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.

Writing a Play Part 3: Showing it to People

And we return to this series.

Okay. So, you’ve had your idea. You’ve painstakingly assembled your first draft. And if you’re clever, you’ve done a cursory edit or two in order to catch the little mistakes that happen when you start a conversation on one day and then finish it the next, or because you had a couple of drinks to spur the creative process, or because your spell check doesn’t flag it when you write “are” instead of “ate.” Simple stuff like that.

Now we reach the hard part… you have to show it to people.

Here’s my process. I doubt it’s everyone’s because if every creative person followed the same process that would just be freaky weird.

Step One: the trusted few

As I discussed last time, sending the first draft out is a slightly harrowing prospect, because I can never tell how well it turned out. But it takes less than a minute after emailing the script out for me to go from “Oh man, what if it’s awful” to “Why haven’t they told me what you think?” Like a switch flicks in my head from “panic” to “desperate need for feedback.”

Sadly, it turns out the other people in your life aren’t hollow simulations who only come to life when you need things from them. They’re actual people with their own dramas and commitments, so there can be a leeettle bit of a wait at this point, and I have yet to figure out a way around it, since I doubt I’m going to get decent feedback if my readers are reading the script begrudgingly. Also people take a weird amount of offense when you sabotage their lives so they have more time for your stuff.

Still, there’s an inherent eagerness to start talking about the script with people properly. This is something that’s been in my head for weeks, probably months. I want to be able to talk about these characters, what they go through, why I’ve had relatively obscure Beatles songs stuck in my head for two weeks. If it’s a comedy, I want to know what they found funny. Does the story hold up? Do they care? I need to know all of these things.

And from there, it’s back to work.

Step Two: time to fix it up

It would be amazing if everyone I sent a new script to came back and said “This is great, I can’t think of anything wrong with it.” But that never, never happens. Okay twice. Almost twice. But that’s okay. The entire point of the close group the first draft goes to is that they will be honest with you/me about the script. And as good as it might feel to hear people say nice things about something you wrote, the way the script improves is when they tell you what didn’t work and why.

The greatest purpose of a first draft is simply to exist. Defeat the blank page and get the story down in some form. Fixing it from there might not be a breeze, but at least you have a framework in place. Build on your strengths, and eliminate your weaknesses, and I don’t know, you guys, this paragraph is starting to descend into obvious cliches, so I’m-a… I’m-a move on.

Next time… hearing it out loud.

Writing Frenzy

So there came a time, after Christmas and into the first days of January, when I found myself in kind of a bad place. Always feeling run-down, ill, and completely unable to maintain a positive mood for more than a couple of minutes.

It has been seven years since I’ve had THAT little fun at a New Year’s Eve party.

I think I know what the problem was. See, right at the beginning of this rough patch, I ran out of synthroid, the pill I take to replenish the thyroid hormones that my immune system targets when it could be taking less than four god damn months to get over a cough sorry, sorry, digressed a bit there… anyway, it’s the pill I take every morning so that I have anything approaching a metabolism. I’d had to switch to my hoard of older, lower dose pills while I went through the process of getting a re-up from my physician.

Ugh. See what I did there? I could have just said “I was under-medicated,” but instead I spent an entire paragraph making sure you knew this was a physical ailment, not mental. I don’t know if it was out of fear that people would assume I suffer from depression (which is a crap fear to have, that should be less embarrassing than needing to take pills for my cholesterol), or from not wanting to be one of those people faking a mental illness or disability to get attention or justify crap behaviour (“It’s not my fault, it’s my self-diagnosed Asperger’s”), but… you know what? On January 28th we’re having a conversation about this. But for now I’m moving on.

Getting out of a place

Right around the time I returned to a proper dose of synthroid, I also decided that it was time to stop looking without for solutions to my bad headspace, and look within. It was time to double down on the thing that always made me feel, well, if not always happy, per se, at least satisfied. Writing. Creating. Storytelling. So I threw myself into whatever writing project I could find. I blogged about movies, Oscar-bait or Hobbit-based. I finished a first draft of a short one-act play for a possible anthology show. I took a stab at a skeleton of an outline for a screenplay my Writers’ Circle co-writer and I want to do this year. I felt… calm. Fulfilled. Myself again. Ready to let go of some of the anxieties and bad thoughts that had been dragging me down. Not all of them, no, it was a three small writing projects, let’s not ask them to work miracles, but still, a start.

Of course, then my projects all hit the usual wall: the wall of needing someone else’s input. The short play was done (for now), I’d gotten as far as I could on the outline without input from my co-writer, and I was back to blogging about old plays. I wanted more. Writing, creating, this was my way out, and I wasn’t ready to stop, sit back, and play Assassin’s Creed until it was time to do a new draft of something.

I needed a new project. And, yes, sure, there are some ongoing projects I could have been paying attention to, at least I think there are, I haven’t checked in a lot lately, but… something got into my head.

The Spark

An old idea. One I’d cast aside a long time ago, but found that there were aspects I didn’t hate. Sure, nearly a decade ago, I couldn’t pull it off, certainly not for the stage. This wouldn’t be a dust-off or a quick polish job. This would be, if anything, only slightly less drastic than the process that turned Jade Monkey into Tyler and Selena. And it would be easy to look at everything else I’m doing, stage, internet, and possibly screen, and say… why bother? Leave it in the past. Move on to the next thing. But first, as we established, all of my “next things” are waiting on workshops, other feedback, or meetings with partners. And second…

There was one scene. One scene that I felt should have been the turning point. Where the protagonist finds his first taste of redemption, where the character I wanted to be the Kaylee-from-Firefly of the cast (the sweet one whose affection for the main character tells us we can like said character as well) is rewarded at long last. And in my first attempt… it failed. It failed as purely and utterly as everything else I tried to do with that story.

And that started to stick in my craw a little.

I didn’t want this scene to be awful. I thought there was potential for a moment of beauty here. A moment where the joy of the characters could seep through to the audience. And maybe I’m wrong, maybe that moment’s impossible, but damn it, I could get closer to it than this. And I wanted to at least try to see it realized.

And that notion lingered. How this moment could be improved. It grew from a “what if” into one of those things, where the only way to exorcise the idea from my mind was to write it down. So I decided… take a crack at it. Write that one scene. See how it turns out. And if you think it’s closer to the effect you wanted… keep going.

That was a few days back. I’m still at it.

Friends old and new

There is something… liberating about this project, for the simple reason that I’m not writing it for anything. It’s not a stage play. Scorpio Theatre needs not worry or care about it. It’s written to be filmed, but I haven’t picked a medium. If it’s not too long, maybe it’s a movie. If it keeps stretching, maybe it’s a series. I don’t know and it doesn’t yet matter. I’m just… writing it until I feel it’s written. There’s miles to go and mountains to climb before it’s even worth thinking about rolling cameras. Couldn’t begin to afford it now, have other things I want to do first if we start convincing people to give us money to make things. I’m writing it for the joy. For the rush. For the indescribable way the characters become like friends, and the pleasure of spending time in their world.

That’s when writing stops being a chore and becomes a passion. As, one by one, the cast becomes people I like, that I care about, that I want to see triumph. Well, after I’m done being awful to them in the name of the story. First things first.

It’s been a good feeling. Good enough that I’m not even sweating the fact that eventually I’ll be done, and will have to deal with wanting to do something with it, yet being largely unable to. Or the fact that despite throwing out every word of the first draft and starting over on a white piece of paper, there might be enough flaws in the basic premise that it can’t be saved. I’ll cross those bridges when I come to them.

For now, it’s just nice to be tinkering away, spending time with friends old and new, hoping that nobody thinks the amount of time I’m spending at home with my computer and DVDs is a bad sign and threatens an intervention.

Thought a “here’s the writing projects taking all of my time” post would be a better than a “here’s why there hasn’t been a blog in three weeks” post, which has been my usual approach.

‘Till next time, then.

Danny Writes Plays: Quest

“Then I know what I must do. It’s just… I’m afraid to do it.”
-Frodo Baggins

Been a while since the last time I did one of these, hasn’t it? Yeah, well, there’s a reason. Because the last time I talked about Quarter Century, and the play after that… I’ve been putting it off and putting it off, because to continue this series meant re-reading what some claim was the worst thing I ever wrote. And man but I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that. But there’s no point in doing this if I start holding back no, so here we are. Yesterday, I cracked open a script called Quest for the first time in nearly eight years.

Are you ready for your nostalgic look at past works to get real? Because today we’re talking about failure. Pure, unadulterated failure. Sure, I had bad things to say about Illuminati in Love, because who wouldn’t, and yes, I had to resort to a speed round to sum up everything that was bad about The Course of True Love and the Curse of the Jade Monkey (why is the title so god damned long), but here’s the thing… every script I’ve written about so far?

They all got staged.

Hell, some of them got staged twice. I not only decided Jade Monkey was worth a second go, I took it to a Fringe festival. But not this one. This one never made it past the first workshop, and frankly shouldn’t have made it that far, but my first-draft readers broke out the kid gloves and I learned of my folly too late.

Let’s get into it.

What’s it about?

“WE NEED YOU TO DO THE THING, AVERAGE GUY. ONLY YOU CAN DO THE THING.” -mentor figure, every goddamn movie
Lindsay Ellis

21st century con man Tobias Rose and his partner in crime Freddy Hale steal from the wrong people, and get dragged into the final struggle of a Tolkien-esque war between good and evil, one in which both sides have begun to fade as wonder and magic were worn away by science and reason.

PREMISE!
Almost TOO dignified this time around…

After stealing both the MacGuffin gem (it’s actual name, the Gem of Anarra, wasn’t less silly, so let’s call it what it was) and a fairy who’s been imprisoned in a PDA (remember those? They used to be a thing!), Tobias’ colleague and occasional lover Pauline is killed under mysterious circumstances, and when Tobias tries to find out who killed her and why, he ends up crossing paths with the trapped fairy’s friends: two sorcerers (Victor and Natasha), and the last of the elves (Ellianna), who are trying to stop the Adversary (basically Sauron from Lord of the Rings, and equally unseen) from regaining his lost power and drowning the world in a new style of dark magic, one fed not by wonder but by fear and cynicism.

While at first Tobias only cares about finding and killing Pauline’s murderer… well, that and getting enough money to pay off a debt to a mobster… Freddy’s nagging and a recurring hallucination of Pauline that acts as his conscience drive him to use his con artist skills to aid Ellianna and company. Also he thinks Ellianna is pretty cute, because why not at this point.

Also the bad guys are all orcs. Or rather, are all descended from orcs, but distantly enough that they’re basically just mob goons: strong and dumb.

So why’d that happen?

“Not with ten thousand men could you do this. It is folly.”
-Boromir

A few reasons. The fairy trapped in the palm pilot was from a dream I had. The fairy was stuck inside the PDA, but since I’d rescued her from her captors, she was willing to try and help me hook up with her friend the elf, but did advise this was a bad idea due to the elf’s baggage. For good or ill (mostly the latter), this all ended up in the play.

As to the rest… in late 2001 and early 2002, I could watch whatever I wanted at Westhills theatre for free. But there wasn’t much playing. So what I ended up doing was rewatching two movies over and over: Fellowship of the Ring and Ocean’s 11. As such, a sketch idea wormed its way into my mind: what if instead of Gandalf the Grey, the Fellowship of the Ring was led by Danny Ocean? While it soon became clear Ocean’s Fellowship wasn’t going to be worth writing down, I guess the notion got stuck in my head, and a few years of loving con man movies later… this happened.

How’d it turn out?

“You folded with a focus and intensity normally seen only in successes.”
-Ray Smuckles

Short answer is “not well.”

For a long time now, I’ve held this one up as a cautionary tale. At the workshop, it was generally agreed to be one of the worst things I’d done (and wasn’t that fun to hear in a group setting), but until then? I had no idea I’d gotten it that wrong.

But I see now. Time, distance, and practice have shown me why Quest failed so utterly.

For starters, it’s like 90% exposition. Ninety percent. That is not okay. Alright, that percentage is a rough estimate at best, but the fact is, people spend more time standing around talking about the premise and the world and what’s been happening than actually doing anything. For something that’s trying to blend Lord of the Rings Ocean’s 11, there is barely any action and staggeringly little charm.

And despite all this exposition, nothing is developed. Why are Tobias and Freddy so close partners? If Tobias is already willing to move on and flirt with Ellianna, how could Pauline’s death have affected him so deeply that he’s imagining her talking to him? We know what the Adversary’s plans are, but do the good guys have their own plan, or is “stopping the bad guy” really the sum of their ambition? I don’t know, and I wrote this bloody thing!

The “curse your sudden yet inevitable betrayal” moment happens during the traitor’s second scene. We have just met this person, how could we possibly have anything invested in whether or not they’re a traitor? In fact, it’s hard to get invested in anyone. They show up, have a stock set of characteristics (Victor’s sarcastic. Really reaching new heights there, Young Me), three of them have a token sad story from their past which end up just being more chunks of exposition in a story drowning in them… I don’t think a potential audience was ever given a concrete reason to care about Tobias, or have any investment at all in what he does. And since he’s driving the story, that is a problem.

The plot is surprisingly barren and moves way too fast. Thirty minutes after finding out magic is real, Tobias knows how to break a seemingly unbreakable curse, with no more explanation than a quick joke about “There’s always a cheap knock-off in Chinatown.”

Somebody at the workshop said “You need a comic relief character.” I said “I thought I had one.” Tells you how funny Freddy ended up.

Everything interesting happens offstage, and is described to the audience so we can quickly move to our next burst of exposition. The final con to defeat the Adversary and win the day is full of holes. Tobais is only the smartest person in the room because everyone else is so reliably stupid.

It is a failure on every level. The world building is sloppy, the characters are cobbled together and uninteresting, it’s a story about the end of the world yet doesn’t feel like it has any stakes, everything, everything, is told rather than shown… and I misused an apostrophe on page 13. It is an eternal reminder that no matter how much I’ve learned, no matter how much I grow, it is still possible to utterly and completely shit the bed.

And yet… and yet now that I’ve cracked it back open, I kind of want to save it.

Would you stage it again?

“You lost today, kid. But that doesn’t mean you have to like it.”
-Fedora, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Or in this case, “Would you allow it to see the light of day,” and the answer remains no, absolutely not, not like this. Like I said, I kind of want to save it, but there isn’t enough in this script that works to build a second draft. The fact is, when the first readers were trying to softball their responses, they were right: this story does not work as a stage play. There’s so much exposition, backstory on the world, its rules, and the characters that’s needed for it to make sense, but right now it’s all happening instead of actually developing the characters, the story, or the stakes. Right now everything interesting happens offstage because it all felt too hard to do in live theatre.

Maybe the story can work. Or at least elements of it. The ancient war of light and dark stuck in an era where magic is dying, a la Flight of Dragons or Carnivale, could have some legs. I might have to lose the elves and the orcs/orc descendents, though, not sure how well that played. Well, definitely the orcs. That did not work at all.

Tobias would need to have some actual charm. Ellianna would need a personality. Freddy’s comic relief would have to actually be funny. The haunted-by-imaginary-Pauline thing has to go, because the idea that anyone might see that as anything but a knock-off of Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica was a pipe dream. But more than anything, to not be terrible, this story would need to have more room to breathe. Time to develop. Time to earn the audience’s interest. And a stage play ain’t gonna get it done. A novel, maybe. A TV series? Definitely.

Sadly, I have at least two other series I want to see exist in some form, and they’re both higher priorities.

One of which starts in a few weeks. For the curious.
One of which starts in a few weeks. For the curious.

Which means the notion of how this story could be told well will just have to lurk around the back of my head for a while. Which is how I got into this mess in the first place.

Repeated theme alert

  • Man and woman cannot be friends: Not sure if I should include this one, since Tobias and Ellianna were never what you’d call “friends,” but their end-of-play hook up is just SUPER tacked-on and brutally unearned.
  • Something something pop culture reference: The Pauline thing wasn’t actually stolen from Battlestar Galactica. It was stolen from Garth Ennis’ 1997 Unknown Soldier graphic novel miniseries, in which the lead character is thrown into a globe-trotting conspiracy centred around nigh-mythological black ops agent Codename Unknown Soldier because a pretty co-worker smiled at him, and was almost immediately killed. He then hallucinates her talking to him throughout the story. Not… not sure that makes it better.
  • Something something pop culture reference part two, Secret of the Ooze: Someone refers to the age of magic as being an age of “nobility and cruelty.” That’s an homage to a similar monologue that opens the first episode of Carnivale. “Before the beginning, after the great war between Heaven and Hell, God created the Earth and gave dominion over it to the crafty ape he called man. And to each generation was born a creature of light and a creature of darkness. And great armies clashed by night in the ancient war between good and evil. There was magic then, nobility, and unimaginable cruelty. And so it was until the day that a false sun exploded over Trinity, and man forever traded away wonder for reason.” That monologue shaped a lot of my vision for the world of this story, and the decline of magic.
  • “Let’s swap backstories for fifteen minutes like that’s not pacing Kryptonite!” This describes more of the script than it doesn’t.

Next time… from my worst first draft to my best, as I experiment with full-on farce.

Danny Writes Plays: Quarter Century

Okay, before we get into this, an apology regarding my last post. When I was picking backlash movements to speak out against, I chose Kony 2012 because some of the complaints I’d been hearing at the time made no sense to me (specifically the “He’s not even in Uganda” thing, which is still a stupid excuse for a counter-point). However, that meant trying to duck around the biggest complaints against it, those of dramatically over-simplifying the issue (“Just go get him. Why didn’t we think of that. Oh right we did,” said the African Union) and of being the very model of ultimately pointless slacktivism.

What I should have done in order to demonstrate how joining a backlash can ally you with the wrong people is go after the “people,” if we’re going to use that word, attacking Anita Sarkeesian for daring to talk about how women are represented in video games. Because the last few weeks have demonstrated that this bandwagon is filled to the brim with disgusting misogyny, and if you’re going after Ms. Sarkeesian for stating that Princess Peach doesn’t exactly have a lot of agency instead of going after the assholes sending her death threats, you are on the wrong side. Which, sorry Invisible Children, just can’t be said about people pointing out that Kony 2012 didn’t exactly accomplish a lot.

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s all watch me tear apart something I wrote eight years ago. Quarter Century, ladies and gentlemen!

What’s it about?

In short, the quarter-life crisis, which I thought I’d come up with myself but was a full fledged Thing by the time I wrote this.

It’s about a group of friends at various points in their 20s: Xavier, or Avi, is a freelance writer married to Miranda, who just got hired by a major law firm right out of law school. Riley, Xavier’s childhood best friend, has recently come back to Calgary after grad school out east. Theresa, Miranda’s older sister, is a psychologist who frequently gets stuck dealing with everyone’s emotional crises while trying to attract the eye of Bobby, the group’s youngest member, who can’t seem to settle on a job, major, or girlfriend.

Xavier’s frustrated because he and Miranda are growing apart, as she’s swamped with her career and he’s busy fighting against becoming a proper grown-up. When Riley’s friend from grad school Angela shows up in town, things get complicated. She and Xavier start to bond over their mutual disdain for being what everyone thinks they should be (or what they think people think they should be–well that sentence got away from me), which starts evolving into something that could ruin everyone’s lives.

Also which involves Bobby being set up on a date with a guy, which he ultimately enjoys, and is very confused about that.

So why’d that happen?

Why’d I write a play about a twenty-something writer struggling against being a grown-up? Because I was a twenty-something writer struggling against being a grown-up. I looked at the awkward difference between growing up and growing old, and thought there was a story there. I took it out, put it away, dwelled on it, dusted it off, kicked it around, and finally got a draft together during U-Boat of the Soul.

And at the time, I was rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer from start to finish, so I attempted to let a little bit of Whedon-style wordplay slip into it.

How’d it turn out?

That’s… a trickier question.

Well, for starters, one of the biggest Whedon-homages worked out pretty well. Based on the Angel episode where an argument between Spike and Angel about who’d win in a fight, astronauts or cavemen, infects the whole group, I had a running gag in which the gang is arguing about who’d win in a fight, Santa’s elves or Snow White’s dwarves. I think it’s still pretty funny.

Moving past that… there’s an inherent problem in looking at something you wrote about how hard it is to be in your mid-20s when you’re entering your… this hurts to type… late 30s. Xavier’s complaints do not ring as true as I once might have believed.

Which isn’t the worst thing in the world. I don’t think they were ever supposed to ring true. This was my first dalliance with tragedy, after all: Xavier’s Peter Pan complex is his fatal flaw, just as Macbeth’s was ambition. Often in tragedy you’re supposed to know that what the protagonist is doing is a horrible, horrible mistake.

Some of Riley’s dialogue is clunkier than I’d like. That was something I struggled with for a while: I let the Joss Whedons and, more importantly, Kevin Smiths of the world influence me in the wrong way, and what I thought would be a clever and sophisticated style of dialogue just gets clunky in places.

I think Angela still works. I hope she does. Angela loathed being the perfect high school teen so much it drove her into self-destruction mixed with self-mutilation. Her and Riley seem like nice people, I wish they didn’t hate themselves so much. But I guess if they didn’t there wouldn’t be much of a story there.

There are parts that work, there are, but… well, no avoiding it now… I hate, I hate, I HATE the ending.

Xavier and Angela almost have sex, Riley catches them, at which point we learn that Angela and Riley love each other but never told each other, hooray for them, that I don’t hate so much. Xavier and Miranda then have it out, at which point, out of god damned nowhere, Xavier decides to skip town and wander the South Pacific until he finds himself.

Which, okay, is something someone might do, but… what? It just… the plot finally gets moving somewhere, and I pull the plug and exile the lead character to the Phillipines or whatever? Where did this even come from? The plot just got out of first gear only to throw down a smokebomb and vanish, leaving nothing but a series of kind of forced farewells at a bus terminal and curtain call. Did I just get bored? Is that what happened?

Would you stage it again?

Okay. Having had some time to come down and reassess, there may well be a may to fix this one. First of all, Xavier’s gonna have to be rewritten fairly substantially. “I don’t want to be a mature grown-up, I don’t know how” just doesn’t work as well as it once did. Even Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen have stopped going to that well. Instead, focus on a less empty, whiny motivation: Xavier and Miranda’s life to kicking into high gear, with adult jobs and parties and talk of children ramping up, and Xavier’s suddenly remembering all the things he said he’d do by the time any of this started happening. Running off to the South Pacific will be less of sudden bombshell if it’s established that he always planned to travel more before he settled down.

Second, is that all I want this story to be? Xavier destroys his life? Because right now other than a bunch of side-chats, that’s all that’s happening. With some streamlining (which, sadly, might mean cutting Bobby, even though I really wouldn’t want to) I can get this down to a tragedy in one act, or possibly a comedy in two. People have said that that’s what this story is missing: a second act, set six months later, where we see what happens when Xavier comes home. Can he win Miranda back? I honestly don’t know. But maybe that would make this a more complete story than it is right now.

Ultimately, this feels like a few good ideas and decent characters wrapped up in a story that I kind of half-assed. And maybe it deserves better.

Next time, either the worst first draft I ever wrote, or the best. Depends on which script I decide to look at.

Repeated theme alert

  • Man and woman cannot be friends: Of course Theresa has a crush on Bobby and Riley and Angela are secretly in love with each other. Why wouldn’t they be.
  • Fun with pop culture: Miranda works for the firm of “Birch, Shore, and Wambaugh,” named after three of my favourite lawyers from TV shows by David E. Kelley: Alan Birch from the first season and a bit of Chicago Hope (before he, Mandy Patinkin, and David E. Kelley all left the show and I stopped caring about it), Alan Shore from Boston Legal, and the undefeatable Douglas Wambaugh from Picket Fences. It would have been Cage, Shore, and Wambaugh (using the other lawyer David E. Kelley wrote for actor Peter MacNicol, John Cage from Ally McBeal), but someone at a workshop said “Because her work is a CAGE. GET IT?” and that had to go.
  • All in all I prefer it when I let Aaron Sorkin influence my writing style. Nothing against Joss Whedon, I just can’t do his thing very well.