Monday, February 21, 2011

Amanda's Character

Amanda is going to a strong, witty, intelligent, independent woman - not over-the-top.

The dialogue between Walter and Amanda will be clever, not jokey.

So for any of you with fears that she's becoming too broad, too out-of-control, or a "desperate housewife" type, that will not be the case.

Writing Teams & Assignment for Next Week

WRITING TEAMS:

Lauren Stenmoe & David Lynam

Gabriel Rodriguez & Robert Willett

Nathan Tamayo & Josh Rivera

Edward Pisari & Christina Kishbaugh

Danielle Weintraub & Evan Jones

Katelyn Fisher & Will McDowell

Tamaira Witherspoon & George Mowbray


ASSIGNMENT:

Each person must come up with three stories - (typed; to be handed in).
Each story must have AT LEAST a beginning, middle, and end.
Set up the problem quickly, and look for a twist in the end.

Each team will then meet/talk about their total of six stories.
Together you will fully work out the three stories you feel are the strongest.
Type up those three stories - in the form of outlines or beat sheets.

Be ready to pitch those stories next week.

STORY AREAS WE DISCUSSED:

Walter's wife shows up, sees Amanda at the crash pad. No chance to reconcile.

Walter looks for a job. No airlines are hiring.
What kind of work is Amanda looking for?

Like many pilots and co-pilots, Walter and the captain he flew with are joined at the hip.
They do everything together.
Hearing Walter on the phone sounds like a relationship (i.e. "You hang up first.")
Now that the airline went under, Walter thinks they're in the same boat...but the captain retires.

Amanda hooks Walter up with one of her friends.

Amanda's roommate, Sherry, breaks up with her boyfriend, and returns to the crash pad.

When an old friend comes to town, Walter tries to pass himself off as successful.

Walter's ex-wife burns all of Walter's clothes.
Walter has to wear his pilot's uniform on a date.


Bed bugs in the crash pad

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Grounded - (the series)

Be ready to pitch story ideas on Monday.
If you have any comments or questions, post them.

THE SETTING

Miami Beach. Sunshine, Latin music, a party atmosphere.

Airline personnel refer to these apartments as crash pads. ("Crash Pad" is a possible title for the show).

Our unlikely couple lives in a very small apartment, very bare bones – and feels more like a hotel room than a home. It’s in an old rundown apartment building that has no amenities. And even though it’s right on the beach, it’s a dump.

Next door to this dump is paradise – a big, luxurious hotel called The Paradiso. The hotel bought the rundown apartment building and rents out the crash pads. They only rent to airline personnel, so all the tenants are transient – always coming and going – and always to and from the best places in the world. Then, they return from their exotic international trips and stay at this dump.

Inside their refrigerator, there’s no real food – just condiments. In the pantry, there are a ton of minis (mini bottles of booze), as well as crackers, chips, and an individual-size cereal box. Also, coffee and Ambien are a fixture.

Those who stay at the crash pad have a key card to the hotel – so they have full use of all the amenities – the pool, gym, free Internet – so they go there all the time. The hotel serves airline personnel free breakfast. For other meals, the hotel bar offers free food with the purchase of one beer. In the bar, they pour big, cheap drinks.

The hotel is THE place to stay. It’s a party atmosphere seven nights a week. It’s right on the beach, and the rate for airline personnel is $90/night. But the reason they all want to stay at the crash pad is because they can live in a $1200/month apartment for $400 when they split it three ways, which drastically cuts their costs, and they still get to take advantage of everything the hotel has to offer.

They all live in other cities, in other parts of the country. That’s why they don’t want an expensive place. They all have other homes. They use the crash pad so they can all get to work at the base. So their home might be New York, but the crash pad is in Miami.

THE LIVING ARRANGEMENT

AMANDA BURNS, the flight attendant, is the only one whose name is on the lease of this two-bedroom apartment. One of the bedrooms is big. The other is the size of a broom closet. Amanda has the big bedroom because she shares it with SHERRY, another flight attendant. But Sherry is never there. She spends every night at her boyfriend’s place – but she keeps the crash pad because her boyfriend doesn’t want her to move in. He’s not ready to make that kind of commitment. So the crash pad is her life raft in case they break up.

Captain “DIRK” DIRKSON, who bleeds red, white and blue, was renting the other bedroom. It was a great situation for Amanda. There was no drama with this guy. She hardly knew him and hardly saw him. He was almost never there. Then, he put in for a transfer to another base - in Dallas. When his transfer went through, he moved out of the crash pad, headed to Dallas, and Amanda needed another roommate.

To find a roommate, Amanda posted on “Pilot Ops” (Operations). There’s also Flight Attendant Ops, but she wanted another pilot since the last one worked out so well. Amanda went to the airport where there’s a floor of offices. That's where Pilot Ops is located. It's separate from Flight Attendant Ops because the company’s philosophy is “divide and conquer”.

First Officer WALTER ELLISON, saw the post for a roommate. (There are flyers put out by the hotel that advertise the rental cost, so Amanda can’t say one amount when it’s actually something else.)

Walter has been staying at the hotel, waiting to get into a crash pad to save money. He takes the second bedroom – the broom closet – with nothing in it but a futon and a goose-neck lamp. Still, they split the rent equally, three ways, since, theoretically, Amanda is sharing a bedroom, and Walter has his own room.

HOW WALTER AND AMANDA WIND UP GETTING STUCK TOGETHER

The airline goes under – and the other airlines are going through major layoffs. No one is hiring. The job doesn’t prepare these people for anything else.

Now, Walter is looking for corporate flying jobs (i.e. FedEx, Express Jets, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, etc.)

Amanda’s home was in New York. But she found herself upside down on her mortgage. She lost her home, and now she has to live at the crash pad. The place was supposed to be a temporary, transient thing – but now it’s become her only residence.

Walter is married to his grade school sweetheart back in Boise, Idaho. She’s the only woman he’s ever wanted, and the only woman he’s ever known. Now, she’s kicked him out of the house and filed for divorce.

So, Amanda and Walter are both screwed. She lost her home...and he can’t go back to his home. The temporary crash pad is all they’ve got left. It’s cheap, it’s all they can afford, and there’s nowhere else to go even if they wanted to.

HOW IT’S WORKING OUT

Not well. The last thing Amanda wanted was drama. Now, she’s got more than she ever imagined. Now that Walter is going through a bitter divorce, it’s turned his life upside down, and Amanda is subjected to all of the hell he’s going through.

The last thing Walter wanted was to be stuck with a wild woman who used her job to do nothing but party. She doesn’t have the time or patience for real life.

They couldn’t be more different. It’s constant conflict. But if she kicks him out, her rent goes up – and she needs his rent money. And he doesn’t want to move out because the place is so cheap, and his wife, who’s lawyered up, is about to take him for everything he's got.

Amanda’s name is on the lease, so she has the power. So it's the rare case where a pilot has to defer to a flight attendant – which wreaks havoc with Walter’s ego.

Amanda has a car but no license. Walter has a license but no car. Amanda’s license expired while she was flying all over the world – and she has a tendency to ignore things that show up in the mail. She only communicates electronically – through emails and texts. Walter’s soon-to-be-ex-wife is keeping the car – and he’s trying to save every penny he can, so he finds other ways to get around a city that he had no intentions of calling home.

Both of their lifestyles have been compromised. He can’t go back to his wife, and she can’t go to Paris for dinner. And while they’re stuck together, they make each other crazy.

They would never admit it – but when you look at it – all they really have is each other.

CHARACTERS

WALTER ELLISON (30s)

A former Air Force pilot, Walter has been stuck at First Officer for years because the captains’ retirement age went up from 60 to 65 – and captains are now hanging around five years longer.

NOTE: First Officers (co-pilots) get promoted only when the company needs more captains (i.e. when captains retire). Promotions are based on need – not on how long they’re around. Since captains are now sticking around five years longer, First Officers are getting screwed. And if the company is stagnant or shrinking, the First Officers get stuck, with no way to advance. And that’s the position Walter finds himself in.

He’s very conservative, with a healthy ego, and, like many pilots, can be a bit condescending toward flight attendants.

Walter’s a family man. The problem is, his wife BETTY just threw him out of the house. After years of spending more time in the air than at home – and with his union constantly making concessions and accepting cutbacks in salary and benefits – Betty finally had enough.

Walter desperately tries to reconcile. He and Betty have been together since grammar school. She’s the only woman he’s ever known.

When he thinks all hope is lost, she pays him a surprise visit and shows up at the crash pad, giving Walter one last chance to win her back. But when the door opens, music is blasting, and she sees Amanda in her bra and panties, wearing a bondage collar and holding a bottle of champagne. Walter, who was trying to sleep, shuffles into the living room in his boxer shorts to tell Amanda to turn down the music…when he sees Betty, who is sure that Walter has been cheating on her, and that the crash pad is his love nest – which closes the door on any hope for reconciliation.

Now, Walter is stuck in every area of his life. There’s no going back to the way things were – and he doesn’t want to go forward. And Betty is going after him with lawyers, trying to make his life as miserable as possible.

So the irony is that the conservative guy is the one with all the drama going on around him. And Amanda, who was looking to avoid drama by having a guy stay in the other bedroom, now finds herself constantly inundated with it.

Walter is incredibly cheap. He’ll do anything to save a buck. When he was still flying, he never bought a newspaper. Instead, he’d search the plane for one left by a passenger. For dinner, he’s always gone to the cheapest place he could find.

He was staying at The Paradiso, waiting for a place to open up in the crash pad. And when it did, he jumped at the chance. It was just another way to save a buck.

Walter has absolutely no sense of style. He dresses horribly (i.e. shorts with black socks). He shops at Ross and buys the cheapest stuff in the store.

In the kitchen, he’s helpless. He’s the kind of guy who’d put a Pop Tart in the broiler.

Walter is very quirky. And his OCD has only gotten worse now that he’s alone and broke and has to deal with this wild woman every day of his life.

AMANDA BURNS (30s)

She became a flight attendant as a way to see the world for free.

Amanda is a free spirit, a party girl, who has men in every city in every country in the world. She never needs a reason to celebrate. Every day is reason enough.

She eats like shit, and carries around hot sauce. She puts hot sauce on everything. The crash pad is filled with minis - the little liquor bottles she takes from the plane.

Unlike pilots, there’s no retirement age for flight attendants. So as long as she can do the job and pass the drills, Amanda planned to keep on working. She had no intentions of giving up the life. It’s like she never grew up...and never intends to.

Despite the fact that she’s getting older, she still dresses young and sexy and parties till dawn. When she first started flying, she posed for Playboy when they did a pictorial called “The Girls at 37,000 Feet”.

Amanda has no sense of fiscal responsibility. She’s buried in debt, maxes out all of her credit cards, and continues to spend like there’s no tomorrow – which includes expensive dinners in great restaurants all over the world.

In her effort to say forever young, she got Botox treatments in Bolivia, so she needed Santa Cruz layovers. She also had a masseuse in San Salvador, named Yolanda, who charges 84 Boliviano (the equivalent of twelve US dollars) for a two-hour massage.

Despite the fact that the airline went under, Amanda still thinks everything is going to work out – which drives the out-of-work, out-of-marriage Walter crazy. He tells Amanda that she’s in denial. She disagrees. She thinks her way of getting through the day is a hell of a lot better than his – with his sense of hope sinking and his blood pressure soaring.

While Walter continues to carry a torch for Betty – (even though she’s got her lawyers going after everything he’s got) – Amanda tries to help Walter move on with his life. She tries to fix him up with women, while he tries to help her become more responsible – especially since they now have to rely on each other to make this living situation work.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Story Areas

Post brief ideas.

Bounce those ideas off each other.

Focus on the conflict between the characters.

From Class Discussion (February 14)

IMPORTANT: Everyone email me your 1-page write-up on the series premise ASAP.
It was part of your assignment that was due last night.
Email: aauscriptdoctor@gmail.com

ARCHETYPES

Pair up some other "odd couple" type characters.

Here are the actors we discussed last night:

William H. Macy
cross between Ed O'Neill (Jay in "Modern Family') and Ted Danson (Sam Malone in "Cheers")
Rob Lowe
Guy Pearce
James Woods
John McGinley

Parker Posey (insincere, off-center)
Zoe Saldana (feisty, sexy, spirited)
Emma Stone
Liz Lemon
Elizabeth Banks
Sarah Silverman
Katey Sagal
Sean Young
Angela Bassett
Regina King
Aisha Tyler
Pam Grier
Taraji P. Henson

TONE
Dramedy
Black Comedy

DO YOU SEE HIM AS A PILOT OR CO-PILOT?
As a pilot, he can be an older character who would have trouble finding a job.
That adds the generation gap element.
OR:
As a co-pilot, he's one day away from being a pilot...when he gets laid off.
Then, our two leads would be closer in age.

Monday, February 7, 2011

Possible Titles for the Series

List possible titles.

Grounded

The Girl's Character

Give her a name and an approximate age.

She was a flight attendant, using the job just to see the world.

She has the upper hand with him.

She's honest, blunt, doesn't edit herself..

Sarcastic

A Southern belle

A female Ricky Gervais

She's into feng shui.

The Guy's Character

Give the character a name and approximate age.

You're not locked in to using the character descriptions that we discussed.
Let's just make sure we come up with a very strong character.

Here are the character notes from tonight's class. If there's anything missing from the list, add it.

He was thrown out of the house.
He's trying to save the marriage.

He was a co-pilot (First Officer) - always riding shotgun. He was one day away from making Captain.
He got a letter that he thought was to congratulate him on his promotion to Captain.
Instead, it was a letter notifying him that he was being laid off.

He's ex-military.
A family man
Conservative
Ex-athlete

A Charlie Sheen-type party guy

OCD
Hypochondriac

He may have had a past affair with the co-star of the show.
They may be Craig's List Roommates.
He may have sublet from someone he knows. (And she doesn't know that he's her new roommate.)

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Class Email List

Christina Kishpaugh stinahole@aol.com

Danielle Weintraub dweintraub@me.com

David Lynam dlynam2@yahoo.com

Edward Pisari edpisari@gmail.com

Evan Jones woeboat@gmail.com

Gabriel Rodriguez gabriel.rodriguez24@gmail.com

George Mowbray gmowbray@live.com

Josh Rivera almostwin4@yahoo.com

Katelyn Fischer hulahut85@yahoo.com

Lauren Winsor Stenmoe LWStenmoe@gmail.com

Nathan Tamayo nathantamayo@gmail.com

Robert Willett cinebleu@gmail.com

Tamaira Witherspoon mairalv7@hotmail.com

Will McDowell singingpterodactyl@gmail.com