Recently, Shooting People asked community members to comment on their experiences with the site’s Script Pitch service – a conduit through which screenwriters can connect with filmmakers to start building something beautiful… so long as they keep the dialogue going. Despite those times a promising something fizzled out to nothing, we haven’t done too badly from the conversations that carried on.

So we replied:

False starts are emblematic of any collaborative venture, so we tend to ignore them: connections that go nowhere, dialogues that end before they ever really begin – who hasn’t been there…? The real value of a network becomes clearer once those who feed in decide to trust their instincts and take a chance on a project they might not have initially considered.

We had some false starts. Some dead-end dialogues. Then we connected with a script seeker on SP who’d never directed or particularly considered comedy. The script she was curious about was a comedy, but it had an indirect appeal. We met for a beer at the BFI. We talked. We committed. Rewrites were made to develop a shared vision and accommodate production values. People were drafted in from the real-life production world to work on ‘something fun’, and within the year, we had ‘Snug As A Bug’ filmed, screened and earning laurels on the festival circuit.

Immediately after, we began working with Snug’s producer on ‘Making A Killing’ where all the necessary production ducks fell into their rows in less than five months. This screened for the first time in late September.

More dialogues. More connections. Four more shorts were made in the calendar year with the director of ‘Snug’. A feature’s being pushed. Some very interesting people are getting to know what we’re about… and it’s no word of a lie to say that it all fans out from that one connection on Script Pitch for a project that wasn’t necessarily ‘the one’ for a director we’ve now made five films with.

If I’d say anything to anyone coming into this diverse collaborative network, it’s open your mind a lot further than you’ve opened it up until now. All of our successes, major and minor, feature collaborators who’ve made major comfort zone or preference concessions to see these projects through… quite a lot of which has rubbed off on us.

And so on we go, ready for more new projects, more new conversations.

Who wants to talk…?

Find someone interested in filming your work… check!

Hope that that someone visualises your characters and situations through a similarly-shaped set of lenses… check!

Cast a furtive glance to the heavens and pray that your box-checking someone also has the drive and ambition to attract and mobilise additional talent to roll up collective filmmaking sleeves and actually make a flippin’ film… CHECK!

We count ourselves very lucky to have met Louise who continues to impress us with an unerring sense of ‘mission’ and her capacity to work quickly and efficiently towards a quality end product: it’s why we’re happy to write for her.

Two of our scripts have featured on Louise’s #oneshortfilmamonth project with a third slated for later in the year. She recently posted a blog about her methods and motivations which is well worth a look:

#oneshortfilmamonth – Louise C. Galizia

View at Medium.com

Andy pulls together a little of what makes Rich Teasers tick on the comedy front. And tock. And chime on the hour…

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We write a lot of comedy here at Rich Teasers.  In fact, the only time we’re not squaring off chunky layers of laugh cement with the funny trowel is when we’re writing about people breathing their last to scratchy old Erik Satie records or hideous acts of butchery and cannibalism in the bad-dream backwoods of mid-18th Century America (tease, tease…).

As committed as we are to diverse storylines and styles, funny is never too far from the front of the class with a hand in the air and an apple for Teacher whenever we sit for an earnest, brow-furrowed script brainstorm.  Just turning the briefest of thoughts to any of the following comic staples is enough for us to spray hot, milky tea over thousands of pounds of sensitive and irreplaceable computer equipment:

• man looking over shoulder tripping on kerb;
• man falling into canal after being hit on head by plank;
• jogger ricocheting off lamppost into canal;
• semi-naked cyclist riding through fence panel into canal;
• anyone slipping on poo and skidding into canal [funnier if Prince Philip or Bono];
• woman suffering from dementia in care home.

Hang on… dementia? How’s that funny? Any combination of poo, plank, canal and Bono is a guaranteed, cast-iron giggle winner so why chuck in an inglorious poke at a terrifying, dignity-sapping condition like dementia…?

We recently wrote a comic short called Home For The Bewildered [see LOGLINES] which was inspired by an observation of middle-stage Alzheimer’s during a Sunday lunch with friends. One of the dining fraternity brought along his elderly mother, fully in the grip of the ‘forgetfuls’. She forgot where she was. She forgot why there was food in front of her. She forgot my name. Repeatedly. My mate’s poor old mum. My poor old mate who’s had to sit back and watch the slow draining away of all that awareness and self-possession without the slightest power to stop it. No great glut of tummy chuckles there then.

DOCTOR:  It appears the tumour is inoperable, Mr. Jones.  I’m so very sorry.

[still on the phone, MR. JONES jogs into a lamppost and ricochets into an adjacent canal]

Except we all laughed over roast and pudding that Sunday. Quite a lot as it happened. Not at the condition. Not at the loss of dignity or the frightening appreciation of how it all ends in the long run. We laughed at those moments in isolation when circular conversations, repeated questions and baffling non-sequiturs are just plain funny, regardless of how or why they come about. They make us all a little forgetful with their sudden and inexplicable interjections. A little less self-possessed, caught in the dazzling headlight of the moment. Trying desperately not to express the slightest amusement at the many tail-chasing breaks in proceedings, it took me a while to realise my mate was chuckling through every meandering, yes-but-no-but interaction with his mum. He just didn’t seem like a man at the most sharp, most painful end of this deeply unfunny affliction.

A man laughing at a cycle/plank/canal incident yesterday

It would’ve been easy to part company with a few mumbled fibs about early Monday morning starts then spend the remainder of the weekend hoping to God our own marbles wouldn’t one day file for divorce, but it didn’t end thus. We left instead after a great catch-up, a few good laughs and some wonderful, funny memories of a lovely lady who couldn’t quite put her finger on her lunch.

And that’s where we often find ‘funny’ at Rich Teasers:  stuck somewhere in the middle of the not-so-funny barrel of awkward, collar-tugging titters. Not because it’s deliberately provocative. Not because it’s more worthy than the poo-and-plank stuff or because “nobody’s done it for laughs yet“. Home For The Bewildered came about because a confused old lady in a care home can be as funny as a semi-naked cyclist riding through a fence panel into a canal. And sometimes she might not be as confused as she appears – just have a squizz at the script…

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As always, if you want to know more about our scripts or wish to explore the possibility of filming one, have a browse through our LOGLINES section or strike up a conversation via our contacts in, er… CONTACTS.

Rich shows the other side of the coin… and it’s ‘heads’.  Or rather, ‘two heads’.

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Firstly: yeah, what he said [Part 1]. Co-writing works for us for a numbers of reasons and can yield advantages which might be worth thinking about if you’re a ‘lone-wolf.’ Or a lone Wilf.

Often Andy and I start work on HALF an idea and because there are two of us, it becomes a WHOLE idea… whereas if there’s just one of you, it might remain a HALF-arsed idea for a WHOLE lot longer. You might not even think it’s half an idea, just the beginning of a fragment of a teensy bit of an idea. But share it with your co-writing mucker and see what happens. Your co-writer has an idea that latches itself onto your first idea, which in turn sparks something else and before you know it, there’s a plot unfolding. And if nothing happens then you were right, it wasn’t even half an idea and you’d be better off moving onto something else.

Never under-estimate the value of having someone whose job it is to listen to you spout out your half-ideas and add useful suggestions about how to mould them into something whole or just into… something. Someone who can ask you searching questions like:

• Why did the killer use the candlestick and not the rope / revolver / lead piping / mechanical egg-whisk?
• Wouldn’t it be better if that character was an old woman instead of Tom Cruise?
• Do we HAVE to have a llama in this scene?

Someone to work off, so that between you, you can tease out what the story, or scene, or character really needs. Or someone who will just say to you:

“Er… No.”

Sometimes you just need that. But it’s better coming from someone you trust, someone with a vested interest in making your manuscript as good as it possibly can be. The deal is of course that you have to put that trust in too. It doesn’t work if you get in a huff about your golden egg of an idea being cricket-batted by your writing buddy rather than transformed into a delightful soufflé. It only works if you aren’t too precious about your writing; if you are, screenwriting might not be for you in all honesty. This is a collaborative business and it pays to be flexible. Bend in the breeze. Like a ninja. A bendy ninja.

Having another PoV alongside your own is also an instant benchmark; you can tell instantly if your partner is excited by your suggestion, has suggestions of her/his own or stands staring at her/his shoes whilst tumbleweed rolls past with some plaintive harmonica. This is especially important if you need to get a sense of whether something is funny or not—much harder to do when you’re on your own, reeling off your one-liners to yourself to see if you crack up (or just crack).

ANDY:  …so it’s basically a Jane Austen-y type period romance that ends with a Mafia/Yakuza gun battle at a dolphinarium.

RICH: …??!?

ANDY:  Right.  I’ll just pop the old coat on and be off then…

Andy and I have been mates for more than 20 years, which helps. It means we share a sense of humour and frames of reference, most of which fall under guitar-bands, cartoons from the 70s and savoury snacks. This gives a kind of short-hand that helps us to short-cut rather than short-circuit.

But more than this, having a writing partner does make you GET ON WITH IT. Sure, play ideas ping-pong, act stuff out to see if it works, wave your hands in the air like you just don’t care… as long you’re being productive. When there’s two of you in the room, the process can take many forms. Even if one of you isn’t in the mood, you feed off the energy of your other writing ‘twinnie’. When I write on my own, the risk of an energy crisis is greater than an OPEC embargo – the ideas ping-pong has no ping, just pong, and the lure of noodling around in the Twitter-verse instead is too great to resist.

Having a mate to write with helps you encourage/cajole/beat great work out of one another and there’s definitely a sense that you don’t want to let your co-writer down… or let them write all the best bits.

Some chalk and cheese just feeding off each other’s cool and diverse ideas, yesterday.

Also, being in a team means the work tends to take shape a little quicker, though with one caveat: that you actually DO THE WORK. That means, no faffing* around, chatting about the footie, girlfriends, boyfriends, girl-boy friends, footie friends, or just last night’s drunken shenanigans**. Unless of course it leads to you actually writing a scene about exactly that. Co-writing can be great if it gives you more focus, but beware that it can derail your best intentions too.

It also helps if you divvy up the workload: if one of you is in full-flow on a full-blown flight of fancy, the other needs to grab pen/paper, PC, Dictaphone or camera to make sure the outpourings are recorded somehow, somewhere before they flutter away like rainbow-coloured sparkle dust in a gust of Satanic hell-trump. Or, if one of you does dialogue better, the other takes care of the structuring and scenic ‘book-ending’. And so it moves forward, as it does for me ‘n’ him, alternating the lead-and-follow:  Holmes and Watson; Bodie and Doyle; Terry and June.

But we always, ALWAYS, take turns making the tea.

[* faffing is a word. Yes it is.]

[** also a word. Official.]

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As always, if you want to know more about our scripts or wish to explore the possibility of filming one, have a browse through our LOGLINES section or strike up a conversation via our contacts in, er… CONTACTS.

Not a ‘lads-mag’ Jane Austen but a look back at how an online chat and a couple of postprandial meal softeners took us from 0 to 3 scripts before closing time and the last of the Bacon Fries…

* * * * *

We’d arranged a Skype call with director John at 7:30 to discuss the progress of two of our shorts as well as the finer points of life, work and funding in John’s fresh new Glaswegian fields. We rattle through the preliminaries in a few short minutes:

• the scripts are still sexy;
• a production team is being assembled;
• Scotland is supernaturally cold;
• John’s bed is supernaturally messy (cheers, Skype…)

John distracts us from his tousled duvet with an eminently sensible plan for funding and filming going forward then advises he’ll be shooting low-to-no budget in a month or so with his new team: do we have anything ‘dialogue-y‘ we could punt his way for two characters in a single location…?

Not at 7:45 with full tummies and an eyeful of ‘crime scene’ bedroom we don’t, but give us some pointers and we’ll see what we can rustle up.

John likes what we do so bats the creative ball deep into our half of the court. He chuckles through our funnies in the right places for the right reasons but he’s also big on ‘dilemma’ and disarming twists and switches. He’s worried he’s being too vague in sketching out what is admittedly a pretty sketchy wish list but we don’t see it that way: give us a pirate hat, a lolly stick and a kilo of cubed beef and we’ll give you the daring deeds and hairs-breadth ‘scapes of buccaneering wooden terror Captain Stroganoff. It’s just got to be short. And cheap. And half the cost again.

DIRECTOR: So what have you got I could shoot in a day?

WRITER: The 25th Century. A space station perched on the outer ring of Saturn. Two gigantic space millipedes…

DIRECTOR: Okay, let me just stop you there a second…

In a final, inadvertent master stroke before returning to the remains of his detonated digs, John forwards over two headshots of actors he’s eager to work with and gives us plenty of time before the shoot to mull everything over. Now we have a spare couple of pub hours and some smouldering publicity portraits to pin a few stories and situations on. Lining up a couple of cold-filtered imagination lubricators, we make short work of making short works.

Between Premier League predictions and strategic micturitions (possibly not a real word…), we flesh out two single-location comedies and a spellbinding little dramatic short that owes much to Rich’s willingness to wipe the smile off what started life as a cast iron belly laugher but ended up with a sizeable lump in its throat. Thinking only in shillings and pence, we cook up an irritable vampire, a double-booked werewolf, a private investigator obsessed with the photographic clarity of a cheating husband and a cosy, cuddly conflab about home improvements that’s anything but. All this at 10:00 from nothing whatsoever at 7:30.

Captain Stroganoff – Benedict Cumberbatch perhaps…?

As writers, it feels great to be able to layer something as substantial on so disjointed a collection of bones in so short a space of time. However, much as I love the image of the fast-thinking, finger-clicking screenplay ninja, looking back I realise just how much was already ‘there’: a director who connects with our writing style; a host of shared ideas and fragments finding new reasons to be thrashed out; a couple of faces to stick in a room and characterise; crisps and lager. The movie-making cogs may at times move slower than a lazy glacier handcuffed to a radiator handcuffed to Terry Waite, but the wait on one project shouldn’t detract from the excitement of beginning another. Next time out we’ll hit the cognac on empty stomachs, set fire to the director’s bed and hammer out an award-winning, multi-season series about a bunch of pals living together in the same West Village apartment block. Perhaps we’ll even call it ‘Pals’.

As for Captain Stroganoff, he’s way too meaty for the shorts.

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As always, if you want to know more about our scripts or wish to explore the possibility of filming one, have a browse through our LOGLINES section or strike up a conversation via our contacts in, er… CONTACTS.

Andy takes first hit at this…

There’s a lot of ‘creative difference’ here at Rich Teasers, but it hasn’t led to a fractious feud of call screening, social media un-friending and mutual no-eye-contacting at beer meets and barbecues. It comes from learning that in spite of those differences and the impediments other writers might identify in the practice, “collaboration” isn’t such a dirty word after all.

“Skidmark“, however…

* * * * *

Introduce yourselves as a writing ‘team’ to some script scribblers and they adopt the kind of expression one does when handed a Tupperware box of raw giblets and sick. They don’t agree with it, you see. It doesn’t work. It stifles creativity or makes the pure idea an ugly hodgepodge of half-formed characters and cross-purpose narratives. Reactions oscillate between ‘mildly perplexed’ and ‘Westboro Baptist’:

• “So who does the writing and who makes the tea?”
• “Oh, so you’re the brains? And you must be… the other one?”
• “Do you settle plot arguments on a dice roll or with swords?”
• “They were shaving people’s heads for that sort of thing back in the day.”
• “God will not long suffer this rank sorcery… OUT, ACCURSED DEVIL, OUT…!!“

the assumption being that any genuine gold we may have mined between us will inevitably dilute down through argument and obstinacy into a patchwork jumble that succeeds only in missing its own point.

But it never does. We collaborate on every piece of writing at Rich Teasers – we always have. Howsoever the seed of an idea germinates and grows into a thick-rooted, castle-bearing beanstalk, it does so in the knowledge that the collaborative aspect of its development has made it a stronger thing than it would have been if nurtured alone: now it’ll bear a castle and an adjoining Waitrose.

WRITER: Hey, I hear you guys write together?

RT: That’s right. Hi, we’re…

WRITER: YOU F*@!ING DISGUST ME…!!

Knowing each other for such a long time certainly helps but it doesn’t guarantee that twin-like synchronicity of cause-and-effect where one of us walks into a door and the other gets a bloody nose. We still have wildly different ideas about what makes characters and circumstances engaging and worthy of further exploration. Rather, it’s a ‘trust thing’ that turns our creative differences into useful development tools. We trust that however much our raw and vulnerable newborn ideas are prodded and poked at, the consequences of sharing will always be rewarding, surprising and definitive. Neither of us worry that our beautiful bouncing babes will be slighted in the same fashion as the rancid Tupperware box – and perhaps that’s what separates us from some of the resolute lone-wolves out there…?

More and more, we draw on our differences to create opportunities, the legacy of which is a confidence to share and a determination to explore any idea from any angle to find that ‘buzz’ that puts us in the same creative groove. When Rich initially pitched My First Week [see LOGLINES] as a rom-com, I was staring into the sick and giblets, gently humming “The Girl From Ipanema” and climbing aboard the mind train to Happyplace. But as averse to the genre as I am, I knew Rich would have a take on it that’d beat most others all ends up and that he’d trust me enough to know that ‘working on it’ wouldn’t mean chucking the whole thing on the fire first. The result was an idea that had us both hooked and which had its entire storyline fixed by the end of the same afternoon. How very different things would’ve been if Rich had wrapped his kid in cotton wool and kept mum. How very different my own drafts would be without the collaborative cherry-topping they’ve all finished with.

“Thus for ALL collaborators…!”

This attitude of openness has also held us in good stead when it comes to the kind of conversations we want to be having as screenwriters: conversations with film makers.

The director loves your script – loves it – but after circulating it around her equally admiring team of battle-ready movie makers, she thinks there’s some adjustments you should make to really nail this sucker to the wall. You could snatch up the prized manuscript and tell her and her team of sycophantic ingrates that they wouldn’t know gold if they were left to drown in an Olympic-sized pool of the stuff… or you could accept that even gold needs a good solid buff to accentuate that mesmerising dazzle and crack on with your edits. After all (and with apologies to Ernest Hemingway), while the first draft of everything might not always be sh*t, it’ll never be the one that gets to actually be something. And yours may not be the only footprints in the sand.

Over to Rich…

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[Do you write with others or are you a creative Greta Garbo? Have your collaborative efforts improved your end products or left you wishing you’d pushed on alone? We’d love to hear about your experiences so comment away or tweet us at @RTscripts]