I saw the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading this weekend, and it’s definitely a lot funnier than No Country for Old Men.
Spoilers lurk after this point, so if you haven’t seen the movie, stop here. It’s a fun movie best enjoyed without preconceived notions.
It’s definitely one of the Coens’ funnier movies, with Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, and Richard Jenkins playing the dumbest characters I’ve seen them do. These three talented actors play gym employees who fumble their way into the Coens’ whacky thriller, and, for me, half the fun is seeing how these smart people play clueless people. Pitt in particular is hilarious with his remarkable gym trainer Chad.
The Coens contrast these three clueless characters with smart characters—Tilda Swindon and John Malkovich play intelligent upper-middle-class characters whose crumbling marriage gets the plot rolling, with Tilda’s Katie having an affair with Treasury agent Harry, played with twitchy energy by George Clooney.
Clooney’s character is what fascinates me the most after my first viewing of the movie, with one scene in particular resonating days afterwards.
I realized I had, while watching, divided the characters into 2 groups, the smart ones and the dumb ones, since the Coens had kept the 2 groups separated into those groupings for much of the first act. I assumed that Clooney’s character, as twitchy and as jogging-obsessed as he is, was one of the smart ones.
Harry, while having an affair with Katie, is also married to a successful children’s book author (Sandy, played by Elizabeth Marvel) and trolls internet dating sites for flings, including McDormand’s Linda. Despite being intimidated by Malkovich’s Osbourne at a dinner party, Harry seems bright enough to be involved with Katie, a doctor. He’s a philanderer, sure, and obsessed with “getting a run in,” but he blends in with the smart characters quite easily. The twitchiness is explained, early on, by his former job as a U.S. Marshal where he acted as a bodyguard, and by his current job as a Treasury agent—he’s in law enforcement, used to constantly monitoring his surroundings. He’s an older man for a field agent, so I had assumed he’d started taking the job home with him and constantly watched his surroundings even when not on the job (we never actually see Harry working).
But at one point in the movie, he reveals a secret project he’s building in his basement to Linda during his wife’s absence. We aren’t shown much of it prior to this scene: just some metal pipe purchased from a store, and some sort of complex metal hinge or mechanism as he works on it (he does, however, keep it locked up in a caged area within the basement, so I assumed it was something related to his job to require the extra security).
The Coens use the moment to not only reveal a great joke, but it also made me realize everything I’d assumed about Harry up to that point was wrong—he was as misguided as the gym trio. It’s a brilliant bit of writing. The thriller genre demands that information be given to the audience bit by bit as they solve the mystery, but the Coens apply this strategy to Clooney’s character (perhaps as a contrast to Pitt’s more obvious character, whose obliviousness is clear from the moment we watch him snap something in a customer’s body by accident).
With Linda at his side in his basement workshop, Harry unveils his device to her and to the audience, telling Linda that it’s a gift for his wife, Sandy. The machine has a seat on it, which Harry rolls back to activate a thrusting pink dildo. A beat later, after the comedic shock has worn off, you realize Harry has built this for his author wife, a woman who has appeared as intelligent and as cultured as Katie or Osbourne during the dinner party. Harry eagerly tells Linda he copied a machine he’d seen in a men’s magazine, building the device for a fraction of the cost. And he’s told her it’s a gift for his wife—he’s forgotten the lie that he and his wife have ended their relationship.
The character of Harry changed for me at that moment—he went from being the long-in-tooth law enforcement man to a sex-obsessed goof who has probably tormented his wife with inappropriate gifts and other whacky behaviour.
The scene doesn’t really advance the plot that much, but it’s not a throw-away gag inserted for laughs, despite the roar of laughter the pink dildo creates when it emerges over and over again from the black seat (a comic version of the alien chestburster from Alien maybe?). It is a clever, and hilarious, means of revealing Harry as a character, tweaking the audience’s expectations. From that moment forward, we realize Harry’s not as smart as he’d seemed to be, and that he isn’t the smooth philanderer we’d assumed he was—he’s a sex-crazed lunatic.
That scene allows the Coens to move Clooney’s character into buffoon county quite easily—in scenes following, he shoots someone in a reflexive moment (followed by a mad panic) and becomes increasingly paranoid as the plot rolls along. His wife, revealed in the scene to likely be long-suffering based on what he considers a gift to her, is on a book tour where she is having an affair of her own with someone presumably smarter than Harry.
The critics are calling Burn After Reading a minor Coen movie, but that scene proves to me that they are still master writers and filmmakers.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Robert Downey Jr is Iron Man, Ozzy
I actually went to see a movie on opening night last week: Iron Man. I’m not a fan of opening nights, generally—on Friday nights, movie theatres are crowded, fanboys are high on carbs, small children are screaming.
If I think a movie is likely to disappear within a week of release (either it’s really horrible or it has such a limited release nobody knows about it), I’ll go to a matinee that weekend. For the movies that seem to have enough buzz that I’m sure they’ll be around for weeks or months, I wait until at least the 2nd weekend to catch a matinee. Or I wait until the movie goes to the 2nd-run houses here in the city.
Iron Man is well worth the annoyance of going to a multiplex on Friday night in the city’s heart. The two morons who shouted out what they thought were funny things at the beginning of the movie eventually got into the flick and shut up—it was that good.
Robert Downey Jr. makes the movie work—he charms the audience with his portrayal of Tony Stark, a character with the same wild streak he has. The best casting decision of the popcorn movie season is casting Downey in this movie. They took the X-Men approach in casting good actors (as opposed to casting the prettiest people they could find), so the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges fill out the cast. They also got around the faceless superhero problem seen in the Spiderman movies by showing Tony Stark inside the costume (making the costume another foil for Stark’s wit).
The script was written not as a fanboy superhero movie, but as a character-based action flick featuring a protagonist who happens to become a superhero. The filmmakers (Marvel Studios in their first step away from collaborations with movie studios) were smart enough to realize that the drawing power of the comic book heroes is not the fighting and explosions (as cool as they may be) but the writing. DC may have created some of the iconic superheroes of the 1950’s and 60’s, but Marvel was king in the 70’s because they caught the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate mood and created flawed and complex heroes. Spiderman, the X-Men, the Hulk, even the bland Fantastic Four, all had their doubts, fears, prejudices. The Superman comic bored me when I was a kid, frankly. An invincible hero saves the world—you knew a chunk of kryptonite was just waiting around the corner.
Where superhero movies succeed or fail is not in how spectacular the effects are or how many villains they fight at the same time—it’s the writing, stupid. Are the characters interesting? Is the story compelling? Most of the time, Hollywood gets it wrong and thinks the visual spectacle is more important. Maybe it is to some people, but the power of storytelling is stronger than that of the visceral thrill. Compare the tepid stories and weak characters in the Fantastic Four movies to the stronger choices made in the telling of the X-Men or Spiderman, or, similarly, Superman Returns to Boredom versus Batman Begins to Not Suck.
So… Iron Man moves to the top of my favourite superhero movies list. Sadly, it displaces one of the best Channel 101 series I’ve ever seen….
If I think a movie is likely to disappear within a week of release (either it’s really horrible or it has such a limited release nobody knows about it), I’ll go to a matinee that weekend. For the movies that seem to have enough buzz that I’m sure they’ll be around for weeks or months, I wait until at least the 2nd weekend to catch a matinee. Or I wait until the movie goes to the 2nd-run houses here in the city.
Iron Man is well worth the annoyance of going to a multiplex on Friday night in the city’s heart. The two morons who shouted out what they thought were funny things at the beginning of the movie eventually got into the flick and shut up—it was that good.
Robert Downey Jr. makes the movie work—he charms the audience with his portrayal of Tony Stark, a character with the same wild streak he has. The best casting decision of the popcorn movie season is casting Downey in this movie. They took the X-Men approach in casting good actors (as opposed to casting the prettiest people they could find), so the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges fill out the cast. They also got around the faceless superhero problem seen in the Spiderman movies by showing Tony Stark inside the costume (making the costume another foil for Stark’s wit).
The script was written not as a fanboy superhero movie, but as a character-based action flick featuring a protagonist who happens to become a superhero. The filmmakers (Marvel Studios in their first step away from collaborations with movie studios) were smart enough to realize that the drawing power of the comic book heroes is not the fighting and explosions (as cool as they may be) but the writing. DC may have created some of the iconic superheroes of the 1950’s and 60’s, but Marvel was king in the 70’s because they caught the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate mood and created flawed and complex heroes. Spiderman, the X-Men, the Hulk, even the bland Fantastic Four, all had their doubts, fears, prejudices. The Superman comic bored me when I was a kid, frankly. An invincible hero saves the world—you knew a chunk of kryptonite was just waiting around the corner.
Where superhero movies succeed or fail is not in how spectacular the effects are or how many villains they fight at the same time—it’s the writing, stupid. Are the characters interesting? Is the story compelling? Most of the time, Hollywood gets it wrong and thinks the visual spectacle is more important. Maybe it is to some people, but the power of storytelling is stronger than that of the visceral thrill. Compare the tepid stories and weak characters in the Fantastic Four movies to the stronger choices made in the telling of the X-Men or Spiderman, or, similarly, Superman Returns to Boredom versus Batman Begins to Not Suck.
So… Iron Man moves to the top of my favourite superhero movies list. Sadly, it displaces one of the best Channel 101 series I’ve ever seen….
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Characters with Hearts of Gold
I’ve been playing with Magic Bullet Looks, but I’m still working on the blog entry. My AfterEffects trial ran out before I could get into some serious work with it, so I’ll have to see if I can get a new trial installed to play with it. There’s a lesson for you: never install a trial until you’re positive you can actually get time to play with it!
Meanwhile, here is this week’s (or last week’s) entry.
I’ve been tardy about getting my testing done because I’ve been busy writing scripts. We’re still a few shy of having enough to look at, pick a few, and shoot a select few.
I have the advantage of writing for two main characters that are well established, and we’ve steadily added a pool of recurring characters that live in Miller & Mullet’s world, so I don’t have to look too far to find foes, foils, or friends. I’ve used them in the scripts for the shorts, and Mullet’s used them for the comic book scripts, so we’re working with the same materials, and we’re fleshing out characters that we can continue to develop.
Several of these supporting players date back from the Babysitters script. Two of them, Officer Bob and The Shark, first appeared in Babysitters (played by Teige Reid and Dave Pearce, respectively), and they (the characters) have since appeared in our comic book series, Miller & Mullet in Space, although they don’t resemble Teige or Dave very much. Officer Bob is a corrupt cop or ex-cop, and The Shark is a hustler and conman usually involved in Bob’s schemes. These guys are natural villains in Miller & Mullet’s world. Morally, Miller isn’t much different from these people, but he lacks the ability to pull off a scheme—or at least come up with something that actually works. From a writer’s perspective, it is a lot of fun to have three swindlers locked in a room together, and I expect that we’ll see more of them going forward. Between Babysitters and the two issues of the comic book, these two are our most fleshed-out villains.
Two other characters we’ve repeated are Honey and The Pimp, both of them appearing in Babysitters. Ron Fromstein played The Pimp and Tasha May Currie played Honey. These characters haven’t appeared in the comic books yet, but they play important roles in the lives of Miller in particular.
Honey is the prostitute with a heart of gold, or at least our version of that cliché. If she’s a reluctant prostitute that the cliché requires, we don’t see that part of her character as she’s quite enthusiastic—or at least willing to provide service—when Miller appears (we’ve never shown her with other johns, so that might be the next step if we want to play with the cliché). Honey probably loves Miller, but she doesn’t hesitate to beat him savagely when he rips her off. Yet her feelings for Miller allow him to take advantage of her (before she retaliates). A strange, sadistic relationship, to be sure.
The Pimp, Honey’s “boss,” is a vicious psychopath who hates Miller and carries a corkscrew as his primary weapon. Honey and The Pimp haven’t appeared in the comic books, but I’ve written them into a couple of scripts.
There is no shortage of people we can bring back from any of the movies or comics—these four are the most important recurring characters in the stories we’ve written so far, and I expect that they’ll continue to remain important.
Another character who has never appeared on-screen is Miller & Mullet’s agent, Larry. Larry seems to get them work, albeit birthday parties and other jobs they’d like to leave behind for greener pastures. We’ll have to put Larry directly into a story at some point, although the idea of an unseen recurring character is interesting, too—think of Charlie of Charlie’s Angels.
I’ve written three or four scripts that include a blind person as a character. In Babysitters, we had Humphries, a blind person (played by a rampaging Sandy Jobin-Bevans) who Miller robs to pay Officer Bob and The Shark. In a couple of shorts, I’ve written other blind characters as foils who get caught up in various misadventures courtesy of our heroes. In these cases, the characters are more vulnerable than the average person is, so you save some exposition by not having to explain why they’re trapped in the situation with Miller & Mullet—it’s as obvious as the white cane and dark glasses that they’re using. I’m not taking out any prejudice against blind people, honest: I have a white cane that a blind friend donated to the cause, so we can come up with a blind person with a white cane. If I had access to a wheelchair or one of those clunky hearing aids from the 1950’s, I would certainly create physically challenged and deaf characters.
There are some other characters I’d love to have in our shorts, too. If I could get a police uniform or two, we’d have natural bad guys or foils. Give me a clergyman’s collar or nun’s habit, a firefighter’s bunker suit and I’ll make use of them. The thing about no-budget filmmaking is, of course, you don’t necessarily have the budget to dress the cast as you’d want, so you have to make do with what you can get access to. In Babysitters, we bought a police officer’s blue shirt for one scene, but otherwise we’ve never supplied a costume (my favourite costume is still the bright red marching band jacket that Steve Chamberlain thought his jockey character should wear while he doped a horse). Of course, if we weren’t trying to keep the world around Miller & Mullet realistic, we could adopt more deliberately unrealistic standards for costumes, like kiddie hats and plastic raincoats to portray firefighers, but we’ve chosen a different direction for the shorts.
Next time, I’ll either get on with the evaluations or I’ll write about finding props in the garbage….
Meanwhile, here is this week’s (or last week’s) entry.
I’ve been tardy about getting my testing done because I’ve been busy writing scripts. We’re still a few shy of having enough to look at, pick a few, and shoot a select few.
I have the advantage of writing for two main characters that are well established, and we’ve steadily added a pool of recurring characters that live in Miller & Mullet’s world, so I don’t have to look too far to find foes, foils, or friends. I’ve used them in the scripts for the shorts, and Mullet’s used them for the comic book scripts, so we’re working with the same materials, and we’re fleshing out characters that we can continue to develop.
Several of these supporting players date back from the Babysitters script. Two of them, Officer Bob and The Shark, first appeared in Babysitters (played by Teige Reid and Dave Pearce, respectively), and they (the characters) have since appeared in our comic book series, Miller & Mullet in Space, although they don’t resemble Teige or Dave very much. Officer Bob is a corrupt cop or ex-cop, and The Shark is a hustler and conman usually involved in Bob’s schemes. These guys are natural villains in Miller & Mullet’s world. Morally, Miller isn’t much different from these people, but he lacks the ability to pull off a scheme—or at least come up with something that actually works. From a writer’s perspective, it is a lot of fun to have three swindlers locked in a room together, and I expect that we’ll see more of them going forward. Between Babysitters and the two issues of the comic book, these two are our most fleshed-out villains.
Two other characters we’ve repeated are Honey and The Pimp, both of them appearing in Babysitters. Ron Fromstein played The Pimp and Tasha May Currie played Honey. These characters haven’t appeared in the comic books yet, but they play important roles in the lives of Miller in particular.
Honey is the prostitute with a heart of gold, or at least our version of that cliché. If she’s a reluctant prostitute that the cliché requires, we don’t see that part of her character as she’s quite enthusiastic—or at least willing to provide service—when Miller appears (we’ve never shown her with other johns, so that might be the next step if we want to play with the cliché). Honey probably loves Miller, but she doesn’t hesitate to beat him savagely when he rips her off. Yet her feelings for Miller allow him to take advantage of her (before she retaliates). A strange, sadistic relationship, to be sure.
The Pimp, Honey’s “boss,” is a vicious psychopath who hates Miller and carries a corkscrew as his primary weapon. Honey and The Pimp haven’t appeared in the comic books, but I’ve written them into a couple of scripts.
There is no shortage of people we can bring back from any of the movies or comics—these four are the most important recurring characters in the stories we’ve written so far, and I expect that they’ll continue to remain important.
Another character who has never appeared on-screen is Miller & Mullet’s agent, Larry. Larry seems to get them work, albeit birthday parties and other jobs they’d like to leave behind for greener pastures. We’ll have to put Larry directly into a story at some point, although the idea of an unseen recurring character is interesting, too—think of Charlie of Charlie’s Angels.
I’ve written three or four scripts that include a blind person as a character. In Babysitters, we had Humphries, a blind person (played by a rampaging Sandy Jobin-Bevans) who Miller robs to pay Officer Bob and The Shark. In a couple of shorts, I’ve written other blind characters as foils who get caught up in various misadventures courtesy of our heroes. In these cases, the characters are more vulnerable than the average person is, so you save some exposition by not having to explain why they’re trapped in the situation with Miller & Mullet—it’s as obvious as the white cane and dark glasses that they’re using. I’m not taking out any prejudice against blind people, honest: I have a white cane that a blind friend donated to the cause, so we can come up with a blind person with a white cane. If I had access to a wheelchair or one of those clunky hearing aids from the 1950’s, I would certainly create physically challenged and deaf characters.
There are some other characters I’d love to have in our shorts, too. If I could get a police uniform or two, we’d have natural bad guys or foils. Give me a clergyman’s collar or nun’s habit, a firefighter’s bunker suit and I’ll make use of them. The thing about no-budget filmmaking is, of course, you don’t necessarily have the budget to dress the cast as you’d want, so you have to make do with what you can get access to. In Babysitters, we bought a police officer’s blue shirt for one scene, but otherwise we’ve never supplied a costume (my favourite costume is still the bright red marching band jacket that Steve Chamberlain thought his jockey character should wear while he doped a horse). Of course, if we weren’t trying to keep the world around Miller & Mullet realistic, we could adopt more deliberately unrealistic standards for costumes, like kiddie hats and plastic raincoats to portray firefighers, but we’ve chosen a different direction for the shorts.
Next time, I’ll either get on with the evaluations or I’ll write about finding props in the garbage….
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
What’s Going on Today (or, Meanwhile back in 2007)
Now that I’ve updated what went on in 2001-2002, here’s an update on what we’re doing right now in 2007.
Mullet is slaving away on the issue 2 script. This is taking a lot of his free time, naturally. But he’s way ahead of where we were for issue 1 so there’ll be more time for story editing and polishing. I’ll see the script eventually and give him some feedback as his story editor.
Writing a comic book is a unique craft compared to screenwriting or prose—you have to come up with the usual story elements (plot, character, dialogue, action), but you also work on the layout of panels and pages. Until Mullet started writing our comic book, I had no idea what the roles of the writer, artist, etc were in that format. Like with movies and TV, well-written and well-designed comics make the writing transparent, so I never really thought about it before. I have more respect for the writers now, to be sure.
Meanwhile, back at the video ranch, I’m chasing a bunch of loose ends. This blog takes some of my time, and I’ve used it to find the discipline necessary to get back to writing almost every day (with the goal for every day). I am working on several script ideas, which I hope to have ready for Mullet by December. I have 4 shorts on the go as rough drafts, plus about a dozen interstitial/blackout type ideas that I think we’ll either use on the DVD as transitions and/or as a collection of short bits that we’ll post online.
When I get tired of writing, I’ve been playing around with the Babysitters final cut, and I finally got back to working on the edit of Can that Andrew Currie did for us. I still have to put Stalled together, and I’m working on an idea for opening credits (for the shorts) that will tie into the comic a bit (I sketched out some quick storyboards and then started some tests in Motion to see how I could accomplish what I’d drawn).
I’ve also downloaded the demo for 2 elements of Red Giant Software’s Magic Bullet Suite. More about that next time, once I’ve had the chance to play with it.
So that’s where we’re at, for the moment.
Mullet is slaving away on the issue 2 script. This is taking a lot of his free time, naturally. But he’s way ahead of where we were for issue 1 so there’ll be more time for story editing and polishing. I’ll see the script eventually and give him some feedback as his story editor.
Writing a comic book is a unique craft compared to screenwriting or prose—you have to come up with the usual story elements (plot, character, dialogue, action), but you also work on the layout of panels and pages. Until Mullet started writing our comic book, I had no idea what the roles of the writer, artist, etc were in that format. Like with movies and TV, well-written and well-designed comics make the writing transparent, so I never really thought about it before. I have more respect for the writers now, to be sure.
Meanwhile, back at the video ranch, I’m chasing a bunch of loose ends. This blog takes some of my time, and I’ve used it to find the discipline necessary to get back to writing almost every day (with the goal for every day). I am working on several script ideas, which I hope to have ready for Mullet by December. I have 4 shorts on the go as rough drafts, plus about a dozen interstitial/blackout type ideas that I think we’ll either use on the DVD as transitions and/or as a collection of short bits that we’ll post online.
When I get tired of writing, I’ve been playing around with the Babysitters final cut, and I finally got back to working on the edit of Can that Andrew Currie did for us. I still have to put Stalled together, and I’m working on an idea for opening credits (for the shorts) that will tie into the comic a bit (I sketched out some quick storyboards and then started some tests in Motion to see how I could accomplish what I’d drawn).
I’ve also downloaded the demo for 2 elements of Red Giant Software’s Magic Bullet Suite. More about that next time, once I’ve had the chance to play with it.
So that’s where we’re at, for the moment.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet 1: Writing the script
Quick: the summer of 2001—how did you spend your time? How about those dark days after September 11? And that hot summer of 2002? Know what I did? I spent a lot of that time writing and producing and directing and performing in and editing a feature called Babysitters. It was our first video project. And it was a feature-length video project.
Up until that point, Miller & Mullet had busked on Toronto streets and appeared in several variety and cabaret-type shows. I’d purchased a then-state-of-the-art one-chip Canon Ultura in the spring of 2000, and, with my trusty PowerMac 8600, I’d started exploring video editing and graphics. My vacation video, plus a couple of quick things I’d done for friends, led us to think we should immortalize our act on tape.
We made a number of decisions before writing that affected how the project turned out. Instead of doing shorts, we thought we should do a feature. A feature shot with a consumer-grade camcorder... with no budget. This was to be a head-first, eyes-closed jump into the deep end, without water wings or anything.
Why a feature? Everyone starts with shorts, so we thought it best to distinguish ourselves with a big project to start. This was pretty fuzzy-headed thinking, but you have to realize as a live act we’re pretty far out there—anti-comedy is our friend! We’ve never held back from doing anything on stage, so why do the same on video? We weren’t following any standard game plan. Youtube and web video didn’t exist like it does now, so short films were still a genre dominated by demo reels for film students and up-and-comers. Our first project had be a feature, which we naively thought would put us on the map.
First thing we did was figure out how long a feature is. This was a topic of some debate between Mullet and I. Eventually, with research, we determined that we needed something over an hour long to justify the description “feature,” so we aimed for 90-120 minutes just to ensure that we’d have a feature, even if we had to cut a few scenes or sequences. Our script, therefore, had to be around 120 pages at the standard rate of 1 page per minute. I think the script ended up being around 125 pages, and I think during production we shortened it to around 112 pages by not shooting a few things.
Never having written anything as long as a feature film before, we decided to use an older story as our framework for the script. This is a well-worn strategy, and I think it is a useful tool, especially if you’re writing in a genre or type of writing that you haven’t worked in before.
Mullet was keen to use Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, so he came up with some plot points loosely based on that story. Unfortunately, he was familiar with the TV version that skimmed the surface and left out the grosser parts, and I was going by the copy of the book I had, so our concepts of the story differed at the beginning and we had to spend time getting onto the same page. Overall, it was Mullet’s story—I followed the plot he’d created (we’ve continued to work in a similar mode, one of us as the main writer but now the other as sounding board/editor/cheerleader/occasional co-writer).
In hindsight, we were trying to stretch what should have been a simple little story over an overly complicated plot—like a fat guy squeezing into a tight t-shirt. I think this was the main flaw in the project, and it affected the rest of the efforts we put into it. Film and TV work best with simple plots—especially comedies where the fun isn’t in the story but in how it’s told and the characters living that story.
Mullet suddenly got a summer job in Alberta chasing dinosaurs, so we wrote scenes separately, with him in Drumheller and me in Toronto. We divided up the scenes, e-mailing them back and forth and rewriting and editing as we went along. Most of the time, we added stuff to the other guy’s scene, so the page count increased every day. I think we improved each other’s scenes, to a degree. Mullet rewrote Ed’s introductory scene from my brief ripping-off-the-hooker scene to the one we shot, a much longer trying-to-rip-off-hooker scene, for instance. I can’t recall anything I did to his scenes, but I was in a Groucho Marx phase and added a lot of one-liners and rapid fire type dialogue to everything I touched that summer.
The writing process was beneficial—it was the first time we’d collaborated on anything longer than 4-5 pages. We’d written sketches for a never-staged live show, we’d improvised a lot of live appearances, but we’d never written anything longer than a sketch. We learned how to work as a team, what each others’ strengths and weaknesses were, as well as our strengths. There was give and take, back and forth, but this grew as we learned to trust the other’s comedic instincts. Mullet was the chief writer on the script as he’d provided the plot and most of the characters, but the finished script definitely had my fingerprints all over it. The most interesting part of the process was that I ended up writing most of Mullet’s dialogue and scenes, and Mullet ended up writing almost all of my dialogue and scenes.
The weakness of our process was that neither of us stood back and acted as story editor, so by the time we finished, we had a shaggy dog story with a really convoluted plot and all the jokes you could eat. The basic plot was that Miller gets a job babysitting and leaves Mullet in charge. A creepy doll collector decides to steal the baby and Miller & Mullet spend the end of the movie getting the baby back, with the middle devoted to a long and confusing journey spent not finding the baby. To fit the plot over Gulliver’s Travel, we wrote a series of episodes. This allowed us have most of the cast come in for just one day and allowed us some room in dropping stuff if the schedule didn’t permit us to get things done in a reasonable amount of time.
Our influences are pretty obvious now, when I watch the finished project. The Gulliver story is not obvious unless you read the paragraph above where I explained we’d used it as our story’s frame (unless you caught the baby’s name as Lemuel...). In terms of how the structure, it definitely shows the results of us being huge Young Ones fans. I’ll go into our influences in a separate post at some point, but the style of that 1982-84 TV show certainly put a mark on what we were doing in 2001. For dialogue, we invoked the spirit of the Marx Brothers quite frequently. Ed has a definite Groucho streak going, and Mullet occasionally ventures into word confusion that Chico could have done.
Next time, pre-production on a no-budget feature.
Up until that point, Miller & Mullet had busked on Toronto streets and appeared in several variety and cabaret-type shows. I’d purchased a then-state-of-the-art one-chip Canon Ultura in the spring of 2000, and, with my trusty PowerMac 8600, I’d started exploring video editing and graphics. My vacation video, plus a couple of quick things I’d done for friends, led us to think we should immortalize our act on tape.
We made a number of decisions before writing that affected how the project turned out. Instead of doing shorts, we thought we should do a feature. A feature shot with a consumer-grade camcorder... with no budget. This was to be a head-first, eyes-closed jump into the deep end, without water wings or anything.
Why a feature? Everyone starts with shorts, so we thought it best to distinguish ourselves with a big project to start. This was pretty fuzzy-headed thinking, but you have to realize as a live act we’re pretty far out there—anti-comedy is our friend! We’ve never held back from doing anything on stage, so why do the same on video? We weren’t following any standard game plan. Youtube and web video didn’t exist like it does now, so short films were still a genre dominated by demo reels for film students and up-and-comers. Our first project had be a feature, which we naively thought would put us on the map.
First thing we did was figure out how long a feature is. This was a topic of some debate between Mullet and I. Eventually, with research, we determined that we needed something over an hour long to justify the description “feature,” so we aimed for 90-120 minutes just to ensure that we’d have a feature, even if we had to cut a few scenes or sequences. Our script, therefore, had to be around 120 pages at the standard rate of 1 page per minute. I think the script ended up being around 125 pages, and I think during production we shortened it to around 112 pages by not shooting a few things.
Never having written anything as long as a feature film before, we decided to use an older story as our framework for the script. This is a well-worn strategy, and I think it is a useful tool, especially if you’re writing in a genre or type of writing that you haven’t worked in before.
Mullet was keen to use Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, so he came up with some plot points loosely based on that story. Unfortunately, he was familiar with the TV version that skimmed the surface and left out the grosser parts, and I was going by the copy of the book I had, so our concepts of the story differed at the beginning and we had to spend time getting onto the same page. Overall, it was Mullet’s story—I followed the plot he’d created (we’ve continued to work in a similar mode, one of us as the main writer but now the other as sounding board/editor/cheerleader/occasional co-writer).
In hindsight, we were trying to stretch what should have been a simple little story over an overly complicated plot—like a fat guy squeezing into a tight t-shirt. I think this was the main flaw in the project, and it affected the rest of the efforts we put into it. Film and TV work best with simple plots—especially comedies where the fun isn’t in the story but in how it’s told and the characters living that story.
Mullet suddenly got a summer job in Alberta chasing dinosaurs, so we wrote scenes separately, with him in Drumheller and me in Toronto. We divided up the scenes, e-mailing them back and forth and rewriting and editing as we went along. Most of the time, we added stuff to the other guy’s scene, so the page count increased every day. I think we improved each other’s scenes, to a degree. Mullet rewrote Ed’s introductory scene from my brief ripping-off-the-hooker scene to the one we shot, a much longer trying-to-rip-off-hooker scene, for instance. I can’t recall anything I did to his scenes, but I was in a Groucho Marx phase and added a lot of one-liners and rapid fire type dialogue to everything I touched that summer.
The writing process was beneficial—it was the first time we’d collaborated on anything longer than 4-5 pages. We’d written sketches for a never-staged live show, we’d improvised a lot of live appearances, but we’d never written anything longer than a sketch. We learned how to work as a team, what each others’ strengths and weaknesses were, as well as our strengths. There was give and take, back and forth, but this grew as we learned to trust the other’s comedic instincts. Mullet was the chief writer on the script as he’d provided the plot and most of the characters, but the finished script definitely had my fingerprints all over it. The most interesting part of the process was that I ended up writing most of Mullet’s dialogue and scenes, and Mullet ended up writing almost all of my dialogue and scenes.
The weakness of our process was that neither of us stood back and acted as story editor, so by the time we finished, we had a shaggy dog story with a really convoluted plot and all the jokes you could eat. The basic plot was that Miller gets a job babysitting and leaves Mullet in charge. A creepy doll collector decides to steal the baby and Miller & Mullet spend the end of the movie getting the baby back, with the middle devoted to a long and confusing journey spent not finding the baby. To fit the plot over Gulliver’s Travel, we wrote a series of episodes. This allowed us have most of the cast come in for just one day and allowed us some room in dropping stuff if the schedule didn’t permit us to get things done in a reasonable amount of time.
Our influences are pretty obvious now, when I watch the finished project. The Gulliver story is not obvious unless you read the paragraph above where I explained we’d used it as our story’s frame (unless you caught the baby’s name as Lemuel...). In terms of how the structure, it definitely shows the results of us being huge Young Ones fans. I’ll go into our influences in a separate post at some point, but the style of that 1982-84 TV show certainly put a mark on what we were doing in 2001. For dialogue, we invoked the spirit of the Marx Brothers quite frequently. Ed has a definite Groucho streak going, and Mullet occasionally ventures into word confusion that Chico could have done.
Next time, pre-production on a no-budget feature.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
A brand new blog
Hello! Welcome to my blog. I've futsed around with a blog at Myspace , but I've decided to chronicle the making of the first Miller & Mullet live-action DVD. Since the internet is full of all sorts of weird and wacky stuff, I thought I'd contribute with my own rantings.
Who am I? I am half of Miller & Mullet, a comedy duo based in Toronto, Canada.
So far, we've shot a 74-minute "boot camp" video, shot a 5-minute short, completed issue 1 of a comic book (with the help of a great artist named Kameron Gates), and took the comic book to the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con. Now, we're turning our attention to both issue 2 of the comic book and a self-published live-action DVD, with a return to San Diego (assuming they'll have us back...).
At this point, the project is basically a dozen first-draft scripts, most of which I've abandoned and will not polish into second drafts. In 2005, when I started writing scripts, we were aiming at filling a broadcast half-hour (22 minutes in Canada, I think 20 minutes in the U.S.) with a no-budget pilot for a sketch show starring... Miller & Mullet. The plan was to shoot 3-4 sketches and edit them down into a cohesive show. But before we started shooting, we met industry people in Toronto who told us the half-hour wasn't necessary --just concentrate on 5-minute shorts. People in San Diego told us the same thing, so our 2007 plan is to do a DVD with 4-5 5-minute shorts. The 10-20 page scripts have gone back into the trunk, and now I'm working on making the magic happen on less than 6 pages.
I started brainstorming ideas last August, writing stuff into a notebook I started carrying with me all the time (or my trusty Palm if I'm going where no backpack has gone before). Stories began to appear in my head, and I dutifully put them down on paper where most of them died quick, painless deaths (the cold light of the written word tends to spike the weaker ideas quickly, I think).
Then I got writer's block. Back when I was in college, I wrote for about 2 hours a day, making great leaps forward in my writing. I lost that daily exercise, so now I've had to work hard at getting back to an hour session 2-3 days per week. The goal is to get back to an hour a day, 7 days a week. I'm not there yet....
I've found the writing process liberating and frustrating in equal amounts. You don't have a lot of time to play with, so the diversions we're so fond of doing with the characters have gone by the wayside. There's not a lot of room for other characters, either, so the end result is the stories have to be more direct than they have been in the past. But I find that it takes me 3 pages just to set up the situation, so once I've written out the script in a rough first draft, I go back and trim the beginning down.
In the next week or so, aside from brainstorming new ideas and getting them down on paper, I'm going over the stuff I've already shown Mullet and pickign them apart to make sure I can't do things better. Checking for internal logic, making sure the writing beats are set up properly, trying to find a better setup for gags, trying to find better payoffs for gags --that's how I'll be spending my weeknights, TV be damned.
Our budget for these shorts is pretty low, probably in the $100 (Canadian) range for each production day (1 short per day is our goal), so I can't include exteriors we can't use for free or include too many characters as we'd have to feed them.
For inspiration, I've been watching the shorts I have on tape and DVD at home, like Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, etc. --mostly to see how they economized on the story and character development to fit one or two reels. These were the people and shorts that inspired me to get into comedy. They had a much better budget than we can scrounge up, but when I watch them, I'm paying more attention to how they're telling the story.
I've got a collection of shorts from the late, great Second Cine, a show that Andrew Currie ran at Second City Toronto a few years back. When the show ended, Andrew brought in a big collection of submission tapes which were eagerly grabbed as potential dubbing tapes. I haven't erased any of them, and with the mix of good and bad, I've watched a few to see what I like and don't like. My favourite shorts from Second Cine were those from HotdogBoy.
And there's Channel 101 and 102, which I visit every month to see what the L.A. and NYC videoheads are doing. I've spun 101 alumnus David Hartman's DVD a few times this week, too, just to marvel at his freaky and violent little opuses (opi?) --will I ever have excellent gun flashes like he does? I have saved a lot of favourite 101 and 102 videos to my hard drive just to watch whenever the mood strikes me. Originally, I saved just my favourites, but about a year ago, I started saving all of them, even the rejected pilots. Some I can't sit through, others have that magic to them.
It's good to study the good with the bad. I paid money to see Dude Where's My Car 2 weekends in a row (at the gone but not forgotten Eaton Centre cinemas, which cost all of $5, making the study of bad comedies cheap). I think I learn more from my own mistakes than when I succeed, and other people's mistakes are a great help, too.
We're prepping for a live appearance at the 2007 Ad Astra con here in Toronto (30-minute show to fill time before the Masquerade starts), so I've put the scriptwriting aside this week.
I think I need 4-5 new stories to add to the 7 I've already done first drafts for. Of the scripts I've done so far, "Can" is my favourite and the first one I've shown to anyone other than Mullet. Another script was actually a clone of "Can," so I've discarded it after I realized what I'd done.
So, after the Ad Astra show, it's back to finding new stories to write. Mullet is slaving away on the script for issue 2 of the comic book, so he's my sounding board rather than writing partner for the next few weeks.
It's still too cold and crappy outside to do any exteriors, so I have about a month to work on the scripts before we have to start the more commitment-heavy parts of preproduction: crew, casting, scheduling.
Keep writing,
Ed
Who am I? I am half of Miller & Mullet, a comedy duo based in Toronto, Canada.
So far, we've shot a 74-minute "boot camp" video, shot a 5-minute short, completed issue 1 of a comic book (with the help of a great artist named Kameron Gates), and took the comic book to the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con. Now, we're turning our attention to both issue 2 of the comic book and a self-published live-action DVD, with a return to San Diego (assuming they'll have us back...).
At this point, the project is basically a dozen first-draft scripts, most of which I've abandoned and will not polish into second drafts. In 2005, when I started writing scripts, we were aiming at filling a broadcast half-hour (22 minutes in Canada, I think 20 minutes in the U.S.) with a no-budget pilot for a sketch show starring... Miller & Mullet. The plan was to shoot 3-4 sketches and edit them down into a cohesive show. But before we started shooting, we met industry people in Toronto who told us the half-hour wasn't necessary --just concentrate on 5-minute shorts. People in San Diego told us the same thing, so our 2007 plan is to do a DVD with 4-5 5-minute shorts. The 10-20 page scripts have gone back into the trunk, and now I'm working on making the magic happen on less than 6 pages.
I started brainstorming ideas last August, writing stuff into a notebook I started carrying with me all the time (or my trusty Palm if I'm going where no backpack has gone before). Stories began to appear in my head, and I dutifully put them down on paper where most of them died quick, painless deaths (the cold light of the written word tends to spike the weaker ideas quickly, I think).
Then I got writer's block. Back when I was in college, I wrote for about 2 hours a day, making great leaps forward in my writing. I lost that daily exercise, so now I've had to work hard at getting back to an hour session 2-3 days per week. The goal is to get back to an hour a day, 7 days a week. I'm not there yet....
I've found the writing process liberating and frustrating in equal amounts. You don't have a lot of time to play with, so the diversions we're so fond of doing with the characters have gone by the wayside. There's not a lot of room for other characters, either, so the end result is the stories have to be more direct than they have been in the past. But I find that it takes me 3 pages just to set up the situation, so once I've written out the script in a rough first draft, I go back and trim the beginning down.
In the next week or so, aside from brainstorming new ideas and getting them down on paper, I'm going over the stuff I've already shown Mullet and pickign them apart to make sure I can't do things better. Checking for internal logic, making sure the writing beats are set up properly, trying to find a better setup for gags, trying to find better payoffs for gags --that's how I'll be spending my weeknights, TV be damned.
Our budget for these shorts is pretty low, probably in the $100 (Canadian) range for each production day (1 short per day is our goal), so I can't include exteriors we can't use for free or include too many characters as we'd have to feed them.
For inspiration, I've been watching the shorts I have on tape and DVD at home, like Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, etc. --mostly to see how they economized on the story and character development to fit one or two reels. These were the people and shorts that inspired me to get into comedy. They had a much better budget than we can scrounge up, but when I watch them, I'm paying more attention to how they're telling the story.
I've got a collection of shorts from the late, great Second Cine, a show that Andrew Currie ran at Second City Toronto a few years back. When the show ended, Andrew brought in a big collection of submission tapes which were eagerly grabbed as potential dubbing tapes. I haven't erased any of them, and with the mix of good and bad, I've watched a few to see what I like and don't like. My favourite shorts from Second Cine were those from HotdogBoy.
And there's Channel 101 and 102, which I visit every month to see what the L.A. and NYC videoheads are doing. I've spun 101 alumnus David Hartman's DVD a few times this week, too, just to marvel at his freaky and violent little opuses (opi?) --will I ever have excellent gun flashes like he does? I have saved a lot of favourite 101 and 102 videos to my hard drive just to watch whenever the mood strikes me. Originally, I saved just my favourites, but about a year ago, I started saving all of them, even the rejected pilots. Some I can't sit through, others have that magic to them.
It's good to study the good with the bad. I paid money to see Dude Where's My Car 2 weekends in a row (at the gone but not forgotten Eaton Centre cinemas, which cost all of $5, making the study of bad comedies cheap). I think I learn more from my own mistakes than when I succeed, and other people's mistakes are a great help, too.
We're prepping for a live appearance at the 2007 Ad Astra con here in Toronto (30-minute show to fill time before the Masquerade starts), so I've put the scriptwriting aside this week.
I think I need 4-5 new stories to add to the 7 I've already done first drafts for. Of the scripts I've done so far, "Can" is my favourite and the first one I've shown to anyone other than Mullet. Another script was actually a clone of "Can," so I've discarded it after I realized what I'd done.
So, after the Ad Astra show, it's back to finding new stories to write. Mullet is slaving away on the script for issue 2 of the comic book, so he's my sounding board rather than writing partner for the next few weeks.
It's still too cold and crappy outside to do any exteriors, so I have about a month to work on the scripts before we have to start the more commitment-heavy parts of preproduction: crew, casting, scheduling.
Keep writing,
Ed
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