Our Book

Working for $1.00 and Other Misadventures in Screenwriting

Disclaimer: This is not a book about how to write comedy, how to write a screenplay, or how to write a comedy screenplay. It’s certainly not a book about how to sell a screenplay, comedy, or a comedy screenplay. If we knew how to sell a screenplay, we’d be writing another screenplay instead of writing this book. It’s not that we haven’t sold a script, it’s the number of scripts that we haven’t sold. There are dozens of other books you can pick up to learn how to write. We know. We had to read them. We may inadvertently quote those other books, including our own, without realizing it. Writing advice is a ubiquitously common dialect in Hollywood and we tend to forget who we’re quoting. Ultimately, it must have been us who said that brilliant thing. That, or we’re too lazy to cite our references, which we didn’t look up in the first place.

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There are challenges during the creative process to which no writer is immune. Anyone who is immune, well shit, they can’t be a very good writer. The cardinal rule is, “Write what you know.”  Fine, we are the foremost experts on our miscues. There is as much to learn from failure, if not more so, than there is from success. Successful people make us all jealous anyway. We’re not shy about our mistakes. In fact, we revel in them. So, we share our shortfalls as thinly veiled advice about things screenwriters should not do. This is what we understand based on our experiences. Hopefully, it helps you decide what you believe based on your experiences. It’s Schrödinger’s screenplay: the breakdown of a movie that does and does not exist. 

A mentor of mine once cautioned, “Don’t explain everything that you know. You will only expose what you don’tknow.” We only know what we know and know some of what we don’t know. Now, you get to know what we know and a great deal of what we don’t know. There, now you know what you are getting yourself into. 

“And that’s all I have to say about that.”        -Forest Gump

INTRODUCTION

“Backstory”

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LOUIE:   “Chicagoland”, somewhere in the 20th century. I was born on my mother’s 37th birthday. Oh, she loved that. Consequently, halfway around the world my future wife was being born at the same time. Great story, and when you’re born with a great story you get hooked on them early. You never think one day can change your whole life. But, sometimes, there is that one day.

KEVIN:  I was born on Easter Sunday in Southern California, but I wasn’t supposed to enter the world until mid-May. I was such a preemie that if I’d been born a day earlier, I’d still have gills. They had to put me in the incubator to cook a little longer. That’s why my dad always said I had such a big... 

set of lungs.

LOUIE:  I blame everything on Kermit the Frog. Yes, yes, I do...

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For more, ask us for the manuscript. No really, ask us.