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Hi,I recently made friends with the producer of "News For Blondes" and he did a short news video of one of my stories and I wanted to see what people think of it:Funny, stupid, well done?Elroy Williswww.elroysemporium.com

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]Hi, I recently made friends with the producer of "News For Blondes" and he did a short news video of one of my stories and I wanted to see what people think of it[/nq]
Fun! My fave line was the throwaway: "About a hundred dollars."

Very watchable and amusing, good production values, well directed. A weiner.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Hi, I recently made friends with the producer of "News For Blondes" and he did a short news video of one of my stories and I wanted to see what people think of it:

Funny, stupid, well done?[/nq]
Stupid, not funny talking heads. Cheap shot on born-agains (who make their own cheap shots).

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Hi, I recently made friends with the producer of "News For Blondes" and he did a short news video of one of my stories and I wanted to see what people think of it:

Funny, stupid, well done?[/nq]
Yawn

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Hi, I recently made friends with the producer of "News For Blondes" and he did a short news video of one of my stories and I wanted to see what people think of it:

Funny, stupid, well done? Elroy Williswww.elroysemporium.com[/nq]
Okay here are my thoughts.
First you don't want to repeat yourself and in both cases you had the interviewer essentially say what had happened explaining how the woman had been killed and then interviewing the husband who then explained how the woman had been killed and then he explained what the woman had seen and then he interviewed the guy who explained what the woman had seen.
That's a bad idea. In both cases, the interviewer should "intro'd" the story a wife's tragic death on the highway and then let the husband explain the first part of the story then let him intro the second part of the scene and then let the guy explain what happened next.
Second and this probably the most crucial thing of all.

What you're doing here is a parody. It's a parody of a news broadcast.

Parody is a very difficult thing to pull off because in order to be successful, it has to walk on the razor edge of being just like the thing that it's parodying. It depends, for it's humor, on taking just one element and exaggerating or inverting it. Once you start tossing in tangential things or trying to be goofy and the whole thing just falls apart.
I once read something written by a comedy writer from the early days of television. He'd written a short black-out for an early comedy show.
Back then there was an advertising slogan "Untouched by human hands" meaning that food had been prepared under very sanitary conditions.

So the very brief black-out consisted of a man ordering a sandwich, he goes to a counter there's a sign that reads, "untouched by human hands" and behind the counter, there's a gorilla who reaches out with the sandwich in his gorilla hand. Bang. That's it. The whole thing is maybe six seconds.
And when the times comes and he sees the sketch there's the guy, he goes to the counter. There's the gorilla but for some incomprehensible reason, they've dressed the gorilla up in a funny costume a sort of silly suit with a funny hat.
And he explained how he wanted to go out into the audience and just apologize to everybody, one by one, because the costume had just screwed the whole thing. What did it have to do with anything? The joke was "Untouched by human hands" it was being handled by something that wasn't human.
Why would the "not-human" thing be dressed up in a funny costume? It simply tossed something random into the mix and by doing that, screwed it up.
For something like that and for something like what you were attempting to work, it requires a perfect "cleanness" of execution.

By that I mean that you can't have your actors and by extension the writer who should be doing everything they can to make this seem to be completely authentic "joke it up."
And that's the real problem. It was "joked up" when the humor, such as it was, should have been situational. That is they all play it dead straight, and the comedy emerges not from them "trying to be funny" as they clearly were but from the events that they describe, in a completely dead pan, serious way (after all, this *is* a tragedy, and how else would it be described on a news program) as they unfold, revealing themselves as progressively more and more absurd.
The way you structure this is to have the "straight account" and it would probably make sense to simply open with the husband describing it his wife seeing a "flight of angels" and Jesus standing in the midst of them, reaching up, toward heaven and then she knew it was time and out she went, up through the sun roof.

Then he turns to the viewer what's the explanation for this tragic event? Investigations by the highway patrol led them to this guy over here.
Well it clearly doesn't work it falls into that same "gorilla in a funny suit" category, to have a fat guy with a moustache saying that a lot of people mistake him for Jesus. It's "funny" in a completely tangential "goo goo gah gah" way in the sense of let's stick a funny line in the middle of this piece, because it's funny and we want to fill this thing up with funny stuff.
But it's not right, because he doesn't look like Jesus and nobody would mistake him for Jesus and he certainly wouldn't, in the real situation, make a joke about something like that. So it breaks the reality of the "situational humor." If he was tall and thin and had long hair and a beard and said, "You know, people have said that I sort of resemble Jesus not that I'm comparing myself or anything," then it makes sense.
And you don't play the guy as a sort of grinning, dopey buffoon. He's involved in something serious. Something tragic. This is the last thing he really wants to be on television about. The more serious he is about it, the more the interviewer has to sort of struggle to get the whole story out so it all has to kind of come out in pieces he'd inflated all of these dolls with helium. Why helium? Well, I'd sort of this idea that I'd string them all together. But then they wouldn't fit in my car, so I had to borrow this truck, and I had to put this tarp over them, and then the tarp came loose and they all started floating up into the sky. And what happened then

and then as I was reaching up, grabbing at these dolls and they're all floating away, up into the sky I look across the highway and the next thing you know, there's this woman standing on top of a blue SUV her hands waving up in the air and she just

and I could have sworn that she was looking right at me.

Then a low bridge took her out.
In everything like this, the challenge the hardest thing is to get the right tone, in the writing and in the performance and that's really where I think this didn't achieve what you were reaching for.

But that's part of the process. You write and make these things so that you can learn and do better next time, so onward and upward.

NMS

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Second and this probably the most crucial thing of all. What you're doing here is a parody. It's a ... else would it be described on a news program) as they unfold, revealing themselves as progressively more and more absurd.[/nq]
Thanks for the comments.
I wish I could have been present when the actors were being selected, and also during the filming, but that's not what happened. I was in Texas and they were shooting in Connecticut. Once I'd settled on the dialogue, things were out of my hands as a writer.

The actors all worked for free, hoping to get their foot in the door for future acting work, so things didn't turn out exactly like I'd hoped, especially how the Jesus character looked and acted.

All in all, I learned several things along the way, which is always a good thing.
BTW, I caught the "Waiting Room" episode of Monsters on the Chiller Channel the other night and saw your name scroll by in the credits. Do you get any kind of residual income from the re-showing of the episodes you worked on? What about the actors? Do they get any residual income? Just curious...

Elroy Willis
www.elroysemporium.com

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@reader1.panix.com:
[nq:1]Hi, I recently made friends with the producer of "News For Blondes" and he did a short news video of one of my stories and I wanted to see what people think of it:

Funny, stupid, well done?[/nq]
A-ha, so you're the originator of this old urban legend!

http://www.snopes.com/religion/rapture.asp
"Origins: This inventive work of fiction was penned and released onto the Internet on 2 August 2001. It was written by Elroy Willis, proprietor of 'Religion in the News', a site that warns visitors what they're in for"

Good show! But I agree with Neal: too talky.
jaybee

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Hi, I recently made friends with the producer of "News ... what people think of it:

Funny, stupid, well done?[/nq]
[nq:1]A-ha, so you're the originator of this old urban legend! http://www.snopes.com/religion/rapture.asp "Origins: This inventive work of fiction was penned and ... the News', a site that warns visitors what they're in for" Good show! But I agree with Neal: too talky.[/nq]
Yeah, I wish I could've had more control over things, since my original story was pretty dead-pan serious and got a lot better reactions than this video is getting...

Elroy Willis
www.elroysemporium.com

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]pinknebulous wrote in misc.writing.screenplays.moderated What scenario would convince the average rapture believer that the rapture was happening right before their eyes?[/nq]
[nq:1]Hey, that's your problem. I'm contemplating why Jews never see the image of Christ or saints in their toast. pink[/nq]
Could it be their big Jew noses block their view?
I'm just sayin.
Signed Marybones.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Could it be their big Jew noses block their view? I'm just sayin. Signed Marybones.[/nq]
[nq:1]Woo hoo, faux-antisemitic-reverse-spam-w/pathetic-fake-attribution. Most totally lame, dude. Be l33t.[/nq]
Wow! A genuine Valley Girl circa 1982.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]I recently made friends with the producer of "News For Blondes" and he did a short news video of one of my stories and I wanted to see what people think of it:

Funny, stupid, well done?[/nq]
Uh... may I vote for the middle one?

alt.flame Special Forces
"You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly." Hank Williams

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