Living the Romantic Comedy

How to Get an Agent

How do you get an agent? After everything we’ve talked about for weeks, this is of course the one and only thing you aspiring screenwriters want to know: How do you get an agent?

Well, first, you’re going to have to make a sacrifice. I suggest you kill something. Not anyone you know, necessarily – a fly would do, for starters, or say, all the other screenwriters in the world. Short of that, do get a bit of blood on your hands. Is there a woman present? Make this sacrifice in a way that will impress her. Reveal a hidden strength, or perhaps an ability to sing. In which case – learn how to read music? Master a musical instrument.

If there were no women present at your moment of sacrifice, a song is a good way of attracting their attention. Failing that, move to another country. If you find one at war, that’s especially useful. See if you can either help win the war, or find a way to lose it that enables you to survive. Helpful too, at this point to learn how to cook. Scrambled eggs will do, as you can put anything in them. Crack two in a bowl, add a dash of goat milk, salt, pepper, beat the eggs and get out a pan with butter – other recipes and methodologies are available. Or just boil an egg, so you can carry the hardboiled egg in your pocket, along with a spoon, as you carefully separate the strands of barbed wire so that you can crawl though the fence to get to safe territory. Try not to tear your jeans and if possible, pick up a dog.

Keep the egg for yourself but find food for the dog. Otherwise she or he is liable to desert you. Have you learned the language? Become fluent in at least two foreign languages. La pared means wall (I know, it doesn’t sound like a feminine word, but in Spanish these things are often counterintuitive). It is la pared. Learn that and the word for hope – ESPERANZA! – hope and the wall. That’s what you need to know. Is there a woman yet?

Go to the town square, where the accordions play and the guitarists, where women tend to gather. Sing, you big beast! You want to see eyes widen. And if you are a woman – I have heard there are a few female screenwriters – you’ll still want a woman to help you. The men are mostly useless. Alright, now steal a jeep, while the others are distracted, they’re singing Guan-tana-mera or calling the wind Mariah – so gun the motor, drive like a fiend. Are you there yet? Take the right hand road. It narrows, the moon bathes it in an unearthly glow. Could the moon’s light be other than unearthly? Think about it. There are things you need to contemplate.

Your dog is howling in the back seat. Drive through the mountain pass, and if the soldiers are firing at you, duck. Rescue a woman, while you’re at it. If she wants to be married, do it. Maybe she’s willing to bear your firstborn child. Not right now, you don’t have time for that, you have to be on the ferry by five to midnight, before the fuses blow. Learn whether it is the red wire or the blue wire that needs to be cut. Cut it, but don’t answer that phone. Fly instead to the other side of the continent under an assumed name. Say the password esperanza! to the leader of the resistance, only to be betrayed and thrown in prison. It’s like being at the bottom of a well but you have your spoon – did you remember the spoon? Begin to dig. A year later when you emerge, no one will recognize you. Use this to your advantage. Sneak into the cellar and snatch a bottle of vintage Pino Noir. And have a drink for courage, because the dog is having puppies.

Realize that one of the puppies can be bartered for a ticket out of town. Over the next hill, in the valley, between two one-limbed cypress trees, you’ll find the remnants of the treasure that’s already been dug up. The bone that you find there can be fashioned into a utensil to write with. And there is always blood. Write about the life of your son, the one you could’ve had with your wife, if you weren’t so intent on your career. Your son is now the owner of an empire of shoes, and you can afford at least the left boot of a pair at discount. With the money you have left, invest in one good stock, anything but Boeing. The shed has yet to be roofed, you have to battle a swarm of bats first and there’s a lesson to be learned in this, something profound but ineffable. Sing about it, only do it in seven-syllable lines. Write 120 pages of these haiku and polish them all till they shine, brilliant in the morning sun. The men in suits are there, crouched in the orchard with their rifles. The one who won’t shoot is the one you can talk to, if you’ve learned the language. The familiar-looking one with the silver tooth who’s a muckety-muck at ICM, the one who owes you some money. Is he your brother-in-law? That’s how you get an agent.

Year-End Rom-Com Pod-Fun

It's that time of the year, so Billy and Tess, absurdly overdue for another podcast, gift each other with some favorite rom-com moments, make romantic comedy resolutions, and wax poetic about where we are and where we'd like to be.

Here is the link to Episode 9 (A Fine Romance). Warning: contains movie quotes, meet cutes, and swearing.

Begin Again

That's me in my home office with Tabitha, one of our family of dogs. If you were here, she'd be tail-wagging and wiggling a welcome.

I've been off this blog for about a year, and was neglecting it for a few before that - largely because Facebook and Twitter took over my social media attention, and because the romantic comedy genre itself was in the doldrums. But as of this week, I may be leaving Facebook, for reasons that should be clear to anyone paying attention, while the romantic comedy - in the wake of Crazy Rich Asians and 80 million Netflix subscribers embracing a new crop of funny love stories like To All the Boys I've Loved Before - is back in force.

I like being where I can share interesting stuff and just sound off about whatever, while engaging friends and strangers in conversation about it. It does say "other topics apropos" above, under Living the Romantic Comedy, so I'll be here appreciating the world and analyzing the likes of anything from The Kissing Booth to Karl Ove Knausgaard and beyond.

Happy to have you aboard, first time visitors and returning readers alike. I'm currently working on the revised and expanded 20th Anniversary edition of Writing the Romantic Comedy, which Harper/Collins will publish in early 2020, so as I wrestle with putting the genre's last 20 years in perspective, all input welcomed! Please do comment, and I promise to reply. 

Missing Mr. Goldman

He was The Man. 

If he had only given us Butch Cassidy, we would have been gratified, but there was more (The Princess Bride) and more (All the President's Men) and more (Marathon, Misery) plus the first and perhaps greatest of contemporary books about the craft: Who among you reading this post has not perused Adventures in the Screen Trade?

Goldman famously claimed "Nobody knows anything" (though - watch me rewrite William Goldman! - I've come to think, after decades in the industry, that "Nobody knows everything" is more accurate) but Goldman did know something, for sure.

[NOTE: An earlier version of this post reprinted a "10 Commandments of Screenwriting" long-attributed to William Goldman. I've learned from a reputable source that they were actually written by (gulp) Robert McKee, so I've removed them. Apologies!]

Good News

The great work begins: Harper/Collins will release the updated, expanded & revised 20th Anniversary Edition of "Writing the Romantic Comedy" in 2020.

 

In Praise of Women

The latest episode on the podcast I do with good friend and great romantic comedy screenwriter Tess Morris (Man Up) is a positive counterpoint to the truly awful Hollywood news of late: We talk about A Dozen Great Female Characters (in comedy, romantic comedy, and black comedy, 1970s-Present, and A Dozen Great Screenplays Written by Women. Cheer yourself up with this tribute to Film Women Who Rock: You Had Us At Hello.

Rom-Com Podcast

My good friend the great romantic comedy screenwriter Tess Morris (Man Up) and I have been doing a podcast on all things rom-com for a while now - we've got three episodes up - and the latest one is about The Big Sick, the AFI Diane Keaton tribute, and other topics that include the dangers of crying (or not crying) on first dates. So by all means, come and have a listen to You Had Us At Hello.

A Million Views

There was a fine white mist at the foot of the Santa Monica mountains as I biked up the path early this morning - my last bike ride on the beach as a resident of Venice: Tater and I are moving to the suburban wilds of North Hollywood tomorrow. It'll be quite a change, as I've lived in Venice for 23 years, but as we're trading a small two bedroom apartment in the over-traversed epicenter of West Side hipsterism for a three-bedroom house with yard and garage, etc. in a charming, quiet neighborhood... Well, I bought a bike rack for the car. I'll happily trek out here once a week.

Seems perfectly synchronistic that Living the Romantic Comedy is celebrating its tenth anniversary this weekend - end of an era, and all that - though not end, I hasten to clarify: I intend to keep blogging, for as long as it's still fun. But the blogger's landscape has certainly changed since I first moved into this neighborhood, ten years ago.

In June, 2005, Facebook wasn't yet as ubiquitous and Twitter didn't exist, let alone all the other platforms. And though I was late to a party that was still going strong - at the time, you could tell someone you had a blog without getting an eye-roll in response - it was a heady, stimulating community to join, especially in screenwriting site circles. These days, to have an active blog makes you feel a little... quaint. It's a bit like writing in longhand and sending an actual letter.

The most exciting aspect of it, inarguably, was and still is getting a response. These days we're all used to being liked, shared, favorited, and retweeted, but back then it was a more novel experience to blather on about something online, and suddenly get agreement, or disagreement about it from a total stranger. By the time Living RomCom was going strong, it wasn't uncommon for me to get 25-35 comments on a given post. That's astonishing, then and now.

The essential experience - reflected for me in the title of the blog - has been of growing up in public (I like to think I'm still growing), and when I looked back, digging up things to re-post this month, I saw all manner of momentous events annotated here: In my very first post, I was wondering how to write a dating site profile, and over the course of a decade, after seeking romance in all the wrong and nearly-right places, I found true love in my third and final wife; America elected its first president of color; my first novel sold to a major publishing house; and my beloved father passed away.

What I hadn't quite foreseen was a major sea change in my genre of choice. No, the romantic comedy is not dead, as I've exhaustively discussed in these pages, but in the past few years, a certain kind of formulaic chick flick (I call it the Career Girl Gets Alpha Guy movie) has finally lost its audience. I myself had dutifully supported the so-called formula of the traditional romantic comedy, but I lobbied fiercely here for more progressive fare.

One of the things that keeps me blogging about the genre, in fact, is that the rom-com seems to be morphing into something newly relatable, as such hits as Silver Linings Playbook and Her have demonstrated. I'll go out on a very short limb now to declare that when Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer's Trainwreck (which I did notes on for Universal) comes out in a few weeks and makes millions, you're suddenly going to hear - from the same people who danced on the rom-com's grave last year - that "romantic comedy is back!"

Such is the ever-cyclical nature of the industry. Meanwhile, what truly makes the blogging practice worthwhile continues to be the people I come in contact with by doing it, from my first-ever commenter Caroline Ferguson to the blog's most stalwart fan E.C. Henry. I'm amazed and gratified to talk with not just friends, but folks from all over the world on a weekly basis.

Probably the most humbling of such encounters occurred when a former consult client living in Eastern Europe informed me that having read a certain Living Rom-Com post had helped her to make a major life decision about when and how to have a baby. Her child is over a year old now, and the idea that something I wrote on this blog could turn me into a sort of cyber-godfather fills me with awe.

That's the thing, I guess: What I've mostly learned here is that when you write something and offer it to the world at large, you can never know what effect it may have, even on people you don't and may never know. And this is the best endorsement for facing one's fears and continuing to write that I can think of.

Thank you all, at any rate, for keeping me company thus far. And please comment to let me know what you'd like to see more (or less of) on this blog. Largely due to the efforts of blog colleague Scott Myers, whose promotion of a recent post currently has my total page view numbers at 999,690 and rising, I'm within 300+ hits of reaching one million by the day's end. You, my friend, may even be my millionth viewer!

May your days be filled with love and laughter.

(Illustrations by Adrian Tomine) 

10 Screenwriting Clichés That (Still!) Refuse to Die

A Tenth Anniversary Re-Post: April, 2010

Occasionally one does see a new movie cliché in formation. Given the impact of Kick-Ass, we may now be in for a decade of "pre-teen curses like a sailor before kicking a villain's butt" moments. And I can remember, long, long ago (i.e. before The Matrix) when action sequences didn't always have those "characters hang in mid-air while dodging extreme slow-motion bullet trajectories" bits in them.

Yet once they're created, some clichés never die.  Does it matter that generally, people (discounting hipsters and DJs) don't own turntables and play records in 2010? Not to movie trailer-makers, who continue to use that hoary "sound of the needle scratching across vinyl" as their standard comedic "someone just screwed up a good time" device. The ubiquity of say, "Cover me - I'm going in!" or "We've got company!" as uber-clichés of dialogue is evidently timeless (take a look at this great compilation video to see the latter line in all its eternal glory).

Movie clichés abound - in genre, dialogue, character; here's a recent cliché exposé, and an entire site that has encyclopedia-ized them. Nonetheless, I'm incredulous when I see a cliché in a new spec script, implying that the writer must be wit-free (e.g. in rom-coms, one dead climactic routine still appears with bewildering regularity). Here's a short list, compiled with the help of my fellow story analysts at Uni, of clichés found in contemporary studio submissions, despite for-the-love-of-God, Monsieur! evidence that by now, they should be long gone.

The Fired & Cheated-On Setup

Apparently it's never enough for a protagonist to be fired from her/his job as the catalyst for a story. No, they have to come home from being fired and find their lover in bed with another woman or man (with both would be nice for a change, but that would suggest a modicum of originality).

The First-Time Stoner Set Piece

Yes, some states in our union are flirting with legalizing marijuana, but that's no excuse: Why do so many spec screenwriters think that the "unlikely straight person eats pot brownies by accident" routine is something new (or beloved) under the comedic sun?

The Unbearable Failure of Engines

Just as any protagonist who's beginning a new life by driving off in a car must inevitably suffer the car's backfiring, if a character is desperate to escape peril and jumps into a car, you can bet your Fire the Writer bumper sticker that the engine will not start at first, whatever the auto's make, year or model.

Worst Screenplay Opening in the World

Used to be "Protagonist wakes up in the morning," but Screenwriting For Dummies must've put the kibbosh on that one. How-To books have not succeeded, however, in exterminating The camera soars over the city/town/countryside... The shot inevitably ends up landing on our protagonist's yard/window/hairpiece, and despite this being as tired a camera direction as the arcane We pull back to reveal..., it still begins spec scripts on a weekly basis.

The Obligatory Ethnic/Gender Stereotype Support

Since My Best Friend's Wedding, the heroine's buddy must be gay. This has given way to The Gay Huddle (i.e. group of gay confidants gather round the heroine's phone/computer with her, see He's Just Not That Into You). All black women - invariably friends of white heroines - must add "Girl!" at the end of declarative sentences (just as all gay men still gesture/say "Snap!"), and the most popular other ethnic character is The Feisty Hispanic or Black Female Detective (e.g. Date Night).

The Eating After-Hours Rule

When's the last time you ate your Chinese food out of the cartons, perhaps with chopsticks? No matter: Anyone staying late at the office/precinct/home kitchen counter is required to do so, despite the common sense "Chinese food is for sharing" rule known to the civilized Western world for decades (See: Single women always eat ice cream out of cartons, in your typical zombie rom-com).

Most Unimaginative Music Cue 

There's nothing cheaper than invoking a "Soul Classic" for a montage of good times, yet this too still crops up with numbing regularity.  Awhile ago, James Brown (e.g. I Feel Good) was the go-to soul music cue, but Early '70s fare (usually Sly) and a little later (We Are Family) have become the brain-dead norm.

The Big Video/Digital Reveal

The evidence is on tape (or on DVD, zip-drive, 8mm, et al), which means that at the eleventh hour, our hero or heroine will slip the incriminating footage onto a screen - the bigger the better - in front of the rest of the cast and/or public, and - well, you know the rest, right?

The #1 Most Over-Used Image

No competition here, and no exaggeration: This phrase turns up in about one out of every three spec scripts I read. Not sure who got it started (and I'd like to know, just so I can deck 'em) but Like a deer in headlights is the hands-down most ubiquitous clichéd screenwriting simile in existence.

Finally, in terms of Definitive Screenwriting Fail, there's one physical comedy routine that makes any reader's mind go Tilt!when it shows up on the page:

The Chain-Reaction Scream

We do know who started it: blame Melissa Mathison and Mr. Spielberg for the moment - fresh and funny in 1982, groan-inducing now - when young Drew Barrymore saw E.T. and screamed and E.T. screamed in reaction, and she screamed again, and... "one screams, the other screams" has been with us for 18 years. So you oughta have your screenwriting license revoked if you're still using it (Runner-up: The Dog Cocking Its Head Like "Huh?" Reaction).

Living the RomCom will be curious to hear of any more recent screenwriting abuses that you'd like to add to the current canon. Meanwhile, take it from a guy who sits on one of the first lines of resistance in Spec-Land: As you're about to type a phrase, a riff, or a scene on your screen, if you even think you've seen it on another screen before? Think, "Is that all you've got?" and "It's a trap!" and... Don't even go there.

 

Mythbusting: The Good Writer and the Bad Execs

A Tenth Anniversary Re-Post: March, 2007

Myths abound in our myth-making movie biz. There’s the myth of director as God – addressed by screenwriter Robert Riskin when he thrust a sheaf of blank screenplay pages at Frank Capra and said, “Put the ‘Capra touch’ on this!” There’s the myth of starlets discovered in coffee shops, of producers who move their lips when they read; there’s the William Goldman-penned myth of Nobody knows anything (actually, a number of people know a hell of a lot; a more accurate credo would have been ‘Nobody knows everything’).

But there’s one pervasive myth in the industry that I’ve yet to see addressed in print, and I’ve had enough of its dogged perpetuation. It’s the one that goes: Writer good, executives bad.

You’ve heard it countless times – the gifted but beleaguered writer whose work has been unaccountably butchered by the stupid, philistine studio executives (always the insidious plural). The writer, in white hat, doing his best for the cause of cinematic artistry is an underdog rugged individualist hero who’s being unjustly repressed (and rewritten) by heinous, mercenary corporate studio thugs who lack only black hats and mustaches to twirl to complete the mythic scenario.

I know I’m going to catch hell for this, but sorry, as a professional writer who also works for a studio as a story analyst and thus sees both sides of the equation on a daily basis, I gotta say that this perception of writer as saint and executive as Satan-incarnate is just a crock.

Believe it or not, there is such a thing as a bad writer. There is such a thing as a good and helpful studio executive. And to retire this bogus good/bad dichotomy altogether, let me put it another way: sometimes an uncooperative or unskilled writer does more harm to a movie in development than the useful, smart execs who are trying to make a better movie in spite of the writer’s failings.

Blasphemy, I know. And yes, of course there are horrible, useless executives who mess with material just to piss on it, there are execs who know nothing about writing who make ridiculous suggestions; there are writers a-plenty who do know better about what works and what doesn’t but get unduly constrained by the powers-that-be; there are writers who are fired on projects, only to be re-hired by the same studio after three other writers have gotten nowhere with the material. Yes, yes, happens all the time.

But what also happens all the time is that writers screw up. Since I don’t want to lose my day gig (while I’m losing all my screenwriting friends), I can’t name names and tell tales out of studio school here, so you’ll have to take the following on faith. But here’s the deal from inside the belly of the studio beast: quite often writers are hired for gargantuan sums of money to pen a studio project, and what we have, as they say, is a failure to communicate.

The writer has one idea of what the movie should be, the studio has another… and nothing but headaches follow. I write up notes on the project, an executive follows suit, a document goes to the writer, and… what comes back is nothing like what’s been discussed. For example, last year I did exhaustive notes on a movie, recommending some fairly serious overhauls of characterizations and plot trajectories… and what the next draft delivered was the equivalent of rearranging deck furniture on the Titanic. None of the more important issues cited – not a one – had been addressed, for whatever reasons, by the writer.

Most probably this writer will be fired. And the studio’s just wasted a lot of time and money. And the project is in jeopardy. So who wins?

Studio story departments' known if well-kept secret is that nine times out of ten, if you pull coverage of a movie out of the files and set it beside the reviews that the released film has received, the critique is virtually identical (especially when the movie’s not so good) down to the specific language. Reader and critic alike speak of “contrived plot developments” and a “lack of credibility in the character’s motivations,” etc. So if the studio was wrong, if all the critics are wrong, and if the audience is wrong (i.e. the movie’s tanking)… how right can the writer be? Chances are (after decades of complaining that these guys take all the credit), he’ll blame the director.

I’ve seen one Big Name Writer hired by the studio to do a rewrite hand in a draft that read, as my story editor reported, as if said Name had been paid a little under a million dollars to take the last draft out of its box, retype the title page and then put the draft back inside the box again. And I’ve seen a head of production at the studio badger a writer-director into shooting an ending that everyone, award-nabbing helmer included, later agreed had turned a potential turkey into a trophy-winner.

Another awful truth: There’s maybe all of about a dozen or so screenwriters who the studios trust to be dependably solid and skilled, even inspired, on all craft levels. These closers (as in “they can close the deal”) form an amazingly small, select club. Used to be Towne and Goldman; these days Richard LaGravanese, Steve Zaillan, Scott Frank and Paul Attanasio are among the elite who get serious money thrown at them to get the job done when there’s a lot at stake. So what does that tell you about the craft of screenwriting and the business of movies getting made? Evidently your average screenwriter sometimes needs a little help. 

Here’s a couple of screenwriters sitting around talking, in this case 2007 Oscar-nominees Peter Morgan (The Queen) and Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine), from [an L.A. Times Calendar article, link no longer available]:

MORGAN: ...People concerned with the marketing of the film said, "Well, it's a hell of a movie. And right now, hers [Helen Mirren's] is a good performance, but it's not an Oscar performance. So, Pete, would you write an argument, or a scene where she's angry, in the first act?" I said to Stephen [Frears], "I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is, there isn't enough Tony Blair." ... Stephen put his foot down, and we shot four extra days of Tony Blair. The net effect was that by putting in counterpoints, his part feels no bigger, but her part feels enormous, without shooting a single extra frame of Helen Mirren.

ARNDT: I just want to jump in and say that everything that got added to the original script of Little Miss Sunshine was an improvement. There was nothing that I was forced to put in that I didn't think was better, and there was nothing taken out that I wanted to be in there.

Check it out: Morgan’s saying he got a note that he didn’t entirely agree with, but he found a way to arrive at a proper solution. The specifics of the Stupid Studio Exec note might have been off the mark, but apparently the executives were right, in that something did need to be adjusted (a common phenomenon, see this post on “looking beneath the note”). So why didn’t the execs give a smarter note? Um, maybe because they’re not writers. It was the writer’s job to solve the problem, which he did, ingeniously, without disturbing the integrity of the piece. And everybody won, including the audience.

And Michael Arndt’s response is kind of astonishing. I mean, I’ve experienced this myself – shrewd, thinking development people helping a writer to more fully realize what he hadn’t got exactly right from the get. But the astounding thing is that Arndt was big enough to admit it. Man, you’ll never succeed in Hollywood if you voluntarily give other people credit for their contributions to your work, right?!

As of this past Oscar night, another myth busted.*

[*Arndt won Best Screenplay Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine.]