STEPHEN FRY: BRITISH V AMERICAN COMEDY What a tosser.

 Stephen Fry ( tosser)

I've seen a few You Tube videos with Stephen Fry comparing the comedy of the Britain to the comedy  United States. It's seems to be a pet subject of his and I don't get it. I don't get the comparison angle and the whole thing annoys me. I love the comedy greats of both countries equally, but it's not a subject I  would ever bring up as a conversation piece.

First of all his opinion is that British comedy is funnier or better than American comedy, because it's much smarter, more human , more character based. (whatever) Is it? Proof?

In both of these videos he's not in a debate.  He is  stating his opinion unchallenged and in the case of the one in the auditorium he is talking to an audience who are his true believers.

When he talks about the great British performers he reels off many from the 1950's and 60's but he has chosen to compare them with John Belushi , who had a very short career from about 1975/80 Ben Stiller and  Jim Carrey who are modern day American comedians.

He says that in the American film National Lampoon's Animal House John Belushi (and  he calls him John Belushia the first time, which is rude because we all know his name) plays this crazy guy who smashes a folk singers guitar. He says that the American comedian and the English comedian would rather be the folk singer much to the delight of his audience. But John Belushi wasn't the star of this film, it was his film debut and he was eighth on the cast. He was playing a crazy guy, not the protagonist so the whole point which Mr Fry is going down is totally irrelevant. AND he sort of hangs his hat on that example.

He also makes a point of comparing British sitcoms to American films. He reels off  a selection of British sitcoms which include Steptoe and Son, Rising Damp, Fawlty Towers, Tony Hancock, Dad's Army, Alan Partridge, The Office,  but as I say he is comparing these to Belushi , Stiller and Sandler who are now all film comedians. He is not comparing these with Get Smart, MASH, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Barney Miller, All in the Family, Cheers, Seinfeld The Larry Sanders Show, nor even the American version of The Office. If he is going to make comparisons he should compare them to the right genre. He does the apple and oranges comparison as if that's like a fact.

For some reason he makes a comment that Americans are brash because anyone born in the USA can become President but that's not the case with becoming Prime Minister in Britain, well I think that's his point.to me, once again is irrelevant. What the hell has that got to do with fucking comedy writing?

Anyway , I see that what he is taking about is humour and in some ways he is correct,  because the British and the Americans have a different sense of humour and and i'd rather talk to a Pom aover an American anny day , except fro Fry and Ben Elton,  but sense of humour is not comedy , comedy is to me a theatrical exercise. I am an Australian with an Aussie sense of humour. My comedy is a combination of all the things which make me laugh, whether they be Australian, American, British or something from some other place in the world. Once again humour and comedy are not the same and in fact very different. Fry likes to suggest that comedy and humour are the same. They are not and I'm repeating myself here.

His old comedy partner Hugh Laurie is a huge hit in America TV dramas and comedy as well as appearing in films. I sense a huge hint of jealousy and that is why he is attacking the Americans.

FILMSCRIPT REWRITES

 

Film Rewrites

I've been looking at the film scripts which I have written over the years and my first observation is that many of them need some work. That work in most cases involves improving the comedy. Rather than continue writing half good scripts I am better off improving the older ones first. It's also practical because all of these which I wrote in the 90's were before mobile phones were a part of normal life.

1. THE VAMPYRE:  WITH BLOOD & ROSES.

Story A young transyvanian guy takes his girlfriend to meet count Dracula. 

This was my first script and it needs very little fine tuning so I can leave it for the moment. Actually it was my second script. The first was flushed down the toilet many years ago.

2. MY STREETKID

Story: A famous radio D.J finds a young female street kid hiding in his house. Years later I realised I'd plagarised Goldilocks. ( Just Kidding)

Has some major issues with the comedy aspect and this is my first project. In the first scene which goes for two pages I changed the last four lines and made something ho hum suddenly funny. The film script is not meant to be hilarious but that means I have to improve the jokes because the story is  quite likeable. It's my attempt at a feel good story and for that reason I think it stinks.

3 LAST NIGHT OF THE FILTH.

Story: A print worker  accidentally on purpose murders his boss and some of his workmates cover for him.

This is my best script has been drafted many times and is now ready to go.

4. WHEN BUSHPIGS COLLIDE.

A football team called the Bushpigs hire an agency to get recruits for their club for a weekend football carnival. However a mistake leads the agency to send a punk band called The Bushpigs in as the recruits. The band want the money so they pretend to be footballers but they are all hopeless.

I actully like the concept but the script although completed needs a lot of work.

KILL VICTOR GOLD

Story: Millionaire and celebrity doctor Victor Gold has upset gangster heavy weight Milo Krane so Krane orders his execusion. The doctor is left a  paraplegic but whilst recovering invents and designs a body suit which enables him to walk.

What was i thinking. This is like a Marvel Movie super hero story.( It would probably make a zillion at the box office) I haven't looked at it for over ten years.

THE MAD WEEKEND

 

 

The IMPORTANCE of DUBBED LAUGHTER

The Importance of Dubbed Laughter.

I've read that when dubbed or canned laughter was invented the ratings of comedy shows went up.

Sketch comedy needs some sort of laugh track but not a phony baloney one.

As good as Fawlty Towers was it has a laugh track. It could probably get away without one but it would need a musical score and it doesn't have one.(at all).

Over the years of having watched The Benny Hill Show , The Two Ronnies, The Paul Hogan Show for example I came to this conclusion of which I may be wrong.

They have an intial episode with a studio audience. That episode  I believe has the "STAR" doing a series of monologues and maybe one or two simple "live" sketches.

From that they have cutaways to as studio audience for the start and end credits only.

 This smoke and mirrors approach means that  this is the only time a studio audience is necessary but implies that audience was there for all 6 or so episodes.

It also implies that audience saw every sketch so that makes the dubbed laughter seem real.

And most importantly sketch comedy is a very hard sell without dubbed laughter.

 

 

MY FEATURE LENGTH FILM BLUEPRINT

The basic Hollywood comedy has a budget of minimum $20million. I guess in Australia it would be $6 million tops.

In most cases I don't even think along those lines . I think cheap cheap cheap.

My script will be 90 -100 pages and hopefully the finished product will be 90 minutes tops. It will be tighter an funnier.

My protagonist is usually male, some variation of myself.

In most cases the story is about a guy in a fix trying to get of the fix. Sometimes the situation is usually caused by the protagonist being an idiot in the first place.

For the film to be a success you have to come up with 6 big sight gags or sight gag scenes. A film with a budget of $20 million can have a box office of $150 million with 6 good sight gag scenes.

In some of my scripts there is a MacGuffin, which is chasing something which is unattainable. I say that because some of the scripts are about a scam.

In my scripts you have a beginning and end and what happens in to get to that end can be a pile nonsense. I don't write romantic comedies which need a proper story.

I find a need to write in a few off the wall comedy scenes.

Have some kind of comedy music scene.

I like the idea of wacky cameos from name comedians.

As many one liners as you can think of. 

So we start of with a quest and in that last scene we reach the quest.

That's about it.

Revisiting IT'S BRISBANE TONITE WOW! 2010

It's seven years since we made 

 

IT"S BRISBANE TONITE  WOW! a film made from a script I wrote in 2002. You know the film was a dud when you write a post like this. My film maker mate Scot had read the script years earlier and contacted me in 2010 about making it into a film. We also had this conversation in 2006.

I said "Go for it, you've got my script"
He said that he wanted me to be the lead character
I said to him that I'm more than happy at my current job at M ON MARY apartments and wasn't prepared to risk my job for the film role. The way I saw it, is. that if the film is some kind of success my script won't go unnoticed. In most cases when a film is a success it's the script which gets most of the recognition in the aftermath.
However Scot was relentless and I caved in to his relentlessness begging and guilt trips so that I would play the lead role.

The script is essentially about 6 people being trapped in a community television station during a flash flood. Those characters are the station boss, the Tonite Show host, the producer, the control room expert, a major sponsor and the protagonist who is a film maker only being there to pick up a film he has had there for editing purposes. The Tonite show host has a show to go live to air.  Her guests can't make it in and everybody else can't leave. So she asks the film maker to help her out. He goes from being one guest to all the guests. A role a great comedian like Robin Williams or Peter Sellers would revel in doing. Meanwhile all the guests who cannot make it to the show have turned up at a nearby pub and are watching this man imitating them.

When I originally wrote the script I wrote it without what is called  a first act. I should have done a fifteen minute introduction of the lead character. Instead of being like a three act play I wrote this as a two act script in which the script hit the ground running. Sounded good to me but in reality it's a bit of a wank. It was a big mistake by me.

Scot asked me to do a final draft but I made some weak changes but nothing significant. He then wrote about another ten pages to the script. I didn't object to this but introducing another four characters totally changed the concept of the story, because these four characters being in the studio could have also pretended to be guests. It defeated the purpose of the story.

I became involved in the auditions and I had no issues with the casting and from May to July there were rehearsals. Late August I said to Scot that I feel that when I tell my boss that I will need some time off for filming that she will sack me so I should stand down and he should find another person for the lead. She was having a sackathon at the time. He said that would be wrong and that without me the project would not get off the ground. I notified my boss about this on August 16 and was sacked on September 5th for a variety of unrelated items. None worthy of sacking at all. Things I didn't do on Tuesday but did on Wednesday type of things. All were so minor it was ridiculous. It was like she had a dossier on every mistake I had made and everyone else for that matter.  Just on this point, this boss had taken over at the start of year. She sacked me in April for a story she invented, re-employed me when some workers called her a liar and in the time I worked there had sacked all the seventeen of her staff that she had when she became boss. Bottom line, she loved sacking people. Loved it.

Scot had a plan to start shooting in late September and finish in early December, We only filmed scenes on the weekend between 8am and 3pm (and I worked on the weekends) The camera man had to leave for another job at 3pm so that's why shooting finished at 3pm.  If we had shot to 6pm on Saturdays and 4pm on Sundays we would have completed the filming in a month.As an actor I was a slow starter but was usually getting into my role in the early afternoon.
Scot proved to be a well organised producer and a competent director but the early finishes didn't do the film or anyone else any justice. At 3pm it was like we all felt let's knock over another scene or two but this never happened and the reality is that when you read this script, which basically has 80% of it at only two locations could be done very quickly.


We had one major disagreement on the set. I was playing a man who was pretending to be six other characters. Scot wanted one actor to play a dual role which I thought was confusing but more so unnecessary. I told Scot so and when this actor came in for the second role I was very pissed off.
The reality is this guy's second character was not so obvious so maybe I was wrong but it was unnecessary and the bloke actually flew back from Perth especially to play the lesser role , because his scenes were shot early in the production.

Now here's where the real problems start. The film was shot in a 3 major locations. A shop in Wooloongabba, a studio in Annerley built by Scot and a hotel in the city on a night where there major construction being performed.  All locations had such major sound issues the final print was unwatchable.

Scot deleted twelve laugh lines from his final edit. Everyone was unhappy about this and Scot said that Ricky Gervais didn't use laugh lines in THE OFFICE. Actually Scot misunderstood what Gervais was getting at, but what Gervais was saying is he didn't write characters in the ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS vein who enter a room and say some deliberately outrageous to get a laugh.  He later admitted this was a mistake but the footage was discarded by this point, never to be retrieved. Twelve laugh lines is an enormous amount, most comedy films don't have twelve laugh lines.

The final product had minimal music and we are talking about a light comedy here, so I insisted on more music This may sound strange but I believe the music is what sets apart a good film from great film and some music can kill a good film. Try watching the original CASINO ROYALE. After the great opening theme Burt Bacharach he had no idea how to score a movie. I've always said that Jerry Goldsmith could turn an ordinary film into what appears to be a very good film on the strength of  his great music. BASIC INSTINCT being the perfect example. 

 Scot finally came clean and said he had no interest in a music score as there was none in THE OFFICE or FAWLTY TOWERS. ( True) I'll say this, presuming we all love FAWLTY TOWERS, we'd love it a hell of a lot more if it had a music score. If I knew that he didn't believe in musical scores for movies I would have said "Why bother making films then?"

THE FINAL PRODUCT
Terrible sound killed it. I suggested to Scot before shooting that we should approach Briz 31 for the hiring of their studios. He said "NO" in a heartbeat,  and yet a quote from Briz 31 would have been useful and they weren't expensive.

Little music made that situation worse. It needed a bouncy feel through it. It wasn't a drama nor was it THE OFFICE.

The Actors
Everyone who performed in the film was really good. Especially Sonia who played the equal lead role. Honestly, I was the weak link in the acting stakes.  And I was now out of work so the whole thing didn't sit well with me.

My performance was ordinary and unfortunately all my best stuff was shot in the mid afternoon.

Editing
The editing was mediocre. Too many scenes of people especially me, walking from A to B. I did my own edit cutting ten minutes from Scot's Final product which made big difference. I cut one scene but also cut every entry and exit from a scene to a minimum.You don't need to see people leaving a room if it's unnecessary.


My script was 6/10
I should have written two introduction scenes for the lead character taking a minimum of ten minutes.
That was biggest the second biggest mistake.
My character should have been a bumbling idiot with some minor but effective sight gags added. I should have written what I know and that was my biggest mistake.  This is the biggest mistake with modern comedy. He should have been a klutz.

I had  a scene at the start with  mechanic. I needed to have this mechanic contact  the lead character a few times through the film to build up a tense situation, because they meet at the end it would have been very funny if there was more interaction during the film. ( It's also very Larry David)

Strangely Scot changed the title to IT"S BRISBANE TONIGHT WOW! using proper English for TONITE.

Would I do it all again? Having highlighted the issues I know another shot at this would work.

A rewrite of the script would improve it dramatically.
Scot's direction showed it was a good watchable story.
Needs a suitable light musical score. (BUT No guitars).

THE WRITING OF PONDEROSA

 I've almost finished writing the best comedy film script I've ever written PONDEROSA.

First of all BONANZA is one of my very favourite shows of all time. Top 5.  I watch it now on Foxtel at least few times a week. Back in the 90's it was on Channel 9 at midnight and I finished work at 11pm so I'd watch it before going to bed. I'd go into work the next day and I had a running joke with my work mate Terry Keir.
It went this way.
Did you watch Bonanza last night?
Yes.
And what was the lesson?
DON"T FUCK WITH THE CARTWRIGHT'S.


Six years ago I started writing PONDEROSA a comedy tribute and feature length send up of BONANZA and it's now near completion. I have many excuses for why it has taken so long but over that time I had written 30 pages of notes and had many visions in my head of what was going to happen.
At the same time I was writing another script which has still gone nowhere.
So I've just had some time off work and almost completed PONDEROSA and it's looking good.
So what is PONDEROSA and what is not PONEDROSA.


IT'S NOT
It's not a Zucker Abrahams Scary Movie type. ( Apologies to the Zuckers because they created a comedy genre that has been abused so that films in their style are now ridiculous, or shithouse or both).

So it's not a western in which characters use mobile phones and computers carry automatic weapons and have many irrelevant things going on in the background and foreground. The are no scenes with 10 pointless gags per minute.

IT'S NOT
A gross out western, so that although there's plenty of killings and accidents the injuries aren't highlighted for "laughs".

IT'S NOT
Full of swearing and "cuss words" because I want the biggest audience possible if possible, but there's plenty of sexual innuendo which Is what I use to instead.


IT'S NOT
A lame likable frolic, it's full of comedy. It's fucking comedy.

IT IS Not at all like BLAZING SADDLES in a comedy sense.

IT IS Like BLAZING SADDLES in a style and budget sense. I'm writing a big picture .

IT IS
A big budget big scale western. I can picture  a few actors as Ben Cartwright as Ben is hilarious, so Will Ferrell would be my first choice, but there are a few others who would fit. 

IT IS
FUNNY for every minute and seldom lets up. I had to write comedy comedy comedy at the top of each page.

IT IS
A film with a paper thin plot and surrounding that plot are many big scenes or big sketches, so in that sense it resembles the MONTY PYTHON films.

IT IS
 A film with send ups of other westerns such as Brokeback Mountain, but it's not Zucker like so not every scene is a send up. I've been very selective and as an avid BONANZA and THE VIRGINIAN viewer.  I've chosen to tweak scenes from those shows rather than look for film send ups.

IT IS
A film with big scale sight gags  but is heavy on verbal jokes.

That's it for now as it's still not completed but getting close.

Note: 2022 and it is complete.

FILM REVIEWS :CAT BALLOU & THE GOOD GUYS and the BAD GUYS

Two films I've watched recently. Both Comedy westerns

CAT BALLOU   1965 

IMDB RATING 6.9

AFI Funniest 100 films Rating Number 50

Starring  : Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin

Directed by : Eliot Silverstein

Screenplay  : Walter Newman and Frank R Pierson

Based on a novel by  : Ray Chanslor


THE GOOD GUYS & THE BAD GUYS 1969 
Robert Mitchum and George Kennedy & Tina Louise

IMDB RATING
6.2

Directed by Burt Kennedy

Screenplay
Ronald M Cohen and Dennis Shryack


Cat Ballou was huge hit and The Good Guys and the Bad Guys not so.
These two films are lightweight comedy westerns, but the word lightweight is more appropriate than comedy.
Sure lots of mildly amusing things happen, like in Cat Ballou there's a guy who fires his gun and from 20 metres away misses a barn and in The Good Guys and the Bad Guys there are people chasing a runaway train in cars and on horses.

The banter is cute and snappy and the actors are all smiling and having a great time so there's some entertainment value.........but mainly for them.

CAT BALLOU made NO 50 in the AFI top 100 comedies of all time and this is beyond  my comprehension. There has to be a criteria and it just doesn't make the criteria. The criteria has to include funny and it's not funny it's mildly humourous.

I can watch Jane Fonda in anything and Tina Louise is so drop dead gorgeous in The Good Guys and the Bad Guys it makes me wonder why she didn't get more work. Seriously.

But there is a bottom line here and the bottom line here is there are no funny lines, no laughs, especially no belly laughs and the stark reality is that without funny lines, it aint comedy.