Introduction
Every few months or so a major Hollywood executive complains that there is a dearth of good scripts being circulated in that town. Underlings nod their heads in approval and editorial page writers tsk tsk and wonder where all the really good scripts are hiding (as if writers are perverse enough to devote their lives to writing, only to keep all their best work to themselves!). The general feeling among the creative types in Hollywood (with the exception of writers, who aren't important enough in the food chain to be given much attention) is that their films would be much better if only they could find better screenplays.
Do you really think Hollywood is looking for strong scripts?
Look at the evidence. As I write this, the films in the theatres in my city
include: The Jungle Book, a live action remake of an old Disney cartoon
(based on an even older book by Rudyard Kipling); StarTrek:
Generations, which has the distinction of being based on not one, but
two separate television series; the third Hollywood version of Little
Women; Highlander Three: The Sorcerer, an attempt to make up for the
poor sequel to the original film; Richie Rich, based on a comic strip;
Streetfighter, based on a video game; and The Jerky Boys, which is,
incredibly, based on a cassette of crank phone calls.
In the last year, Hollywood has released Speed, an above
average formula thriller; Blown Away, a below average formula
thriller; Maverick and The Flintstones, adaptations of television shows;
Wyatt Earp, the umpteenth telling of this story; The Crow and The
Mask, both based on comic books; The Shadow, based on films which
were based on pulp fiction novels which were based on a radio series;
Angels in the Outfield and Black Beauty, remakes of old films; City
Slickers 2, a sequel to the hit from 1991; The Little Rascals, based on
the series of Hal Roach shorts; the film adaptation of the video game
Mortal Kombat; and It's Pat, a film based on Saturday Night Live
sketches. Beverly Hills Cop 3, another sequel, breezed in and out of
theatres. On television, I can see such cinematic fare as Coneheads,
based on another SNL sketch; Super Mario Brothers, another adaptation
of a video game; the second version of The Getaway; the third version
of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers; House Party III, another sequel; and
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, another sequel based on a comic
book.
Remakes, sequels, adaptations of old television shows and
sketches and formulaic films dominate the output of the major
Hollywood studios. Hollywood doesn't want original screenplays.
Hollywood fears original screenplays. Adaptations of things on
television have a built-in audience made up of the people who watched
the original show. Similarly, remakes and sequels have ready-made
audiences who enjoyed the originals. Original works have to be sold to
a film audience -- gasp -- on their own merits. What Hollywood
executives really seem to want is an original formula picture (and, if
any of them recognize that as an oxymoron, they're not letting on).
Nowhere is this tendency towards uncreativity in Hollywood
more obvious than in comedies.
Season after season, we seem to be inundated with films based
on inferior comic vehicles of other media: old television programmes
(such as The Flintstones, The Beverly Hillbillies, Car 54, Where Are
You? and The Addam's Family) and television sketch comedy
programmes (The Coneheads, Strange Brew, Wayne's World, etc.). The movement towards remaking foreign films (Three Men and a Baby, for
instance) is also part of this trend, as is the recent spate of genre
parodies (Hot Shots and its sequel, for example, or Robin Hood: Men
in Tights). Finally, some artists have begun using postmodern techniques
for comedy without a clue as to what they're really about (cf: Wayne's
World and The Last Action Hero). The result of these trends is that
there are damn few comedies being released in Hollywood which are
especially funny.
Postmodernism for Idiots
There is a tradition in theatre of "the fourth wall." On a traditional stage,
the three walls represent a room; the empty space which would be the
fourth wall allows the audience to see the action. Yet the actors act on
the stage as if the fourth wall actually existed. This allows the audience
to pretend that what it is watching is reality unfolding rather than an
artificial simulation of reality (the technical term for this is, of course,
the "willing suspension of disbelief"). This convention is also
somewhat appropriate to film and television, where the screen acts as
the fourth wall.
Postmodernism, as it relates to the arts, is an attempt to destroy
the willing suspension of disbelief in order to call attention to the
artificiality of modern art, to the difference between what we accept as
reality in art and the way life really is. Breaking the fourth wall is not,
of course, a new phenomena: actors speak directly to the audience in
Shakespeare's plays, for instance. Neither is self-reference (that is,
directly referring to the fact that one is part of a performance): there is a
comic routine in the Commedia dell'Arte where the comedian walks off
the stage, sits in the audience and heckles the other performers. What
does seem to be different about modern efforts to break down the fourth
wall is that they are inherently critical of the way various media create
meaning by manipulating their audiences.
This critical impulse began quite early in films, owing to the
unique genius of silent film producer Mack Sennett and, in one glorious
film, actor/director Buster Keaton. In Sherlock, Jr., Keaton, who runs
the projector in a film theatre, falls asleep and dreams that he runs up to
the screen and enters the mystery he is projecting. At first, one of the
actors in the film throws him out of the screen. He jumps back in, but,
just as he is about to attack the villain, there is a cut to another scene.
What follows is a brilliant sequence where, just as Keaton orients
himself to being in one milieu, the scene cuts to another, completely
different, location (for instance, he dives into a stream, only to end up,
after a cut, head first in a sand dune). The sequence is very funny, but it
has a serious point: film reality is different from our reality, and real
people do not belong there. The longer Keaton stays in the film (this
sequence of scenes makes up the majority of Sherlock, Jr.), the more
bizarre the imagery becomes. Keaton, who was extremely scrupulous
about not using special photographic techniques in his films,
specifically went against his rule in this film to make the point that film
has its own logic based on the surreal juxtaposition of images, and that
once one has entered the film world, one must abandon all one knows
about logical cause and effect.
A more recent example of an effective use of self-reference is
Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which a character in a film
walks off the screen because he has fallen for a woman in the audience.
The studio panics when the character starts to forget lines and speak to
the audience in theatres in other cities, and sends the actor who played
the character to convince the character to return to the screen. Specific
instances of the difference between reality and film (as when the
character tries to pay for a meal in the real world with "studio money,"
or when he indicates that he has no experience of whores because it's
not written into his character) are both funny and telling.
One other film which successfully employs self-reference is
Robert Altman's The Player, an acidic look at Hollywood itself. In the
film, a studio executive is sent threatening postcards from a writer he
once said he would talk to about a script the writer submitted to him, but
never did. In a fit of rage, he murders a writer, but it turns out not to be
the one who was sending the threatening postcards. One of the major
conceits of the film is that characters talk about what goes on in films
even as the devices are used in The Player. The effect is to constantly
undermine the audience's suspension of disbelief, and to call into the
question the validity of Hollywood's formulas.
The ending of the film takes this concept and, incredibly, turns it
back on itself like the proverbial snake swallowing its own tale.
(WARNING: the ending to a film is about to be revealed. If you are
sensitive about such things, see the movie before you read the rest of the
paragraph.) Throughout the film, various studio executives, but
particularly the protagonist, insist that Hollywood movies must have a
happy ending. And, at first blush, it appears that The Player does have a
happy ending: the executive becomes head of the studio and marries the
lover of the writer. But, for this ending to be happy, the executive
literally gets away with murder. Furthermore: during the course of the
film, a writer claims his script shows the innocent being punished and
the guilty going free because "that's just the way life is" (he recants
when a rough cut of the film tests badly). However, despite its
ostensibly happy ending, that is exactly how The Player ends: the guilty
man goes free, and the innocent (in this case, his girlfriend at the start of
the film, who loses him and her job at the studio) ends up suffering
(literally by skinning her knee -- she ends up crying and bloodied on the
curb). The Player portrays a complex relationship between film and
reality.
Postmodern artistic techniques such as self-reflection are almost
always comic. There are a number of possible explanations for why this
is so. If we believe Freud (humour is an expression of the id, a way for
us to release antisocial impulses in a socially accepted way), self-
reflexiveness is funny because it exposes the arbitrariness of accepted
social custom. Another theory would have it that self-reflection is funny
because it is unexpected. Another theory would is that self-reflection is
funny because it juxtaposes absurd elements. Whatever the mechanism,
we experience these things as funny. This has become an irresistible
temptation to filmmakers who want to get an easy laugh from a media-
weary audience, even when the filmmakers have no clue as to what
they're doing with it.
Take, for example, Sleepless in Seattle. The signature line from
the film (used in the commercials) was: "You don't want to be in love,
you want to be in love in a movie." This and the comparisons between
relationships in the 90s and the relationships in the film An Affair to
Remember, which is frequently referred to in Sleepless, would suggest
that the film is intent on exposing the differences between screen
romance and real romance. No such luck. The main movement of the
film is towards an ending in which the main male and female characters
find their true love -- each other -- in a reenactment of a scene in Affair.
In fact, the ending of the film reinforces the concepts of romance which
Sleepless seemed poised to criticize.
Or consider the extremely popular Wayne's World, based on the
Saturday Night Live sketches. There is a scene where Wayne and Garth
claim they will not bow down to the current Hollywood trend towards
product placement; at the same time, they are showing off products. It's
a funny scene, and can be read as critical of the practice, although the
satirical intent is far too mild to be taken too seriously. Other self-referential techniques include Wayne speaking directly to the audience
and subtitles which seem to have no relation to the dialogue being
spoken. Here, again, the intent isn't so much to make the audience think
about the artificiality of film convention as to bring them in on the joke
("We've all watched too many movies, so let's have a laugh at it"). In
this way, postmodern techniques which were once used to challenge the
audience's assumptions about art are now being used to reinforce the
idea that we're all a little superior.
Perhaps the worst recent offender in this category is The Last
Action Hero. The film is frustrating because there are two wickedly
funny scenes which indicate that the filmmakers had an idea of what they
were doing. The first is a parody of Hamlet starring Arnold
Schwarzenegger ("Something's rotten in the state of Denmark...and he's
out to fix it!") which pokes fun at the actor's lack of dramatic range. The
other is a scene late in the film where Schwarzenegger, playing himself,
plugs his restaurant in an interview after his wife begs him not to, a dig
at the perception (whether right or wrong) that Schwarzenegger is
constantly promoting himself.
Unfortunately, the majority of the film is a one note joke about a
kid who is magically transported into a film and can't convince the hero
that he's actually in a film. Unlike, say, The Purple Rose of Cairo, in
which the premise was developed with constantly fresh variations, The
Last Action Hero isn't especially clever; but, worse, it just isn't
particularly funny.
There seem to be three phases of artistic innovation: in the first,
individual artists create new techniques or forms; in the second, an
intermediate group of artists popularize the new techniques or forms for
the social elite (especially for other artists); in the third, a final group of
artists popularize the new techniques or forms for the masses (at which
point a new round of artistic innovation kickstarts the whole process
once again). By the third phase, the original creative impulse has
usually disappeared, drained of its intellectual content and replaced by
a cynical kind of calculation intended to give it mass appeal. While
practitioners of the second phase of self-reflexive comedy (such as
Robert Altman and Woody Allen, both of whom work independently of
the Hollywood studio system) still make films, the ground seems to have
been ceded to the mass populizers of the third phase.
Film American!
Consider the following joke: Q: What is the difference between Toronto
and Montreal? A: Toronto thinks it is the centre of the universe, while
Montreal thinks it is the universe.
Laughing yet?
Consider a completely different joke: Q: What is the difference
between New York and Los Angeles? A: New York thinks it is the
centre of the universe, while Los Angeles thinks it is the universe.
Now, that's a lot funnier.
I use these two jokes to illustrate a point: humour is largely
culturally bound. A typical American audience would not recognize the
humour in the joke as originally told because it would not be familiar
with the two cities. Even an American audience made up largely of film
people wouldn't necessarily get the joke; although they may be familiar
with the cities (because two fairly large North American film festivals
are held in them), they aren't necessarily aware of the rivalry between
the two cities.
Recasting the joke using American cities makes it far more
accessible to an American audience (which, I presume, is largely the
readership of this publication). It also illustrates an important point:
although the forms of humour are fairly consistent from one society to
another, when attempting to move a specific joke from one culture to
another, its content must be reworked in order to make it understandable
to its new audience.
In the last 10 years or so, Hollywood has started to take remakes
of foreign films seriously. Trois Hommes et un Couffin, La Femme
Nikita and Le Totale are three fairly well known examples. (Oops,
sorry, I meant Three Men and a Baby, Point of No Return and True
Lies.) Unlike works from other American media, remakes of foreign
films do not have a built-in audience: few Americans go to foreign
films, and those who do aren't likely to be interested in an English
language remake. The reason Hollywood is going a little foreign remake
crazy is that, given the perception that there are few good scripts by
Hollywood writers, producers are looking to other countries to find
good stories.
Remakes of foreign films can be successful if the filmmakers are
prepared to translate the elements specific to the culture of the original
into elements specific to their own culture. The story of Trois Hommes
et un Couffin, for instance (three self-centred bachelors have to cope
with a baby which is abandoned on their doorstep) would seem to be
even more appropriate for an American film than the French original;
American culture is, if anything, even more individualistic and
materialistic. However, where the French don't hesitate to give their
protagonists unsavoury personality traits, American filmmakers soften
their characters in order to make them more palatable to a mass
audience (especially if those characters are played by the likes of Tom
Selleck and Ted Danson). Thus, the characters in Three Men and a
Baby, rather than having serious problems, are just a bit misguided, a
change which ultimately turns the film into unwatchable mush.
In addition, the funniest moment in the film occurs when the baby
pees on the three protagonists, suggesting that the level of comic
invention wasn't especially high. One problem with Hollywood
comedies, a problem which is not limited to remakes of foreign
comedies, is that, once the comic premise has been set up, the
filmmakers don't seem to see the need to build any comic momentum by
creating a series of increasingly funny individual scenes. Thus, many
Hollywood comedies are funny in bursts rather than in any sustained
way, or, worse, contain one joke which is repeated over and over again.
While Trois Hommes et un Couffin seems a natural film to
remake for an American audience, the remaking of a film such as
Cousin, Cousine is more problematic. In the film, a married woman and
her cousin, who is also married, start spending time together. When
their two families start gossiping about the two of them having an affair,
they decide to prove the gossip right and embark on one, a joyous affair
which gives them both much pleasure. (In one well known scene, the
lovers paint designs on each other with magic markers.) The film ends
with the lovers riding off on his motorcycle, to the stunned shock of
their families.
Cousins, the American remake, was a predictable disaster. The
original film was based on a European concept of sexuality which
doesn't apply in Puritanical America. The filmmakers were left with an
insoluble dilemma: to retain the joyousness of the affair, which would
be highly unpopular with an American audience; or to tone down the
pleasure the affair gave the two protagonists, which would make the
film morose and unwatchable (destroying the comic potential of the
plot). Cousin, Cousine is a good example of the problems inherent in
attempting to transport a comic idea from one culture to another.
Le Totale shows a different approach to working with foreign
material. In its French original, it is a minor film about a spy who is so
good at working undercover, his wife is about to leave him because she
is bored with their life together. True Lies, the American remake, has
maintained this basic outline, jettisoning almost all the detail in the
original. A large part of the reason is the personalities involved: James
Cameron is an action director who is always trying to push the special
effects envelop, while Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to star in splashy
effects-driven movies because it takes the pressure off him to actually
act (something which he has not, in the past, proven he could do). But
they may have stumbled upon the secret to successfully remaking foreign
films: take only the barest essentials and remake it in the image of an
American film. (On the other hand, it doesn't hurt to be making an action
film: explosions translate very well into any language.)
Remakes of foreign comedies aren't necessarily doomed to
failure. They are not, however, the easy path to success which some
producers seem to see them as.
There Are a Million Genre Parodies in Naked Hollywood
Parody occurs when one work of art is mimicked for comic effect in
another. The work being mimicked must be recognizable, so the closer
the parody is to the original, the stronger its comic effect. Parody
usually offers a single, simple twist on the original; it is most effective
when it brings to the foreground flaws in the original work. Parody is
also frequently used as a vehicle for satire; that is, parody is the means
by which the artist makes fun of social institutions or relationships.
Parody has long been a staple of film comedy. Buster Keaton's
silent feature Three Ages is actually an elaborate parody of D. W.
Griffith's Intolerance. The Warner Brothers cartoons of the 1930s and
1940s contained a lot of cultural parody; for instance, The Rabbit of
Seville, featuring Bugs Bunny, was a parody of the opera The Barber of
Seville. (The Rabbit of Seville is an example of the specific form of
parody in which a "high art" form is vulgarized. The effect, aside from
being very funny, implicitly criticizes the difference between high and
popular art.)
In the 1970s, a new form of parody developed: genre parody.
Rather than make fun of a specific work, as traditional parody had done,
genre parody makes fun of the shared characteristics of works in a
specific genre (detective fiction, science fiction, romance,
action/adventure, among others). When it works, genre parody points to
the weaknesses inherent in a whole body of work.
Genre parodies, like the genre works on which they are based,
could only have arisen in a mass culture. Before the nineteenth century,
the only identifiable artistic genres were epic poems and religious
literature (which you parodied at the risk of your immortal soul). As
culture became mass-produced, cultural products became standardized.
Two of the earliest practitioners of genre parody were Woody
Allen and Mel Brooks. Allen made fun of prison pictures (Take the
Money and Run), science fiction (Sleeper) and Russian literature and
the films of Ingmar Bergman (Love and Death); Brooks made fun of
westerns (Blazing Saddles), Frankenstein films, especially those of the
1930s (Young Frankenstein) and the films of Alfred Hitchcock (High
Anxiety).
The parodies were frequently clever, but what sets these films
apart from their successors was that there was more to them than just
parody. Sleeper, for instance, contained a fair bit of political satire
(remember the scenes of rebels stealing the nose of the Great Leader?),
while the subtext of Love and Death was a serious concern for the
human condition. By placing a contemporary black man in a traditional
western in Blazing Saddles, Brooks was, in his wildly inventive way,
commenting on racial issues. There was also a sense, especially in
Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety, that the filmmaker had a fondness for the films which were being parodied.
This changed with Zukor, Abrams, Zukor's Airplane. For one
thing, the film refers only to films in the airplane disaster genre which
was popular in the 1970s (a genre which, with its overblown
melodrama, was admittedly ripe for parody), limiting the scope of the
humour. In addition, Airplane sacrificed what little coherent
characterization and narrative logic there was in previous genre
parodies, opting for assembly line joking. While this form, in which one
joke follows rapidly after another, is the standard style for stand-up
comic (the reasoning being that if the audience doesn't like one joke, the
next one comes too quickly for them to lose interest in the comic), it isn't
the best use of the film medium since it ignores the elements which can
make film comedy such an engaging, and occasionally moving,
experience.
Because the film was a financial success, spawning two sequels
and a police procedural genre parody tv show and film series (Police
Squad and The Naked Gun), the Airplane style has become the standard for genre parodies. Even more than that, studios now look studiously for
two or three films with common themes in order to find a genre which
they can then turn into a parody. When dangerous women were featured
in films like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, they were inevitably
parodied in Fatal Instinct and Hexed. Films like Lethal Weapon and The Silence of the Lambs spawned National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon, while Hot Shots and its sequel were originally based on films like Top Gun and Rambo, although they drifted outside their particular genre.
Several aspects of the current state of genre parody should
be noted. One is that they are now pushed by studios rather than
writer/directors because executives recognize that they have a built-in
audience (the people who enjoyed the films which are parodied); thus,
they get made whether or not there is particular inspiration for them.
Furthermore, the screenplays are written by committee (rather than by a
single inspired individual), which, even in the best current genre
parodies, means the humour will be uneven. (While many comedians,
including Keaton, the Marx Brothers and Mel Brooks used more than
one or two writers on many of their films, those films are marked by
their individual comic sensibilities. The director/star was able to give
his films a unifying comic vision which most current comedies by
committee, created by a producer and a director-for-hire, do not have.)
Finally, the process by which these films are made virtually
guarantees that, rather than the affection of Woody Allen or Mel Brooks,
they treat the films they are parodying with contempt. While many of
these parodied films arguably deserve contemptuous treatment, without
the wit of early Allen or Brooks, such parodies frequently end up sour
and unpleasantly nasty.
This is how we get terribly unfunny films like Hexed.
A Pre-sold Bargain Is No Bargain If It Isn't Well WrittenStar Trek. The Jetsons. The Addams' Family. The Beverly Hillbillies.
Wayne's World. Car 54, Where are You? Coneheads. The Fugitive.
Maverick. The Flintstones. Gilligan's Island...Gilligan's Island, for
goodness' sake! Okay, Hollywood is clearly pandering to the nostalgic
yearnings of Baby Boomers who were brought up on television -- is that
really such a problem? Well, yes. It is a problem because the structural
requirements of episodic television are completely different from those
of feature films, a subtlety too few producers or directors seem to have
grasped.
Consider the obvious: characters in episodic television must end
every episode at more or less the same place they were in the beginning.
The industrial nature of television requires this: when you have half a
dozen writers working on scripts for a show at the same time, they
cannot stray too far from the character descriptions or basic situations;
if they do, they will destroy the continuity between the scripts they are
working on and the scripts the other writers are working on. (There are
a couple of exceptions. One is a series where the character arcs are
determined by the producers before the writers are assigned to write
their scripts; this allows for character development over a season.
Another exception is at the end of a season, or when an actor dies or
otherwise leaves the show; here dramatic character transformations are
possible. And, finally, there are cartoons like The Simpsons and The
Critic, where bizarre things are constantly happening without arousing
concerns about continuity because, well, they're cartoons and they're not
expected to take continuity seriously. However, for the vast majority of
episodic television, especially prime time comedy, the rule holds.)
This is, of course, the exact opposite of longer works such as
films, where the proganist is expected to change due to the events of the
story. (Or, to state the idea a little differently, the protagonist, who
contains conflicting impulses, in the end chooses to act in a way he
didn't appear to be in the beginning. It is the difference between a
coward miraculously becoming a hero and finding the heroism that had
always been latent in his personality, but not expressed.) It's not that
television characters don't learn anything: you will often find a trite
little homily at the end of a television show. However, it is rarely
something so profound that it changes a character.
In films like Wayne's World or The Blues Brothers (the first
film to be based on a sketch from Saturday Night Live), no effort has
been made to expand on the basic ideas of the characters. The results
are paper-thin characters who cannot maintain our interest for a full 90
minutes and plotlines which are either ill-thought out or simply not
dramatically engaging. Complicating the situation is the proclivity
Hollywood has for making sequels, which ensures characters will not
be made complex by effectively making films episodic in the same way
television is.
Film and television also differ in their fundamental story
structure. A half hour comedy show has two basically foreshortened
acts: the first act sets up a situation, the second act resolves it. Most
film comedies (especially those written by disciples of Field) contain
three longer acts (each approximately the length of an entire television
comedy): the first act sets up the situation, the second act complicates
the situation and escalates the comic action, and the third act contains
the resolution. It should be obvious that a comic situation which is fully
developed in a half hour cannot be sustained over 90 minutes, but so
many studio executives just don't get it. (Aha, I hear you cry, but a
successful television show will have 24 episodes -- 12 hours -- in a
single season! The implication is that they sustain a comic premise over
a longer period than a feature film. I would argue that the basic unit of
television is an episode, not a show. Most series tell the same sort of
story over and over again; the rest don't stray very far from an
established formula.)
One aspect of getting the story going so quickly is that characters
in television comedy are thinly drawn, rarely more than two
dimensional caricatures. The wonderful luxury of having 90 or more
minutes to explore characters in a feature film is that it allows you to
explore some of their internal contradictions, to give them that crucial
third dimension. I see no practical reason why, in the transition from
television to film, characters cannot be fleshed out so that they deserve
the longer treatment. The practice thus far, however, has been to transfer
characters more or less unchanged; the reason being that audiences are
going to te film to recreate the experience of the television show, and
they don't want it tampered with. Unfortunately, this almost always has
resulted in characters who cannot maintain their comic interest over an
entire feature film.
Another aspect of television which film writers have to keep in
mind is that the action is broken up by commercials. Thus, at certain
pre-set intervals, the audience must be given an emotional high so that
they will not change the channel during the commercials. In fact,
television writers are encouraged to produce as many high points
(which have sometimes been referred to as "jolts") per episode as
possible to keep viewers from turning to another program. This tends to
make television programs plot-oriented. Film is, of course, completely
different: the audience has made a conscious decision to spend time in a
theatre, so it has a stake in getting the most out of the particular work. In
any case, it is difficult to change films if you don't like the one you are
watching. As a result, film is not as driven to supply as many jolts per
minute as possible, and (action/adventure pictures notwithstanding) can
afford to explore character more fully.
In its effort to supply as many joke jolts per minute, television
comedy often abandons plot and character altogether, opting for a string
of one-liners. (In this way, television has influenced current genre
parodies, which often take a similar form.) Even the best of these kinds
of films have a superficial feel because there is no focus to the story
(and sometimes virtually no story).
It should also be pointed out that the creative process in film and television is radically different. Traditionally, a feature film has been the product of a single writer working with a single producer or director. (The exceptions of a successful screenplay written by a committee are relatively small in number: Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz and perhaps as many as a dozen others.) Television, with its insatiable deadlines, cannot work this way; a dozen or more writers may write for a series over the course of a season, and three or four writer working on a single episode is not unheard of. This is made possible by the fact that the characters are so broadly drawn that, as long as they follow simple guidelines, different writers cannot make them do anything that is out of character. In film, by contrast, a certain subtlety of characterization is necessary to keep an audience's attention, something which is difficult to sustain over an entire feature.
Translating characters from sketches takes these problems and makes them substantially worse. In a sketch, you have to set up the characters and situations very quickly, exploit them for as long as you can make them funny, and move on to next. (Sketches are the bar peanuts of comedy.) The characters are the briefest of caricatures, and the situations usually involve a single comic element; neither character nor situation were meant to be sustained for 90 or more minutes.
This is not to say sketches cannot be turned into feature films. However, it would take a radical rethinking on the part of the writer: the characters would have to be given far more depth (including a much richer backstory than even a series of sketches can provide) and a proper story which can provide the spine for a series of comic scenes over a feature's length. However, for reasons already mentioned, this is simply not done.
I should point out that I have written hundreds of pages of sketches as well as feature films. Thus, I come to this debate without prejudice. I do not personally favour one form over the other; both can be used to produce funny work. What I am arguing is that having the ability to do one does not automatically mean you have the ability to do the other (because the skills required are very different), and that what works in one form is likely not to work in the other.
One final comment: all of the foregoing suggests that television values are invading film. Given current industry conditions, this is perhaps inevitable: television writers and directors "graduate" to film, bringing their television training with them; the public, trained by television to have a certain kind of experience, expects the same kind of experience from film. In addition, the television tradition of having several writers work on a single script is becoming increasingly common (although the horror of the Flintstones 32 writers is not likely to be repeated); this assures these films do not have a single comic style. (NAYMAN'S FIRST LAW OF COMEDY WRITING: all other things being equal, the quality of a script is in direct inverse proportion to the number of writers who worked on it.)
Because they superficially seem similar, the public can be forgiven for confusing film and television. Professional screenwriters and directors, on the other hand, cannot.
Conclusion
This essay has assumed a certain critical attitude towards what is humourous and what is not. I do not consider stereotyped characters and cliched scenes funny; and I am harder on films where scenes which are funny come at the expense of believable character or story development than films where the humour flows naturally from the interactions between characters or the forward motion of a particular situation. In this light, I consider a film like Wayne's World a dismal creative failure, even though it was very popular and made obscene amounts of money at the box office.
Given that caveat, what passes for comedy in Hollywood is pretty sad. There can be no artistic comparison, for instance, between the lame studio film The Last Action Hero and the brilliant independent film The Player, or The Beverly Hillbillies and Four Weddings and a Funeral, or Coneheads and Sirens. Independent comedies are invariably funnier (and, not coincidentally, smarter) than studio comedies.
Unfortunately, the rule in Hollywood is that the bad chases out the good. The massive amounts of money which studios use to advertise their latest works gives them a prominence independent films cannot match. This is heightened by the "starmaker machinery," the talk shows, entertainment sections of legitimate newspapers, the gossip of the tabloids, all of which give even more prominence to the works of studios. And, of course, Hollywood makes films with a pre-sold audience because it often is effective in getting people out to their films. (Incredibly, given the massive machinery involved in promoting their films, many studio executives claim that more people see their films than the majority of independent films because their films are inherently better. Get a life, guys, or at least a sense of irony.) Many worthy comedies are not getting the audiences they deserve (while many terrible comedies are getting more attention than they deserve) because the system favours the output of the studios, and the studios tend to develop comedies which are poorly conceived and executed.
My conclusion? If you really want to write comedy in Hollywood, be prepared to sell out right away. The longer you harbour the illusion you will be able to write any meaningful comedy within the system, the harder it will be for you to find work. And if you want to write something funnier than The Beverly Hillbillies, try writing a novel.
This article first appeared in Creative Screenwriting, Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 1995.
