802.11me

LA Confidential

There are two ways to succeed in Hollywood, and only two ways: a) total blind luck, and b) formula. Since you never ever want to put your life's eggs in the blind luck basket, if you want to succeed in Hollywood, you will devote yourself to the formula. Fortunately for you, I will now present the simplest possible formula that you can follow in order to get your screenplay produced. This formula is the romantic comedy. Pay careful attention, because you are not just going to write this script and pitch it to writing agents, you are ALSO going to write it with very specific actors/actresses in mind, so that you can take it to THEIR agents. Here then, is your recipe for a highly successful hollywood romantic comedy.

Lead Actresses (choose one):

- Sandra Bullock
- Julia Roberts
- Renee Zellweger

Lead Actors (choose one):

- Hugh Grant

Choose the role for your male lead from one of the following:

- Ruthless Business Tycoon
- Ruthless Attorney
- Misunderstood and overworked Business Tycoon
- Misunderstood and overworked Attorney
- Hapless but Charming Dreamer
- Ruthless but Misunderstood and Charming Politician

Choose your female lead from any of the above roles or the following two additional roles:

- Maid
- Hooker

Ok, we're all set. Let's say we've chosen our male lead, hugh grant, who will be playing a Ruthless Business Tycoon, and our female lead, Julia Roberts, who will be playing a maid. Are we done? no, we are not done, but relax, that was the hard part. We still need a supporting cast, and we can't forget the actual script.

For our supporting actor, we can choose from any of the following:

- Any male actor on the face of the planet who is not immediately and only associated with "blowing things up in action movies". Thus, we only need eliminate Arnold, Vin, The Rock, and unfortunately, Wesley Snipes

For our supporting actress, we can choose any two of the following, but one of them must be non-caucasian, the reason for which will become apparent shortly:

- Queen Latifah
- Emma Thompson
- Anybody now or formerly in a prime time network television show

Lastly, we need to add Colin Firth to the cast, as it is now a rule that he appear in all romantic comedies. we'll figure out what to do with him soon enough. First, we need roles for our supporting actor/actresses.

Choose from one of the following roles for your male supporting actor:

- Evil aide to the good male lead
- Good aide to the heretofore evil male lead

Choose a role for your female supporting actresses from either of the above or the following additional roles:

- Maid
- Hooker
- Female lead's neighbor who brings over pot or booze
- Poor person working a demeaning service job who bumps into female or male lead at random but frequent intervals

Now, two more things before we write our script: first of all, have colin firth do anything, it doesn't matter, he just needs to be in the damned film. Moving on, we come to our non-caucasian female supporting actress. It is the role of this person to play "God" in our film. God is the all-knowing, all-observing, wise counsel to our female or male lead that helps point them in the right direction. it is critical that they play up their non-caucasianess because this is where 93% of the film's laughs come from. If hugh grant's mother tells him to stop being evil and instead focus on his true love and the importance of relationships in his life, we are all headed right for the exits...blagh! nobody wants to hear that garbage! If, however, the female lead goes into a hotel and queen latifah is at the concierge desk and queen latifah gives our female lead sage advice in "street" language like "girl, my man pulls up in a bentley like that, i'm locking myself IN the room, not runnin out for the night!"...whatever, the dialogue's not important. what is important is that God be played by a non-white person with plenty of attitude. Also note that the non-causcasian actress must delicately balance her role as "street God" against a desire by people viewing Romantic Comedies not to see too much reality. Thus, this actress can't be too real, it has to be very two-dimensional with lots of "white street" words, like "girlfriend" and "you go, Girl" and such. Don't start throwing real hip-hop language around or we'll lose our audience.

Now for the dialogue. Relax, i told you the hard part was over! Take a deep breath and go find the scripts for the following movies:

Four Weddings and a Funeral
Pretty Woman
Any other romantic comedy!

Now simply cut and paste snippets of dialogue from 6 or more movies, being sure to get at least one fight between male and female lead scene, one fight between male lead and male or female supporting actor scene, one fight between female lead and male or female supporting actor scene, and one sex scene which goes at the end of the movie.

You are done! Look at you, you just wrote a successful hollywood romantic comedy. what are you waiting for, get out there and sell sell sell!

ps, some people have said to me that you can't just cut and paste dialogue becuase people will recognize it from the other successful film and accuse you of plagiarism. To those people i say, are you kidding? do you get out much? wake up and smell the broccoli, sister. I'll prove it to you. try to match the following bit of dialogue with the movie whence it came. i'll even make it easier by giving you multiple choice:

GIRL
[guy's name], it's three in the morning. I'm
really not in the mood for one of your
practical jokes.

GUY
(insistent)
It's not a joke.[...]
look, just come up and see him, okay?
Five minutes, that's all I ask.

KAREN
I thought you promised to give me some
distance?

GUY
This is purely professional, Karen, I swear!

Karen rolls her eyes, lets loose a tired sigh.

KAREN
Five minutes, not a second more. And I
don't want to hear a word about "us".

GUY
No problem.

Your choices are "Pretty Woman", "Love, Actually", or "Two Weeks Notice". tick, tock, tick, tock............Give up? come on, don't give up! Games are fun!

ok, give up? the dialogue is lifted DIRECTLY from the movie...."Blade", starring Wesley Snipes as some sort of man from the future or something with a sword. The point being, this isn't even a romantic comedy, and you still can't tell because the dialogue JUST DOESNT MATTER. you need only line up the right cast with the right premise and then just ask the director to please shoot the movie in 30 days or less so harvey weinstein doesn't come over to england and go postal on your butt. One last thing, if you do lift your dialogue from films not traditionally considered romantic comedies, be sure to take out lines that hugh grant would never say, such as "That doesn't look like human blood" or "I'm your father, Luke"

You're very welcome.

Posted by Dick at November 11, 2003 01:49 PM | TrackBack