Payton myself, or the earlier versions of him, on three occasions: twice in Two Guys, and once in U-Boat. But by the time Writers’ Circle happened, I felt it was time for that baton to be passed. Partially because I directed the play myself. Keith and I never even considered playing roles in the series. I mention this to underline how weird it felt being an extra at that funeral. Hopefully I get used to it, though, because I have plans that require Keith and I to be in the background many more times.

Ian: Upon his entrance to the bedroom where the trio are being scolded, Aaron walks through the door making a hand gesture to the camera that cements him as one of the worst people in history. It is not the last time he does it over the series. That hand gesture became the unofficial “gang sign” of the series that I reject to this day.

… I dunno, Pond, feels like mentioning it is just giving him all the power. Just sayin’.

We ran out of time for this shot when we did the rest of the funeral. Not being able to pay overtime means our delightful Production Manager, Daisy, ruthlessly enforces the planned wrap times. It was a distinct challenge coming back to this somewhere around a month later and trying to recreate everyone’s look as we got the last shot in a totally different house.

Also, flirting tourette’s is real. One of our cast suffers from it. We’re searching for a cure, but the science is ahead of the funding. Also he claims he “doesn’t need to be cured.” Sure thing, guy. Sure thing.

Ian: Patrick Fitzsimmons, the bearded young man that Becky, played by Steph Morris, is going on at length to turns in a great performance of someone forced to patiently/incredulously listen to a hugely inappropriate diatribe. Too good, in fact. Almost all of his best reactions were cut so we could keep focus on Becky who was also turning in a performance too good to miss.

Damn that Steph Morris, always force feeding us gold.

Coming next week: the group gets a new member in “Brent’s Non-replacement.” Watch the episode Thursday, and then join me here on Friday, where we’ll be discussing “Super-fun-happy-good-times Week.”

That was not what everyone called it.

Prologue to Writers’ Circle Confidential

So, remember all those times I mentioned working on a web series?

Well, it’s here! It’s live! It’s waiting for you to fall in love with it! All currently released episodes can be found at our website. At the moment, that includes our pilot, The Vicious Circle…

And our deceptively named but even funnier second episode, Funeral for a Friend.

Check ’em both out, we’re pretty sure you’re going to like them.

But the reason I’m here… visitors to Tales From Parts Unknown will soon be getting bonus content. Every Friday, here at Parts Unknown HQ, I’ll be doling out backstage tales from the making of each episode.

So here’s what you should be doing: every Thursday morning, head to our YouTube channel for the newest episode. Watch it, laugh, learn to love again, share it with your friends, use it as an icebreaker to make conversation with your crush*, watch it again… then on Friday afternoon, stop by here for stories of how it all happened. Slightly modified to make me sound more handsome than my co-execs.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to kicking it in Hawaii. Writers’ Circle Confidential starts in three days!

*Not a guarantee. Affiliation with this series has resulted in zero makeouts for myself or Ian. Keith, we’re not sure about. His wife was somewhat pre-disposed to make out with him now and then already.