The documentary of Ken Berns:

The Atlantic: What inspired you to explore storytelling as a topic for this film?

Sarah Klein and Tom Mason: Everyone loves a great story. Stories teach us things, move us emotionally, and form the basis of the way we understand the world. As filmmakers, we’ve been telling stories for a while now — but at a certain point we realized that it’s actually really hard to explain what makes a good story. We know it when we see it, but the recipe always proves elusive. Ken Burns has been telling incredible stories for decades, and we thought that if anyone would have a thoughtful perspective on this, it’d be him. So this project started as our own exploration to figure out what that magic dust is that brings his stories to life.

It takes guts to make a documentary about one of documentary cinema’s most iconic filmmakers. How did you approach it?

We were definitely nervous about it. Ken Burns has defined documentary for our whole lives. We both remember sitting with our families watching The Civil War series in awe. We came to this project with a lot of questions and very little idea where they’d lead. He was incredibly patient, and brought his own curiosity and open mind to the conversation about how he tells stories and why. The first time we sent him a cut, we both poured a couple glasses of bourbon and crossed our fingers. Luckily, he liked it.

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BTW: Screenplay rules that affect “Readability” DO MATTER.

most really beloved books have one thing in common — minor characters, who get a fraction of the column inches of the protagonists, wind up becoming audience favorites. This isn’t really an accident: A main character needs to be sympathetic and engaging, but a supporting character needs to do much more — the supporting cast hold your scenery up and either sell the fundamentals of your story, or fail to. If they fail, you fail.

This is something I’ve struggled with for years, and have been grappling with a lot lately. Out of all my obsessing over how to create a supporting cast with staying power, here are some guidelines I’ve come up with:

1) Give them at least one defining characteristic.
The master of “sprawling supporting cast,” for my money, is Dickens. He probably created a few thousand people, out of thin air, over the course of his career, and many of them are so recognizable they’ve become words in the English language. One thing you’ll notice about Dickens is, his minor characters often just have one really weird quirk that defines them — a weird way of talking, or a strange habit. Think the Aged Parent. People are like this in real life, too — lots of people have one or two habits that you notice the first time you meet them, that stand out in your mind even after you learn more about them.

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My name is Bradley Jackson and I’m a 26-year-old writer/director. On Twitter, I’m @BradleyJackson.

Like many of you who frequent this site I aspire to write and hopefully direct great films. Also like many of you, I don’t live–nor do I have the desire to live–in Los Angeles or in California. I currently reside in the great state of Texas and more specifically the even greater city of Austin.

Austin is an amazing place. I have great friends, pay cheap rent and have gotten to work on and make some quality films with amazingly creative people. Plus, my entire family lives in Texas. Moving to LA would seriously damage the good thing I’ve got going here.

However, I’m not an idiot. I know that the beating heart of the film industry resides on the west coast. So I’ve made it a point to visit as often as possible. I recently got back from a very productive two week stint in LA and I’m here to report to you fine readers the pros and cons of being a writer/director who doesn’t live in Hollywood-but wants to work for them.

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ON HOW HE MET ALFRED HITCHCOCK

I had worked on a radio show called Suspense, which was a half-hour drama. Then I worked on The Adventures of Sam Spade and a number of other radio detective shows. He used to listen to them. He heard my name all the time. That’s really what got him interested in me, because I doubt if he had gone to see War Arrow or Red Ball Express or anything else. So he inquired about me. It turned out we had the same agency, MCA, but we were in different departments. He gave me a tryout, and it stuck. He needed a writer for Rear Window, so I went from B movies to A movies overnight.

ON THE WRITING OF ‘REAR WINDOW’

Paramount found Rear Window. Hitch had left Warner Brothers and was looking for a home. And Paramount said if he could get a screenplay out of a Cornell Woolrich story, they would make a deal with him. They gave him a collection called After-Dinner Story, by William Irish [Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1936], a pen name of Cornell Woolrich. Out of about five or six stories, he liked “Rear Window” and brought me in on it. There was no girl in the original. I created the part. Hitch had done Dial M for Murder [1954] with Grace Kelly, and she was beautiful in that film; but there was no life, no sparkle there. He asked me what we should do with her for Rear Window, so I spent time with her for about a week. My wife, Mel, was a successful fashion model, so I gave Grace my wife’s occupation in the film. The way the character posed, the dialogue—it reflected actual incidents in our life.

That was my first A picture with a big director, and I was so keyed up. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have, because I was worried about everything. Yet it turned out well. We worked beautifully together.

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All comedy is built around the same principles. Laughter is the release when we are taken quite suddenly from one expectation to a completely unexpected one.

by HebeDesigns”

The Setup – Why did the Chicken cross the Road?

The first joke everyone learns. This opening line sets up our expectations. Because of our experience with English we may be expecting a deeply thought out answer – a motivation that sheds light on the Chicken’s innate soul… This is also called a “build up” – we’re setting up the audience to think a certain way. What comes next is the punchline.

The Unexpected – To prove to the possum it could actually be done

I bet you were thinking “to get to the other side”. But that was to be expected… The punchline is something completely unexpected, a curveball, a new way of thinking that STILL makes sense. The disconnect between the buildup and the punchline is the essence of comedy – a set up that gets you to think a certain way and then we hit you (punch) with something you didn’t expect.

At the core, all comedy works in this way. From stand up to gross out, smart humor to the lowest of lows.

Now, let’s take a look at a comedy sketch I found this morning that I feel perfectly demonstrate comedic form in sketch writing:

Let’s break this down because there’s nothing like taking something fun and analyzing the hell out of it to make it boring.

The Setup starts with two women talking about a bake sale. The language (and performance) is overly bright and cheery. Even the small throwaway joke (“yum, yum AND YUM!”) fits into this fictional world of “sunshine and lollipops”.

And then we see the exception…

This is also example of the Rule of Three. There are three participants in the bake sale – the first baker sets up the tone of the scene. The second baker establishes the norm (yes, its normal to be cheery) and the third baker breaks the norm.

Now it could be any number of bakers at the table. It could be four or five. But three is the most economical number – one to establish, one to set a norm, one to break it. Any less would not have the impact and any more would just be repetitious.

“I made the nether-pastry of Al-Desh-Rah, the Donut that will End the World”

This is a huge leap from the cheerful rhetoric of the girls. The goth’s monologue is full of rich dark imagery.

“It’s dough is milled between the skulls of men executed for crimes that thieves and murderers alike forsake as ghastly and unforgivable.”

Even on a micro level we are seeing the essence here comedy here. These lines are about a donut – any life time experience reading cook books or visiting a bakery would lead you to believe that confectioneries are not spoken about in this proper gothic manner. Although this may not be the “Punch” of a punchline – the disconnect builds up the sketch in an amusing manner.

“It’s cooked in the boiling fat of animals that have feasted on their own young… It’s icing is a congealed mass of sorrow and despair made viscous with the saccharine discharge of sugar cane plants watered with the blood of the damned… it also has sprinkles”

Here the writer chose four items to list (Floured milled by skulls, cooked in fat, icing, sprinkles) each of these cooking processes described in long dark details to ultimately lead up to the short “Sprinkles” line. Instead of using the Rule of Three the writer goes with four and it works just fine as each of the three cooking stages has its own amusing lines and jokes written in. If the writer did wish to tighten the script here’s where a set of lines could be dropped… but as it is it works fine as an amusing set up to the final punchline.

The final punchline is a role reversal. The Goth, after all that build up, calls back to the “Yum, yum and YUM” joke earlier, dropping the dark nature.

So…

What makes strong comedic writing is the rich layering of setups and unexpected twists. From a holistic view of an entire scene or sequence down to the individual lines themselves, good comedic writing is rich with these patterns of setups and twists.

When writing comedy be mindful of the comedic pattern and figure out how everything fits into the pattern that you want to establish. There are no hard fast rules of comedy but if you understand the mechanisms of what makes something funny, you hone your ear for what’s funny.

The circles are everywhere, if you know to look for them. They’re on the whiteboards around Dan Harmon’s office, on sheets tacked to his walls, on a notepad on the floor of his car. Each one is hand-drawn and divided into quadrants with scribbled notes and numbers sprouting along the edges. They look like little targets.

Harmon, 38, is the creator of Community, a sitcom about a group of community-college study buddies and the most giddily experimental show on network TV. He began doodling the circles in the late ’90s, while stuck on a screenplay. He wanted to codify the storytelling process—to find the hidden structure powering the movies and TV shows, even songs, he’d been absorbing since he was a kid. “I was thinking, there must be some symmetry to this,” he says of how stories are told. “Some simplicity.” So he watched a lot of Die Hard, boiled down a lot of Joseph Campbell, and came up with the circle, an algorithm that distills a narrative into eight steps:

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