Step 1: Mastery of Drama and Comedy

The first setting for this video segment is the restaurant where Louise works. Can you translate the on-screen chaos into clarity on the page?

In the screenplay by Callie Khouri, things are kept really simple.

The car Louise drives in the screenplay is a ’66 T-Bird, in mint condition. But the available script draft incorrectly names Thelma as the driver leaving the restaurant.

The following ‘getting ready montage’ is not written in the script as such. It constitutes two distinct scenes, covering half a script page.

In the script, the 100-second video covers a little more than a page and a half, almost perfectly following the guide of one page per minute.

Knowing the above, how will you describe what you see in this video segment?

The setting is LAZY JOE’S, and the players are RACHEL (Mila Kunis) and PETER (Jason Segel). I picked this segment for two reasons.

First, you’ll have to describe the sudden mood change when Peter hears about Rachel’s surprise.

Next, you’ll have to notate a song. If you don’t know how to do this, think about clarity and readability as the two main criteria.

How would you do it?

Did you know…

The Dracula musical is, in fact, based on a real Dracula musical which Jason Segal began writing in his youth, and the song he sings is a real song from that musical. He claims to have played a demo tape for Judd Apatow, whose only response was “You can never let anyone hear this tape.”