This is the finished cut of Kilroy Productions’s 48Hour Film Project, Boston 2008 edition. Competing teams have 48 hours to create a short film, from script to score, from scratch. Our designated genre was sci-fi, and we had to incorporate 3 items: a receipt, a character named Reginald H. Higginbotham (diplomat), and the line “This could get complicated.” I’m proud of my team!
The lady and I are working our way through the third season of the critically acclaimed long-form crime drama The Wire. We came up with a spin-off series that will surely make us millions:
In each episode of Bubs in Trubs, lovable junkie/informant Bubbles will unsuccessfully attempt a new and hilarious caper! The lady and I will be writing the spec pilot, in which Bubble’s prize is a radiator stuffed with copper pipes. Featuring guest appearances by McNulty, Kima and the gang!
This will surely be an ostentatious launch of my screenwriting career.
This afternoon I sent a handful of people my first public draft of Amusement Park, the screenplay I began developing as part of Boston University’s Summer screenwriting course. The class only workshopped the first 30 pages, and I’ve been tinkering and hammering on my own time since the end of The Wasteland Comedy Hour. It’s thrilling to be able to share my work, and solicit honest feedback from people I trust. One of the few things I really miss about college are creative writing workshops. Even at their most pretentious and pointless, there’s something safe about being able to discuss and critique the craft of writing with your aspiring peers. From what I’ve seen, equivalent experiences in the real world are rare.
This is my first real attempt at writing a feature, and I’d like to get the story tight enough that I’d feel comfortable adding it to my portfolio, or sending it to a grad school admissions department. We’ll see what happens as feedback starts trickling in.
The Wasteland Comedy Hour is over. Indulge me, if you will, as I fumble for a suitable postmortem.
The last show, “In Calvin We Trust,” was a good blend of silly and sentimental. We mixed with some comedy staples—god, religion, death—from new angles, and peppered in some darker material—our fears, the future, the cosmos—and steeped everything in a rich time-travel broth. Of our shows that require context to understand, I’d say “In Calvin We Trust” is up there with “Hitting Our Marx,” and I don’t know if there’s any one bit or sketch that I could extract, hold over my head, and scream “Look! This is how awesome our show was!” As we got deeper into our seven show run, we found ourselves intertwining sketches more and more. I’m looking forward to the day when we edit the footage from our live shows together, and host the whole experience in cyberspace—we definitely made a “live happening” that’s difficult to grok from our standalone video selections.
That said, here’s a thing:
Weird, right? It’s my send-off to the T.S. Eliot character I’ve been playing for the last three months. I figured he’s already dead, so there’s no harm in turning his pseudofuneral into an artsy-fartsy meditation on performers’ postpartum. Also, I love “The Long Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and had to get Eliot’s real voice in the show. This seemed like an elegant solution, a kind of video elegy. The funny stuff in our last show was strong enough to buoy this downbeat, and I am eternally thankful that we have a team willing to take these kinds of risks.
Speaking of the team! Holy shit, do I love these cats. I wish I could throw them a parade. I wish I could remember every compliment that people have given me in the last five days so that I could replay it for the cast and crew, word for word, as I clap them on the backs and then maybe give them handjobs. The Wasteland Comedy Hour was a massive machine, an extremely demanding ensemble production that relied on our team’s ability to not just pull their weight, but to stretch well beyond their comfort zones, to be open to peer collaboration, critique, and construction, to set the bar high and then jump like crazy. They built a ship, drew a map, and steered everybody there and back again.
The time to bask in our success is quickly drawing to an end, as everybody switches gears, prioritizes new and old projects, and contemplates what to do now that they’ve blown six months on one big beast of a variety show. Myself, I’ll be continuing to improvise with my friends and colleagues in the cast, although I’ve put a moratorium on any new improv projects that involve significant rehearsal time. I’m reclaiming my weeknights and charting my own course for the immediate future—finding full-time employment for my days, and (screen)writing at night. It’s going to be rocky, moving from the comfort of a supportive, talented ensemble to spending nights alone with the inventions and failings of my own imagination.
But The Wasteland was a shot of liquid courage. We’re all moving onward; upward.
I'm a full-time student in USC's Stark Producing Program, class of '12.
Code Duello joined the UCB TourCo and is available for national bookings.
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This is me in Peru. I am very interesting.
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This is me in one of my comedy shows. Won't you come to the next one?