Category
Phudie Mart
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07.25.07One Phinal Post
I meant to get this up during last week’s lovefest, but it got lost in the shuffle of important important information. There’s this function in Final Draft, the screenwriting program I’m told I’m not supposed to use that allows you to see how many curse words are in your script. We want to make adult comedies, but we also know how a really harsh script can turn a lot of people off and we want them to enjoy our characters and the other work we put into the script and not see the word “shit,” stop reading, and never get to the part where Brent trades the gun from the Phudie Mart’s gun counter to a Columbian Cartel for a bunch of coke. Regardless, there’s going to be some profanity until we’re in the editing room trying for our contractually obligated PG-13. I obviously did this analysis a many drafts before the end because the F bomb only occurs a couple times in the final. Regardless, it’s just funny to see a machine analyze references to “Bullshit.”
Profanity
This profanity report should be used as a general guide to
the profanity content of your script. Some of the items in
this report may not be actual profanity and other real
instances in your script may have been missed.“Asshole” (1 occurrences)
It appears on the following pages:
26
It is spoken by the following characters:
NARRATOR“Bitch” (7 occurrences)
It appears on the following pages:
17, 25, 31, 75, 80, 82
It is spoken by the following characters:
ANXIOUS YUPPIE, BRENT, ROCKY, ZOE -
07.22.07“It’s very easy, except for that last bit.”
Well hopefully this week has proven somewhat insightful and you’re not sick of us talking about ourselves. I swear we rarely do it. We’ve gotten a lot accomplished over the last 9 or so years and I feel we’ve been pretty humble about it, but if you ask, we’ll fill your ears, and you didn’t ask, so thank you. I often don’t talk about Schadenfreude partly because it makes me feel like a superhero with a great secret (if only Lois knew that I’m actually a CIF Festival Highlight Winner), but also, if anyone knew exactly how much fun we have, they’d hate us all forever. When you’re cultivating an audience you just can’t take a chance on being hated like that unless you’re Don Hall.
Which brings me to something very fun, My Breakfast with Justin, aka the rewriting process…
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07.20.07No retreat, no surrender…well, maybe a retreat.
January is our traditional retreat month, we started retreating in 2002 because we’d stupidly promised Chicago Public Radio that we were capable of giving them thirty episodes and found ourselves needing to produce content really quickly. Retreats are the most fun you will ever have as a thirty-something. There’s something very Big Chill about taking off to the middle of the woods to a cabin lovingly provided by Sheila’s family and spending seven days with some very close friends all united towards a common purpose, like Al-Qaeda, with fart jokes (now Homeland Security’s reading this post. Quick, go here). Some of my fondest memories of my entire life are the radio show retreats. We had retreated exactly one year earlier to write “Alderman” the story of Ed Bus, and as it turns out, needing to write two hours of content over five days is much easier than trying to write 8 hours of content over that amount of time.
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07.20.07Friday Phudie Catch-All
As you know by now, we’ve taken this week (minus a few exceptions) to talk about the story behind the story, behind the story of Phudie Mart. Everything from the origins on stage, the evolution into radio that helped us define the characters, the concept and shooting of the short film, the week in New Buffalo, MI (and the menu) writing the new screenplay- so what’s left?
All the little pieces… So today will be the “kitchen sink” - bringing you videos, maybe some audio, perhaps a picture, and if you’re lucky, a coupon. Because it’s time to take a new look. A new look at an old friend, Phudie.
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07.20.07
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07.19.07
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07.19.07From Radio…To Wherever We Are Now
So we had an idea. We’d taken our radio show and turned it into an incubator for all our small characters from stage. In one end went rough stage concepts, out the other end came developed characters with worlds and histories and problems and lives. So we decided our next mission would be to develop our top three into feature screenplays. Something with market value. We picked Ed Bus, Phudie Mart, and some of you know Dinerbanski & Ross, the world’s largest tax and accounting firm, led by Ted Dinerbanski, the world’s richest man.
So we sat down in, summer of 2005 and laid out the three screenplays. The original Ed Bus read a lot like the radio script. The original Phudie read like the synopsis after the jump. It was all about Ted Dinerbanski (who plays the opponent to Ed Bus in our first screenplay, but his name isn’t even referenced in the draft of Phudie Mart we just finished) wanting to bulldoze the store so he can buy a submarine, or something like that. The only way he can do this is if the store ranks poorly in it’s evaluations at the hands of Tom Peck or something. There’s also an inside man who didn’t make it past this. At the end, they do more and more poorly, Tom Peck docks them and they bulldoze the store. Still reading? Well, thankfully this isn’t the script we’re celebrating this week. But here is the original Phudie Pitch written two years ago and modified a whoooooole lot.
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07.19.07Measuring productivity by chicken breasts
The radio show taught us something great about writing big projects. The best way to accomplish amazing amounts of comedic writing is to go somewhere. Just go get a house for a week, get a bunch of food and write. We wrote the bulk of our radio shows that way and we have written all projects since in the same form. It started in New Buffalo, MI with Stephe’s father-in-law’s summer home. We have a ton of pictures. Then we went to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin one summer and then Berwyn for a couple straight and then back to New Buffalo. We have done this 6 times as a group. The best part? The $400 receipt from Sams Club. Wanna know what we bought?
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07.19.07Well, just saying “Yoda” doesn’t really count as a Star Wars reference…
Part of the joy of writing a movie with Schad is trying to cram in as many references as possible, and then endlessly debating which ones stay and which ones go. As references within other movies or shows TO other movies or shows become more and more popular, we become aware that it seems as if we’re jumping on a bandwagon, when, in reality, as douchey as it sounds, we’re writing in our collective voice because we reference movies all the time in everyday life anyway. Case in point — Alderman, our first movie, has 3 references to Star Wars. Not the McDonald’s NBC Prime Time Stone Phillips Look How Clever We Are “Use the Force” or “I am your Father” references but (hopefully) some sneaky ones that people will get a kick seeing. Phudie, contrastingly, has no Star Wars references — really, it could be argued, the movie (as is the case with the short) is just one big reference — which leads to the point that doing a parody of a very specific genre is wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more difficult than writing in a more general genre, like “COMEDY” or “HAS A TWIST ENDING.” Half of our time was spent trying to come-up with things that hadn’t been done in this way or that way — and, when stuck on plot devices or logical events, being able to say “Come on guys . . . it’s a comedy . . . ”
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07.19.07Everyone Plays Well TogetherThe world is pretty deep. To get to the point where we could fully express these characters, we had to figure out who they were. It took us years and using stage sketches, short films and radio shows to just let them roam…
In this little clip, we see our hapless grocery store manager, Tony, and the Phudie Mart 16-inch softball team take on those pretentious jerks from the Actors Center For The Live Perfomance of the Dramatic Arts Center - and their leader, Christopher Kriss… Enjoy!
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07.19.07Phudie: The Final Chapter?All week long we have been writing and posting multimedia about the Schadenfreude creation, the Phudie Mart. Last week we finished up our screenplay (same title) and we are putting all our Phudie Mart thoughts into this special week of Schadenfreude programming. Actually, this is the first time we’ve done this with the site and we hope to do plenty more in the future. Today? The making of the Phudie screenplay. Enjoy.
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07.18.07Slim Working Somewhere Else??Here’s another clip from the Schadenfreude Radio show. In this one, we toy with the idea of Slim “thinking” she’s dissatisfied with her current job (Thanks to Tony) - and goes to investigate her options. Perhaps even MORE interesting - it’s the introduction of Corey (who later became Reyna played by the vocal chameleon, Sandy!) Enjoy!
