649 - The Comedic Premise with Simon Rich
Scriptnotes Podcast
John August
4.8 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 2 July 2024
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John welcomes Simon Rich (Man Seeking Woman, Miracle Workers) to look at how he crafts a comedic premise. Using his work on SNL, his time writing Inside Out at Pixar and his plethora of short stories, they look at how he develops a funny idea into a story with narrative and emotional punch.
We also follow up on the Harry Potter TV series, and answer listener questions on the downsides of writing in other mediums and adapting your screenplay into a novel.
In our bonus segment for premium members, how do you get your work into magazines? Simon walks through his experience, from rejection letters to being published in the New Yorker.
Links:
- Glory Days by Simon Rich
- “Gifted” by Simon Rich
- Rocket Dog sketch
- Howtown with Joss Fong and Adam Cole
- Dr. Eckener’s Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel by Douglas Botting
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- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
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You can download the episode here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome my name is John August and you are listening to |
| 0:05.0 | episode 649 of script notes. It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that |
| 0:09.7 | are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show which ideas are inherently funny, we'll discuss |
| 0:14.7 | what makes a comedic premise and how you develop and execute upon that idea. To do that |
| 0:19.0 | we have a very special guest, but first Drew we have some news and some follow-up. |
| 0:24.0 | We do so we've talked about the quest to make a Harry Potter series and the sort of |
| 0:28.5 | uncomfortably public search for a showrunner. |
| 0:30.6 | So as a reminder they said that we're going to make a Harry Potter series and |
| 0:33.2 | we're going to go through a series of rounds with different writers who might |
| 0:36.9 | become the showrunner and it got kind of public in a way that made me feel |
| 0:40.5 | ew. Yeah, it was a bake-off, right? |
| 0:43.0 | Yeah. |
| 0:44.0 | We have news that Warner's has made their pick, so it's Francesca Gardner of Succession, |
| 0:47.7 | along with Director Mark Mylad, who also did Succession and Game |
| 0:51.0 | Thrones and The Last Of Us and all sorts of stuff. |
| 0:53.7 | Yeah, so they seemed like a really good team to do that. |
| 0:56.2 | I would say going into this, I was skeptical that anybody would want to step up to do this, |
| 0:59.4 | especially in the big obvious situation, but it looks like they ended up with some really talented people. |
| 1:04.3 | So I wish them luck. |
| 1:05.7 | I think it's going to be a hard road ahead, but we'll see what they're able to make. |
| 1:09.2 | So that Harry Potter series will eventually probably come to your screens. |
| 1:14.3 | Second bit of news is very, very local here. |
... |
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