I find these days I have trouble remembering scripts once they ship out the door. Quite to the contrary of every standup I've ever worked with, who'll claim every line like it was birthed from their own loins, I tend to forget (in a production room) what I wrote and what the room came up with. For instance, I no longer have any clear idea what the hell I wrote or came up with on Charlie Jade. I think this is a delightful coping strategy.
However, I've been doing mostly development lately. And in the end the lines you love most, I think, are the ones that make you laugh. Sometimes against all reason.
In one of my recent comedy pilots, a group of students in residence throw a Canadian Thanksgiving. Through hijinks, two of the characters wind up having to deep fry a turkey. Amidst discussions of the (not inconsiderable) danger involved, one comes across something he's never seen. The character, TED, is a sweet Inuit guy who's in his fifth year of undergrad. He asks his friend if he's ever heard of a "turducken," the famous turkey stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken. Then he comments:
If someone showed up in my village with a bird like that...we’d have made him a shaman.I don't know. That just makes me laugh. And that's why I started in this silly business anyway.
Now, I just hope the network greenlights me.
3 comments:
The reason I posted my line? It's the script I'm polishing right now.
This is what happens when you focus on the work and just keep doing - you stop for a moment and catch your breath; look behind you, and suddenly there's a whole bunch of scripts, stories, etc... that weren't there before.
What's the Faulkner line? "You must kill all of your darlings"?
Haha! I laughed too :)
In University residence we had a little video game hockey league, and were allowed two "created" players on each team. We played a full season against each other, and then the playoffs.
I had an incredible created defenseman named Solomon Silverberg, and I also had an Inuit player - Tleknik Naknuk. Tleknik was the highest scorer in the league after Jeremy Roenik.
During the playoffs I moved Silverberg up to center though, and low and behold, he outplayed everybody as a forward. If only I had seen his capabilities earlier in the season...
There is real point to this comment, other than I think it's great you made an Inuit character.
That's a great line! Great, because it doesn't need context to be funny.
I read it and laughed and I didn't read anything else in your post (until after I had laughed).
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