Today I examine why this controversial episode was never made.
Genre: TV episode
Premise: As Elaine contemplates buying a gun, Kramer comes back from vacation, claiming to have slept with the stewardess on his plane, prompting Jerry and George to bet on whether he’s telling the truth.
About: This is the infamous unmade episode of Seinfeld that featured a gun. It looks like this would’ve aired in season 3 or 4. The episode spiritually died in the table read, when Julia Louis Dreyfuss read a line about shooting Jerry. After the table read was over, the producers and creators huddled up then came back and told everyone to go home. They wouldn’t be making the episode. You can hear the cast talk about the episode here.
Writer: Larry Charles
Details: 52 pages
When you run a screenwriting website, you’re constantly coming up with ideas for things you can do on the site. I remember an early morning, while still in bed, half-asleep, where I became convinced that I needed to have a contest to write a modern-day episode of Seinfeld. For a good hour of half-asleepness, I had convinced myself it was the greatest idea that had ever been invented.
Then I fully woke up and, within five minutes, reality slapped me in the face, as it became clear that a website dedicated to feature screenplay writing probably wasn’t the best forum to do a contest for a sitcom that had been off the air for 20 years. So even though my love for Seinfeld remained unparalleled, I put the sitcom to rest. Finally.
That was until today when I learned that there was a Seinfeld episode that had never been filmed! Based on a script that had actually been written! This was like a dream come true. I knew these characters so well that a script might as well have been a filmed episode since it was so easy for me to envision these characters in that world.
In The Bet, Elaine shows up at Jerry’s apartment and claims that someone she knows got robbed and she’s thinking about getting a gun for protection. Jerry tells her she’s not a gun person but Elaine makes a strong case about being a woman in a big city with a lot of crime. You need to be able to defend yourself.
A sunburnt Kramer barges in, recently back from Puerto Rico, and tells Elaine that he knows a guy who can get her a gun. His old buddy, Mo. Elaine is thrilled. Then Kramer shares a secret with the crew – he slept with the stewardess coming back from Puerto Rico.
As Kramer and Elaine leave, a frustrated George, bemoaning his lack of opportunities with women, is convinced that Kramer is fibbing. Jerry, however, thinks Kramer is telling the truth. Therefore, they make “The Bet.” They bet 1000 dollars on whether Kramer was telling the truth or not.
We then head over to Mo’s, where Kramer, Elaine, and Jerry, go to buy the gun. Mo is a weird loser who lives with his clueless mother. He has several guns for Elaine to choose from. It all becomes too overwhelming for Elaine and she decides not to get a gun. Instead, she goes down the street and buys a fake gun so she can at least scare people away.
The group, minus Kramer, then head to the airport to find the stewardess who supposedly slept with Kramer. They locate her and ask, in a myriad of ways without being direct, if she joined the mile high club with Kramer. The woman is freaked out and in the pandemonium, Elaine accidentally pulls out her gun from her purse, and the group gets swarmed by security.
A couple of months later, they’re all back in their homes and everything is fine. Kramer shows up at Jerry’s and reads the group a letter from the stewardess who hints at, in no uncertain terms, that they did have a physical tryst on the plane. So Jerry wins the bet and George loses at life, once again.
One of the things I’m constantly telling you guys to do is TAKE RISKS. But “risk” is a nebulous word. A risk to one writer may not seem like a risk at all to the next writer. So it’s important to identify when real risks are taken. That way, you guys know what I mean by “risks.”
This was a big risk for Larry Charles, the writer. He admits as much in the accompanying interview. He says that he was always looking to take darker subject matter and find a way to make it funny. Building an episode of Seinfeld around a gun is pretty dark, relatively speaking. This wouldn’t be risky for an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philidelphia. But that’s a show that got 1/20th the viewership of Seinfeld. It’s not mainstream so of course it can be darker.
The consensus from the Seinfeld group seems to be that Charles’s script was too risky. “You can’t make guns funny,” they concluded. I think that’s b.s. And I’ll tell you why. Suicide is way darker than guns. And suicide came up several times throughout Seinfeld. There’s one episode where Newman keeps threatening to commit suicide. They even have a couple of episodes dealing with sexual assault (the masseuse and the woman with the toys), which turned out to be two of the funniest episodes in the series.
So I don’t buy that they couldn’t make guns funny. They just couldn’t make this episode work. The plot didn’t lead to funny situations. Going to buy a gun from a random guy who lives with his mom? Where’s the funny in that? I guess it’s ironic in that you’d normally expect to buy a gun from some sketchy hustler on the street. But they needed another angle. Mo was a dead-in-the-water character who didn’t generate a single laugh.
What I was really hoping to find in this episode was some classic Seinfeld dialogue, even if it was only one stand-out exchange. That’s where Seinfeld excelled, was in its dialogue. Because Seinfeld was the only show able to create funny dialogue out of nothing.
What I mean by that is, in most sit-coms, the scenes always had a point. For example, if you watched the first season of The Big Bang Theory, they’d have a scene where Penny was coming over to have dinner with our protagonist roommates for the first time, and Leonard would tell Sheldon, “Your job tonight is to just be normal. Don’t do or say anything weird!” And so the whole scene would be about Sheldon trying to be normal. And because Sheldon isn’t normal, he would end up saying and doing weirder stuff than usual. That’s where the comedy would come from.
But Seinfeld would just have the characters talk about nothing and it would still, somehow, be funny. So I was hoping to catch a glimpse of that here and learn something from it. There was a little bit of it and what I learned is that this brilliant team of people at Seinfeld had a particular voice that understood the minutia of everyday life in a way that the average person couldn’t articulate.
So when they picked apart that minutia (“I hate that guy. He stands so close to you when he talks. He’s a close-talker”), it was usually amusing. The lesson here is: pay attention to details in life. It’s those details – it’s those things that seem insignificant – that allow your characters to converse about things that you don’t usually see conversed about in movies and TV shows.
For example, if you’re on a plane and there’s a person sitting nearby who’s not doing anything – they’re not sleeping, they’re not reading, they’re not watching a movie, they’re not on their phone – they’re just sitting up straight and staring forward. You might see that, shrug your shoulders, think “That’s weird,” then never think about it again.
But Seinfeld used that premise for one of its plotlines. When Elaine is dating the dimwitted Puddy and the two are flying back from their trip to Europe, Elaine notices that Puddy is staring forward doing nothing. “You’re just going to sit there and do nothing?” “Yup.” “You’re not going to read?” “Nope.” “You’re not going to sleep.” “No.” Elaine is so flabbergasted by this bizarre behavior that she breaks up with him on the spot. She can’t handle it!
Paying attention to details, as a writer, pays off.
Speaking of dialogue (go buy The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written!), I wanted to share another dialogue tip with you. Here’s the scene with the tip.
The tip is: not every character in your scene needs to be participating in the same conversation. You can have fun with the fact that one or more people are having their own conversation. We see that here with George. George weaves in and out of the conversation, occasionally having a conversation with himself, obsessed with finding the punchline for his joke.
Everyone says this episode was TOO DARING FOR TV. I think it just wasn’t funny enough and they didn’t want to put a dud on the air. But they could’ve made guns funny. I’m sure some commenters will come up with some funny plotlines they could’ve used.
Script link: The Bet
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You never want dialogue to be too perfect. In real life, conversations are messy. That’s why you want to do things like have one character in the room having a completely different conversation from everyone else. It adds that “messiness” that mimics the kinds of interactions people have in real life.
Everybody in Hollywood is talking about the weak opening for The Fall Guy. Not just because of the movie itself but because it’s the official movie kicking off the summer movie season. That movie is always pulling double-duty. It’s got to do well for itself and it also has to get people in the movie-watching spirit for the rest of the summer.
The Fall Guy made only 28 million dollars. Which is, on average, a third of what movies usually make in this weekend slot.
The reason I didn’t see this movie is because I didn’t notice anything new in it. The movie may be about a unique subject matter (stunt men) but that’s not the impression the trailers gave. The trailers gave me a bunch of generic-looking explosions and guess what? I’ve seen about 10,000 generic movie explosions in my lifetime. Why would I pay 20 bucks to see a dozen more?
As I always say, YOU NEED TO GIVE US SOMETHING UNIQUE to have a shot at us showing up for your movie. The only chance you have at getting people to show up for a generic concept is if the direction is visionary. That’s, ironically, how Fall Guy’s director, David Leitch, got started. He took the most generic script ever – John Wick – and gave the world a tight slick carefully curated production that elevated a B-movie premise to look like an A-movie. No one had ever done that before.
Since then, Leitch has become sort of Michael Bay Jr. His movies are very slick-looking. They have that high production value with splosions everywhere you turn. But, just like Bay, there isn’t any soul in them.
Which is interesting because part of the reason John Wick worked was because of the soul. But I suspect it was Keanu Reeves who brought that soul. There’s something about that guy that elevates everything he’s in.
The Fall Guy’s failure is another reminder of how competitive the entertainment world has gotten. Cause, this morning, while eating breakfast, I watched a chess streamer on Youtube and then a “First Time Watch” video of The Princess Bride. Both of those videos, which added up to 1 hour of time, were highly entertaining. And that’s one hour I’m not spending on watching a new movie.
In other words, concepts have to be more compelling than ever to draw us away from countless other options. The only thing we know that gets butts in seats these days is the creme de la creme of comic book movies. Deadpool and Wolverine. Joker 2.
But, outside of that, you need to think long and hard about what’s going to get people into the theater. Challengers is a unique concept. So that did pretty well. Civil War as well. The Beekeper – a fresh spin on ‘guy-with-a-gun’ movies. Barbie felt completely different than anything that had come out. Even Anything But You, a generic rom-com if there ever was one, felt fresh to audiences because it had been forever since they had made a rom-com with a young cast.
It’s a bit of a mind-f**k, Hollywood. Because, on the surface, it seems like they only release generic stuff. But if you look closer, you realize that’s not true. Yeah, they love sequels, but those sequels were built on top of movies that broke out because they were fresh and new.
Wonka was different. The new Mean Girls is a musical. Guardians of the Galaxy was a total wildcard when the first movie debuted. As was the original Avatar. John Wick, as I pointed out, was sleek and cool and polished for a B-movie. Scream may have just come out with Scream 6, but the original blew the traditional slasher format out of the water.
Don’t get caught up in the fact that Hollywood loves IP because almost all of that IP was built on top of a movie that felt unique and fresh at the time. So that should still be the goal for you as a writer.
Speaking of uniqueness, how bout a movie about the Pop Tart?
I know this movie is getting a lot of sour milk poured on it, but you’re not going to see me bashing a Jerry Seinfeld film. You’re just not. I love Seinfeld. And if I can just get a few more jokes from him that remind me of the original sitcom? I’m happy.
Unfrosted feels like it was made in a vacuum. Which is both its biggest strength and biggest weakness. It’s a strength because you can tell nobody came in and “notesed” the writers to death, leaving them with a stale middle-of-the-road box of cereal. The joke-writers were unleashed. There were no restraints put on them.
Unfortunately, that led to the movie’s biggest weakness, which was an endless stream of the silliest jokes imaginable. I mean, there were at least 100 cereal-related puns in this script. But that’s a conservative estimate. It was probably closer to 200. I can handle a dozen cereal puns. I’m not sure anyone can handle 200.
What surprised me is that Jerry Seinfeld is 70 years old and yet he embraces some of the most juvenile humor this side of Johnny Knoxville. At one point, a rogue pop-tart comes alive and turns into a little creature that runs around and hides in drawers. It’s beyond wacky.
But the script does have its moments. My favorite set piece by far was the first test of the pop-tart. Our heroes are all safely hiding behind a big bunker (as if they’re preparing for a nuclear bomb test) and one of their assistants (in full oxygen hazmat suit) is tasked with putting the first pop-tart ever in the toaster. He has to operate within this “Fallout-esque” fake kitchen with fake family dummies and everything.
During the process of trying to toast the pop-tart, his oxygen tube gets loose and starts squirming around everywhere, then accidentally goes into the top of the toaster, causing the whole thing to explode and he just BLOWS UP AND DIES, lol. It was so wacky.
And they didn’t stop there! They follow this with a Kellog’s-funded funeral where, after they lower the casket into the ground, two people with giant boxes of cereal walk up and pour the cereal into the hole in the ground with the casket. Then another guy comes and pours a giant vat of milk into the hole. And then a final person comes with a giant spoon and starts stirring the milk and the cereal together. I admittedly could not stop cracking up, it was so stupid. But stupid funny!
And there were some good lines too. Hugh Grant plays this failed pissed off Shakespearean actor forced to be Tony the Tiger for Kellog. One day he’s drinking in a bar and a guy sees him and says, “I saw your one-man show of 12 Angry Men.” So there was at least one clever joke writer on this team.
Once you realize just how absurd the movie wants to be AND YOU ACCEPT THAT, it’s quite an enjoyable film. But I suspect some people aren’t going to be able to handle it. It’s one thing to not take yourself seriously. It’s another to be so dumb in places that it feels like you don’t care. This movie rode that line the whole way through.
It’s not going to be for everyone. But if you liked Seinfeld and you’re having a lousy day, this is definitely the movie for you. It’s going to cheer you up.
So, are there any lessons we learned from this weekend’s box office? The one lesson I’m reminded of is that the concept is always bigger than the actor. Hollywood bigwigs thought, “I’m Just Ken” was going to lead to a 75 million dollar Fall Guy opening no matter what. But people don’t see actors that way – at least not anymore. They see CHARACTERS. They see CONCEPTS. If they like a character, they’ll show up. They would definitely show up if this were a Ken spinoff movie. But as a totally new film about a stunt man? They don’t care that he was once Ken.
I’ll never forget the biggest example of this ever, which was Leonardo DiCaprio post-Titanic. There was never IN HISTORY a bigger actor than DiCaprio post-Titanic. You would’ve assumed that any movie he was in would’ve made 300 million at least. But the next movie he was in was The Man in the Iron Mask and NOBODY CARED. Nobody went to see it! It was a shocking lesson to me.
People don’t care about the actor. They care about the character and the concept. Which means YOU, the screenwriter, have the power. Give us that great concept. Give us that killer character. And we’ll show up, baby! :)
I would’ve had more Star Wars stuff to discuss in the newsletter if, you know, Lucasfilm actually released any new Star Wars information! But don’t worry, I still have you covered. We’ve got rumors that Tarantino was going to use tons of characters from his Tarantinoverse for his final movie. We’ve got screenplay tips from the best show currently on television. We’ve got some wild industry news to break down, including Post Malone becoming a woman and Silver Surfer becoming a screenwriter. Or wait, I may have got those two mixed up. Plus, a sneaky cool project that was announced recently that went totally under the radar. People are calling it the next Misery! I also review one of my top five most anticipated reads from last year’s Black List. Does it deliver? I’ve also got some killer screenplay notes deals for readers who are quick on the draw.
If you didn’t receive my newsletter, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I’ll put you on the list!
Memento started as a short story.
I’ve got some bad news. We’ve been swindled! The Beckys writer e-mailed to inform me that there is no Beckys script. Honestly, he doesn’t sound like he knew the rules. He just thought it was a logline contest. So what we’re going to do is I’ll review the second place script, Devil in Transit, sometime this week. Maybe in the newsletter. Maybe on Monday. Maybe next Friday. So, a review will be coming.
In the meantime, start your engines. Your SHORT STORY engines that is. Cause this month’s showdown is a Short Story Showdown. It’s everybody’s chance to take a brief respite from screenwriting and try their hand at this other writing medium. What I need from you is your title, genre, logline, AND the first page of your short story, which will be posted in the showdown.
This is the most excited I’ve been for a showdown this year. I think short-story writing is fun. It allows you to be more creative. Try some weird stuff. It doesn’t take a lot of time to write them. But you’re not going to be in the competition unless you have a good idea. So make sure you’re writing from a strong concept. Or an interesting one. Here are the submission deets…
What: Short Story Showdown
I need your: Title, Genre, Logline, and FIRST PAGE
Competition Date: Friday, May 24th
Deadline: Thursday, May 23rd, 10pm Pacific Time
Where: Send your submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Week 16 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge
Argylle teaches you how *not* to rewrite a script
Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”
Week 13 – Moment of Death
Week 14 – The Climax
Week 15 – The End!
The last time I saw you guys, we’d completed our script! While I wasn’t planning to leave two weeks in between articles, I’m glad we did. Because one of the most valuable commodities in rewriting is DISTANCE. The more distance you have from what you’ve written, the more objectively you can judge it.
The scripts of mine that I’ve found the most clarity over are the ones that I hadn’t read in years. When I pick those up, it’s obvious to me what’s wrong with the script. Conversely, the reason it’s not obvious right after I’ve completed a draft is because all writers have something called “EAS.” Emotional Attachment Syndrome.
Writing is, and always has been, an emotional endeavor. This is because you’re almost always writing about yourself. Or, if not yourself, the things you personally like and personally believe. Therefore, you have an attachment to those beliefs that go beyond writing. To you, those things are part of who you are as a person.
So when you go back and read your characters and your scenes and your plot beats, your EAS goes into overdrive. It becomes impossible to judge anything objectively.
For example, one of my favorite themes to explore in stories is people who don’t believe in themselves. I love it when those characters overcome that flaw. I just watched Back to the Future again recently via one of these “First Time Youtube Watch” videos (one of my favorite new activities) and I tear up at the thought of George McFly not believing in himself. In his original timeline, he doesn’t show his writing to anyone. But after defeating Biff, he gains confidence and ends up becoming a successful author in the subsequent timeline.
So, if I write a character who struggles to believe in themselves, I will only see that character through my stubborn EAS lens. Therefore, if that character is humorless or passive or annoying, I won’t notice it. All I see is the character arc that I so desperately want to execute in my story. And nothing will get in the way of me executing that arc!!!
This is why so many scripts stay boring throughout rewrites. The writers are too attached to their original ideas and their EAS prevents them from making the changes they need to make in order to improve their scripts.
Probably the best professional example of this is M. Night Shyamalan’s career. Night has talked openly about how important certain plot themes and character themes are to his stories. As a result, he can’t see the forest through the trees. He is too blinded by his EAS, leaving each of his movies worse than the last.
This is something it took me forever to figure out. It should never be about what you’re trying to say through your creative choices. It should only be about WHAT IS BEST FOR THE STORY. Good writers are able to detach themselves emotionally and admit when a particular variable isn’t working and then get rid of it (or fix it) in the next draft.
If you keep doing that draft after draft, your script will get better. And that’s the end game. We’re trying to write the best script possible.
So bringing this back to today, all I want you to do this week is READ THROUGH YOUR SCRIPT. I don’t want you rewriting too much. I know, as writers, when we see something we hate, we have to change it immediately! But try to limit those changes as much as possible. Because what you don’t want to do is spend four days rewriting a sequence only to find out two drafts later that you never needed that sequence in the first place.
Instead, try to read through your script as a reader. Readers aren’t allowed to change scripts. They just read. Some of you are going to be tempted to at least jot down notes. If you have to, that’s fine. I always have to write down ideas as they come to me. But the advantage of reading straight through is that you’re mimicking the reader’s experience. Which is what I want. I want you to feel exactly what the reader feels.
As you’re reading your script, please give yourself grace. You will hate a lot of what you’ve written. That’s fine. I would even go so far as to say, if you don’t hate a lot of what you’ve written, you’re doing it wrong. Cause that means you have an overly optimistic opinion of your writing. Every first draft is messy. And that’s okay.
After you’ve read your first draft, write down the three biggest problems you had with your script. Some common problems include a first act that goes on for too long. A lot of on-the-nose dialogue. An unlikable main character. A main character who isn’t active enough. Major supporting characters who don’t pop off the page. A third act that comes around too quickly. A third act that isn’t nearly as powerful as you imagined it would be. Way too much exposition. A rudderless second act. A weak forgettable villain. Things come to your hero too easily (you, as the writer, are giving them a hand rather than challenging them). If you’re writing a sci-fi script, the sci-fi choices don’t feel imaginative enough. Ditto your set-pieces in action scripts. It’s hard to come up with set-pieces, especially in action films, that are new and fresh.
But the three things that are probably the most important are: 1) A main character that’s working. 2) A strong 3-Act structure, and 3) A second act that stays purposeful the whole way through.
That second act is usually where readers give up. That’s because a lot of screenwriters don’t know what to do in that second act. We readers can feel that when we’re reading the script. It’s like we’re in the writer’s room with them as they lose faith in real time and just throw any scene on the page in order to keep the story going. So that second act is a big one.
You don’t have to know how to fix these problems yet. We’ll talk about that more next week. All I care about now is you figuring out your script’s issues. I know this can be challenging cause it’s not always clear. So the way I like to do it is to NOTE the exact moments in the script WHERE I GET BORED.
Once you know WHERE you started to get bored, you can backtrack to figure out what caused the boredom. For example, I watched Argylle recently (not a good movie). And I was bored instantly. Agent Argylle walks into this dance club and meets some hot chick who it turns out is another agent trying to kill him. John Wick moment where everyone on the dance floor points guns at him.
We’ve seen this before. We’ve even seen this version of the story where it turns out to be a writer writing this scene. That’s how fast a screenplay can become boring! One early cliched scene. What are you doing differently with it? Nothing? Okay, then expect the audience to be bored. This movie was released and what did everybody universally agree upon? It was boring.
So, in that case, if you had written Argylle, you need to start your rewrite from the very first scene. What’s a more original secret agent set piece I could put here? And you’re on your way to a better script.
By the way, cliched scenes and characters are going to be a major problem in every first draft. That’s because, when you write a script, the things that feel “right” to you when you’re writing them only feel right because you’ve seen versions of them before. So you’re inadvertently copying what’s familiar to you. It’s only in the rewrites that you then challenge those weak cliched choices and try to come up with something fresh.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Your job this week is to simply read your script and write down what isn’t working. Feel free to get a jump on next week by writing down potential solutions for these problems.
By the way, if you didn’t participate in the 6-month Script Challenge, you can still do the Rewrite Challenge! Just go back into your archives of scripts and look for that script you always liked but never had the motivation to rewrite. Now that I’m guiding you, I can be the motivation to fix that script.
Seeya next week, when we come up with actual solutions for these problems! :)
