I had to begin by proving that there was a plausible path to writing a climate change comedy. Maybe if I could find the funny this type of script could attract the attention of the executive producers in the movie industry.
Finding the funny is where it begins. Weather related events that steal the headlines are on the upswing. There’s nothing funny about a superstorm.
My first decision was it must be a comedy, that I needed to find a light touch, a way to access the topic without popping viewers emotional circuit breakers. The next problem was determining what could be made comical. I have found two climate problems that I’ve carved out the comedy from.
First is my take on the crisis on the Colorado River. Sure, there is nothing funny about a catastrophic water shortage, instead I found humor in the actors trying to block new water allocations to the 40 million that live in the Southwest, those blockers are the villains of this tale, while the actors determined to push through a new agreement the scripts heroes.
My second script revolves around a resort located on the precarious steep hillsides in Big Sur. In this script it is the threat posed by the mountainous terrain being hit by climate induced rain events now described as atmospheric rivers. What is funny here is the disbelief the characters exhibit in the face of such enormous forces. Big Sur has been plagued with highway closing landslides, as soon as one piece of highway is repaired another storm arrives and another piece of the road fails and is closed.
Most of this second script revolves around a Brazilian band in route for shows from LA to Monterey. Their trip north is blocked by a landslide and quite by accident they find a resort perched on a plateau just above the Pacific Ocean. Because of the landslide there arrives a road repair crew, Highway Patrol, and US Geological Survey employee. The band has but stumbled upon the venerable resort, discovers the mothballed showroom, and then goes onto convince the proprietor to reopen the room for a weekend concert they were sure their fans would want to see.
The band’s leader is a younger woman while the resorts owner this older man. The resort owner had years ago circumnavigated the world by sailboat. Three decades before just as he was about to embark on his epic voyage he met and fell in love with a Brazilian vocalist. The vocalist’s daughter doesn’t yet know that her mother had indeed been the resort owners love of his life.
We have all kinds of obstacles strewn in the path of the characters. The most obvious is the damage caused by these powerful climate induced storms. Nobody, I mean not a soul in this script is able to imagine the magnitude of the landslide that is headed their way at the screenplay’s climax. To keep the script firmly in the realm of comedy I’ve been sure that not a soul is killed when the natural disaster suddenly strikes.
Comedy has a distinctive physical component. How we move, the pace at which we move, and the constant use of suspense and surprise all work as essential elements, they are not in every scene, but they are in most. Next is finding ways to put your characters into a corner and how they work themselves out of the mess they find themselves in. That is often dialogue driven. A good comedy owes so much to rhythm and pace. I have been working my butt off trying to incorporate six Bossa Nova songs into the script. What is difficult about this aspect of building the script is how it disrupts flow and can interfere with the scripts comic pace.
If writing a drama, the structure would be more flexible. A comedy is considered the more difficult form because it is a slave to pacing.
If we go back to my beginnings, the late 60’s early 70’s it was my discovering that I liked gymnastics and then I shifted my attention to ballet, then modern dance, then circus arts. I didn’t really understand the significance of my training and how those long hours of rehearsal and practice was physically installing a comedy muscle into my body.
For years I experimented with ukulele. Then, it was working as a solo variety act and devising the lines I would use when performing. All my experiences had to remain mindful of timing. Sometimes it was as simple as removing one extra syllable that fixed a problem.
In the initial phase of standing up my first shows there was a focus on content creation and much less attention being paid to the pace. Traveling nationally, I hadn’t quite solved the biggest dilemma, that the travel distances and time were long and my time on stage in front of an audience was too short.
In 1980 that was fixed in an instant when I setup shop on a sidewalk in San Francisco and then proceeded to crank out over 2000 shows over the next two years. I’d come into town with a couple of hours of material that I cut down to its essence, I took my best 15 minutes and away I went eight shows a day, five days a week— two years and two thousand shows later that is where my raw ambition was forged into something I still use to this day.
It didn’t hurt I was surrounded by some of the funniest jugglers, magicians and puppeteers in the world. A Whitney Brown, Harry Anderson, Michael Davis and Bob Hartman all top acts back in the day went onto work at the highest levels in show business. I paid close attention to their work and did my best to build a show that might keep up.
I had always been a writer. I put my first draft of my first novel, Highway Home away for several decades while working my one man show. By 1984 I was firmly planted in the small time, grassroots community-based shows for fairs, festivals, libraries and other even more esoteric venues. The main thing is I was being stood up in front of audiences trying to figure out how to deliver the best possible experience I could muster. By now the show ran a maximum of one hour. Most of the shows were shorter, more like 30 minutes, sometimes 45 minutes. Instead of thousands of shows per year I was steadily putting out somewhere closer to 500.
In 2005 I pulled my first draft of my first novel out of my writer’s chest. This manuscript was hammered out on a manual typewriter, Smith-Corona, and what edits I’d made all were retyped page by page. I transferred the manuscript to computer where we edited the novel until it was complete. I worked with a team of editors.
I wrote another three novels the most important I believe was the sexual farce titled Hot Spring Honeymoon. The novel was proof I could write a successful long fiction comedy. My fourth novel, The Women of the Oak Savannahs delved into the environmental troubles plaguing the Napa Valley. The biggest breakthrough of this script was that it led me to my work in screenwriting and the idea of creating a series of climate change comedies.
I was convinced that after 12 years of writing long fiction that my career in show business had given me all the necessary skills and experience to write funny compelling characters that could help the world navigate this truly perilous moment in human civilizations most dangerous times.
Distilling global events into actionable screenwriting material demands research. You read and read and read, you think and debate and argue, you save news clippings, read books, in your search to understand.
One of the most startling facts that awakened me to the magnitude of the threat mankind poses to life on earth was discovered while studying the water flows of the Napa River. Scientists had been using fish traps to count the number of salmon returning to spawn in this watershed. Each year fewer and fewer fish returned. For the past 5 million years salmon had been part of this waterway. As California’s human population increased, as water was diverted for vineyards fewer salmon were able to successfully spawn. By 2010 it was over, the last salmon were gone.
Extinction events are all bad, but it isn’t just that we couldn’t save this salmon run, it is that the Napa Valley winemakers could not bring themselves to take the necessary steps to save this species.
And that is why I write climate change comedy. I’m trying to navigate the truth of our circumstances, none of us want to live in this hotter unpredictable world. It is part of our behavior, part of our instincts, our mind’s shutdown when confronted with the calamity barreling at us. The anxiety and grief help nobody. If we might laugh a little while we learn a little about the self-destructive forces inherent in our economic lives, we may just find a means of opening to the challenges we face. A rousing climate-change comedy has the potential to cut through the anxiety and to see with our open minds—
