Monday, September 10, 2007

And so it begins

It’s been a full week for the Wasteland team. We had three major victories over the weekend:

1. Wrapping our first video shoot, which consisted of two sketches
2. Dance rehearsal for next weekend’s shoot
3. Re-jiggering each of the 7 shows to fit a more modest production schedule

The third item is a bittersweet victory. We had, as of last week, multiple sketches in multiple locations being filmed on every day of every weekend in September, with the promise of still more to do in October.  This is in addition to our weekly rehearsals for the stage material.  As I wrote in a previous entry, I think this ambitious schedule was attainable—but it wasn’t ideal, especially as our cast is swept up in the tide of “major life events” that is always heralded by the coming of the fall.  In our eight-person writer/actor team, we’ve got two people getting married, two people recently engaged, and a person just married.  If I were to also list nonmarital conflicts, the list would merit its own post.  Instead, I can summarize the producers’ decision thusly: our cast needs to be focused, energized, and having fun more than we need to create 150 perfectly-shot comedy gems.

We lost a cast member and some good material, but the show rolls onward, gaining momentum.  This weekend’s shoot, which I can summarize thusly:

was a whole bundle of fun.  As we end the stressful task of writing, revising, and structuring our seven hours of material, the horizon is filled with fun shoots, fun rehearsals, and the more fun task of bringing our work to life (via more work).  I think our decision to cut some of our more excessively complicated material will pay off when we open in two months and the cast is alive enough to do the bits justice.

In related news, I recently had to end my full-time commitment to The Uncommonwealth, a sketch group formed in just January of this year.  The group had a lot of talented writers and performers involved, and we even pumped out a fair amount of material in our first six months.  Unfortunately, as the months flew by, many members of the group (myself included) found themselves spread too thin, and the demands of filming all but the simplest of sketches were too much for us.  We shat out, like, fifty scripts in the first two months, then got bogged down in the logistics of prioritizing and filming everybody’s work for the next six.  There’s some good stuff on TUC’s site, but I’m afraid that might be all she (we) wrote, pending a total recast.  No regrets, no hard feelings, always the option of restarting something in the future.  But for now, The Uncommonwealth‘s primary function in my life is a great learning experience, if not an outright cautionary tale.

The difficulty of managing—or committing to—an ambitious film team is not to be underestimated.  Especially if you are in a community of improvisors, who take for granted the immediate satisfaction and fast turnaround time of weekly shows, weekly bombs, weekly laughs. Film is, honestly, only 10% fun—but the payoffs are more substantial than the disposable, transient giggles in an improv show.  The Wasteland, mercifully, has an end date of December 14^th.  With a solid, clear goal of doing the show in Nov/Dec, our cast and directors and crew are more able to commit—and follow through on—some very demanding shooting schedules.  Much of the post-production work falls on the shoulders of the directors, and our one tech/fx wizard, since we don’t have dedicated editors.  With the helmers editing 24/7 and the cast rehearsing or shooting for 3-6 hours per week, it’s a damn good thing we have a definite open date.

It’s been a tumultuous month.  As this one perpetually-shifting project continues to eat my life, all the other little projects are falling by the wayside.  Uncommonwealth is done, I’m on hiatus from Rondo, my writing is begging to be touched, and I’m only doing one Mainstage show in the foreseeable future….

I just had this cute little metaphor about the coming of autumn coinciding with the falling-off of old commitments, like leaves off a tree or some bullshit.  I’ll be honest—I’m not in a very poetic mood, and I have miles to go before I sleep.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Spec Frustration

The esteemed Eric Pope and I are currently brainstorming a new verb to describe a common phenomenon amongst aspiring screenwriters (which, to my knowledge, doesn’t have its own slang term yet):

_______ : -verb (used without object)
To experience the inevitable but crushing sadness caused by discovery that your brilliant, original spec script is undeniably similar to a Hollywood project that just moved into production.

Here are some of the verbs we’ve bandied about:

• Brainjacked
• Dehymen’d
• Hollycocked
• Hollyblocked

Surely you have more ideas….

(For Pope, he was ______ by I Sell the Dead.
I was ______ upon learning of Adventureland‘s existence.)

Monday, August 20, 2007

150 sketches in 3 months, 2 stages in 2 months

We’ve taken tally of all the greenlit material for The Wasteland Comedy Hour, and the verdict is, we have 3 months to produce 88 film sketches.  In addition, we have 2 months to rehearse around 60 stage sketches.  Oh, and there are about 10 musical numbers to record and/or rehearse.  Did we bite off more than we could chew?  Yes, most definitely.  Are we still going to swallow?  Mmmm-hmmnph.

Most of the sketches are very short and light on production value, but there are some epics in each show that require real locations, costumes, props, and effects if the film is going to be properly served by our efforts.  We’re hoping to knock out 4-5 sketches per evening, and another 5-6 over weekends—but as we know, filming always runs long, even with the most generous of compromises.

Most of the stage bits are self-explanatory, but will require rehearsal to hit the beats right.  Because each sketch is so different, each needs its own TLC, and we have to be sensitive to both the needs of the show as a whole, and how each bit breathes.  Again, most of these are short bits, 2 minutes or under. The music is also moving into production, so that our handful of musical wizards can work their sinister alchemies on our material.  The mysteries of this process will be revealed to me in a month or so, when we have actual pieces of music with which to work, not just clever lyrics in a Word document.

In an effort to make this project more open-source, I’m going to share with you—the ten readers of my blog—the master spreadsheet that our director, Jason Haas, and our Production Manager, Lynn Wilcott, created this weekend. They took account of the following data:

• Cast availability
• Location availability
• Location overlaps
• Estimated production value, abstracted into cost in “resources” (time/money/cast/postproduction)
• Priority of producing material, based on the order of our shows

He also color-coded the material to give us an idea of which sketches are the “epics” in terms of our resources.  Pink is hellish, yellow is standard, green is easy.  Oh, and in this context, gentle reader, the names of the sketches function as teasers, not spoilers:

Goodbye, Autumn Weekends!

In short, the wheels are in motion, and in a few short weeks I’ll be holed up with Adobe Premiere, cutting hours upon hours of footage into little comedy gems.

Speaking of wheels in motion, there’s major news at our home theater, ImprovBoston.  ImprovBoston is opening a new theater in Central Square, Cambridge.  This is huge, exciting news for our little improv community, and—in time—it’ll be huge for Boston comedy.  The new space will have 2 stages (mainstage and cabaret), it’s actually T-accessible, there’s probably going to be a bar, and just about everything about this new space is new and exciting.  It’ll be right next to The Field, where an old Asian market used to be.

When will it open, you say?  The plan right now is to build the whole goddamn thing by the opening of Gorefest, which means Halloween weekend.  Now, I’ve never heard of any construction, big or small, happening according to schedule, but I’m biting my tongue and crossing my fingers.  The people slaving behind the scenes to make this new theater a reality are very dedicated, and it sounds like there’s a time-sensitive need to move out of the current theater in Inman Square.

So—if ImprovBoston can build a new theater in 2 months, I think we can produce 150 sketches in 3 months.  The bar is high, but nothing rewarding is easy.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Themes & Outlines

We had a big Wasteland meeting last night, in which the producers unveiled the seven outlines for the seven shows we’ll be putting up in November/December.  The seven organizing principals have held up well, and will indeed be the 7 shows we produce.

A hell of a lot of time was spent parsing through two months’ worth of material, then organizing it by theme, then scraping and molding it to feel cohesive.  We still have a lot of work to do, but the show outlines look very exciting.  I think we’ve managed to write about 6.5 hours, and the remainder will come together by the end of August.  We’ve got films, experimental videos, stage sketches, fake video games, musical numbers, audience-interactive bits, and jokes to produce, rehearse, and polish.  There’s not nearly enough room in our schedules to do it all, but luckily the producers have the power to bend space-time.  All my other projects take a back-seat until Christmas.

My personal challenge in the next two weeks is to rewrite a series of sketches for the War/Aggression show, tentatively titled “My Thing Is Bigger.“  I’d written a fun running bit about a unicorn terrorist attack and the media’s exploitation of the event, which would periodically interrupt T.S. Eliot’s late-night program.  (We’ve begun referring to these running motifs as superstructures, to differentiate them from the 3-act structure we’ve built around Eliot’s show-within-a-show.)  After discussing this episode with Tucker and Haas, we decided we were missing an opportunity to actually discuss issues surrounding the Iraq War, the fictitious “War on Terror,“ and the trouble we Americans have dissecting the conflict.  The unicorn runner, fanciful as it is, is going to be reworked to be a little heavier, a little more palpably linked to the global events of the last six years.

The difficulty, of course, is actually writing a series of scenes about the Iraq War, without undue levity or condescending heavy-handedness, starring a bunch of fucking unicorns.  The point is not to engage in discourse about the war, but to pull our comedy from the aspects of the war that are most real, most difficult.  I think our team can pull it off, so long as we use these: