We’ve got three months until the Comedy Showdown deadline (June 17). Three months is plenty of time to write a script. And that’s what I’m going to help you do. Every Monday, until June 17th, I will be guiding you along in the process. This way, you don’t have to think about when and where to work. I’m going to provide you with every step. All you have to do is do what I say.
By the way. I don’t want to confuse anyone but I already know what the next Showdown (which will take place in September) will be. It will be a Sci-Fi Showdown. I’m not officially announcing it yet. I’m just letting you know, in case comedy’s not your thing, you can use this time to write your sci-fi script, and then have a whole extra three months to make it perfect.
So, what is going to be required of you? A minimum of two hours a day of writing. And, yes, you’ll be writing seven days a week. You have that time. You may think you don’t. But I promise you you do. Chris Dennis, who wrote Last Great Contest winning script, Kinetic, has three children. And he still managed to write two screenplays over the past year. So you have time. Just stop watching so many stupid Youtube political videos.
While I’ll be stressing comedy during this exercise, I’m basically going to act as a script-writing motivator. I’m going to give you tasks and your job will be to complete them. So even if you’re not going to enter Comedy Showdown, feel free to write a script in another genre. When else are you going to have an angry website owner standing behind you with a whip?
Last week, I gave you your first task. Come up with a concept. If you failed at that, I’m going to offer you a last second comedy concept hack. One of the easiest ways to come up with a comedy idea is to take a movie in another genre and simply turn it into a comedy! Take John Wick… and turn it into a comedy! Take a heist film, like Triple Frontier… and turn it into a comedy! 1917 made hundreds of millions of dollars on top of the one-continuous-shot gimmick. Why can’t you make hundreds of millions of dollars on a one-continuous-shot comedy!? The possibilities are endless.
Okay, so we’ve got our concept. Now what?
I need you to brace yourself.
And make sure you’re sitting down.
This week… IS ALL ABOUT OUTLINING.
Your outlining will be broken into two sections. The first section will be three days and consist of getting to know your characters. The second section will be four days and consist of writing a physical outline.
Day 1 will consist of getting to know your main character. Specifically, you’ll want to know what their fatal flaw is. While the need for a fatal flaw in every movie is debatable, it’s not debatable in comedy. In comedies, your main character needs conflict within himself about SOMETHING. Something needs to be unresolved. Your hero may be aware of what that something is. Or they may not.
Happy Gilmore has anger issues. That’s his flaw. That’s what he needs to resolve. Seth Rogen in Knocked Up isn’t ready to be an adult yet. That’s what he needs to resolve. Columbus in Zombieland struggles to connect with others. That’s what he needs to resolve.
Your concept will usually tell you what your hero’s flaw is. Bridesmaids is about a bridesmaid who has to compete for attention with the bride’s new friend. The flaw we give to our main character, then, is pretty obvious. Jealousy. Kristin Wiig has to resolve her jealousy by the end of the story. That’s the thing with this stuff. It’s not rocket science. The answers are often right in front of you.
Next, you’re going to do a character biography. I know that all of you hate character biographies. So I’m going to give you an option. But, first, for the purists out there, I want you to write between 2-5 pages of some key details in your hero’s life. I want to know where they were born, where they grew up, what their relationship with their parents was like, their first kiss, their first sexual encounter, their religion (or lack thereof), their best friends, the most traumatic thing that ever happened to them, their current relationship (or marriage), their education, their job, and finally, whether they’re happy or not in life. And, if they aren’t, why?
What you write isn’t important. In fact, you may never look at this document again. The idea is to get you thinking about your character. And that’s what this exercise will do. I guarantee you’ll come out of it learning something exciting about your hero.
If you don’t want to write a biography, go ahead and open up a new document in Final Draft. And I want you to write out, in script form, the beginning of your main character’s day. The more detailed you are, the better. This will achieve the same thing. It will make you think about who your character is. You can learn a hell of a lot about someone by how they start their day. Is it timed to the second and perfectly ordered? Or is it wake up whenever you want and figure out what to do on the fly? Have fun with this. We’re writing a comedy.
Day 2 will be focused on your secondary characters. I need you to write down two things about everyone outside of your main character. I need to know their fatal flaws. And I also need you to assign them a DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC. Almost all the characters in a comedy are funny. What you’re doing now is deciding HOW THEY’RE FUNNY. And you do that by assigning them a defining characteristic.
If we’re to use The Hangover, Alan’s defining characteristic is that he’s the world’s most socially unaware person. Stu’s (Ed Helms) is that he’s paranoid about everything. Phil (Bradley Cooper) is selfish and hates his life. If that sounds like a weak defining characteristic, that’s because it is. Of the three main characters in The Hangover, Phil is the most forgettable. Which is why getting the defining characteristic right is so important. It will decide how funny and how memorable that character is.
Day 3 will be focused on whichever one of the first couple of days you weren’t able to finish. If you still don’t feel like you know your main character, get back in there and write more of that biography! If you still have secondary characters to figure out or don’t feel like your defining characteristics are strong enough, go back in there and keep working.
Day 4 is going to be about about figuring out your structure. You want to know what your first act is going to be about, your second act, and your third. If you need help, remember that the nicknames for these acts are the SETUP ACT, the CONFLICT ACT, and the RESOLUTION ACT. So I want you to think about how your concept can be extended out into this construct.
Let’s look at the famous Chevy Chase comedy, Vacation. The first act is going to be setting up the members of the family and the family dynamics. The second act is going to be the drive. This is where the characters attempt to get to their destination. You’ve going to want to come up with a series of obstacles that get in the way (this is the CONFLICT ACT and obstacles create CONFLICT). And then the final act is them getting to their designation, only to find out it’s closed.
Days 5, 6, and 7 are going to be physically outlining as much as you possibly can about the movie. Your starting points should be the inciting incident (usually, this is the thing that causes the problem that the main character must now deal with – like Seth Rogen getting Kathryn Heigl pregnant in Knocked Up). The first act turn (page 25 in a 100 page script) is when the character goes off on their journey. The midpoint shift (page 50 in a 100 page script) is when something major happens that changes the entire dynamic of the plot. In The Hangover, this is when Chow informs our protagonists that he has Doug and will kill him if they don’t pay him back his 80,000 dollars. The end of Act Two (page 75 in a 100 page script). This is always an easy plot point to figure out. It should be your hero’s lowest point where he’s given up on achieving his goal. And, finally, your ending. You don’t have to know your ending just yet. But it helps to know it early because then you can start writing “set up” scenes throughout the script.
If all you accomplish is figuring out those pillars, you should be good to go. But I would encourage you to add as many checkpoints to your outline as possible. Checkpoints are any scene idea or plot development that you come up with. If you’re writing Borat 2 and you know you have a scene where the daughter goes to a doctor for breast implants, that’s a checkpoint scene. If you know you want Borat and the daughter to split up somewhere around page 67 (midway between the midpoint and end of second act), that’s a checkpoint scene. This is how they write Avengers movies. The writers just figure out where all the checkpoints are so they know where to write to.
Another option for outlining is the sequence method. This is where you divide your script up into eight sections. If the script is 100 pages long, each section will be roughly 12 and a half pages. Some writers like this because it turns this big endless 100 page black hole into more manageable chunks, each of which are, essentially a “mini-movie.” So instead of writing one big movie. You’re writing eight mini-movies.
And you’re using the exact same methods as you would in a big movie. You want to come up with a goal, some stakes, and some urgency for the first mini-movie. Then you come up with a new goal, stakes, and urgency for the second mini-movie. And just keep doing that all the way down the line.
Guys. Comedy is one of the most structured of all the genres. It is in your best interest to spend 14 hours this week outlining. It will make everything so much easier when it’s time to write.
And that’s it.
Next Monday, we’ll start writing the script!
