Witness… The Waterbody Canines

My English teacher for most of high school, Mr. Doherty, always set out to give us interesting assignments. When reading a Shakespeare play, we were told to rehearse and deliver a Shakespearean monologue to the class. When studying poetry, he focused on slam poems, and we got to write our own and, once more, recite them to the class. We were once given homework to adapt a short story into a screenplay, something in which I especially reveled. I should also mention that the movies we would watch in conjunction with some of the books we read were always off-kilter and yet appropriate, not just your standard book-to-screen fare. The Great Gatsby led us to watch Rushmore, A Farewell to Arms gave us Harold and Maude, and, regrettably, The Metamorphosis resulted us in watching David Cronenberg’s The Fly, which gave the class nightmares; I only cured mine by watching Finding Nemo, which makes everything better*.

*not guaranteed for everyone

One assignment Doherty gave was to write a crucible— a short story that took place in one location, where the stuck/trapped/waiting characters couldn’t help but eventually clash. We had just read Sartre’s No Exit, so the homework was apt, and I, always one to chomp at the bit for a new opportunity to write something new, got to work on a story I called “Escape.”

“Escape,” written circa 2004, I think?

(And oh jeez, there’s a typo in the first friggin’ sentence. “Lied” instead of “lay”? Also, “sulking” instead of “skulking”???Ugh.)

In it, the main character, Max, believes he is being held in some sort of prison and desires to find a way to break free. His companions aren’t so sure, not even the girl he has a crush on, but the “Giants” that run this supposed penitentiary occasionally take someone away, and Max fears he will be next. When that day does come, Max is resigned to his fate, only to discover that the giants are taking him to his family. His family is elated to see him, petting him and putting on his leash to take him home and WAIT WHAT HE WAS A DOG THIS WHOLE TIME AND HE WAS JUST BEING LODGED IN A KENNEL HOLY SHIT TWIST ENDING WHAT??? Of course, I’m not a fan of these types of twist endings anymore, because it’s basically a “ha ha fuck you” to the audience, whereas if the twist is revealed to a character at the same time as the audience, it’s better, because there’s more of an empathetic gut punch as opposed to the sensation that someone just flicked your brain for shits and giggles.

The “shocking” ending of “Escape”

Sorry to give you more reading inside a thing you’re already reading.

Anyways, this is the long and extremely tangental way of me trying to segue into talking about S2 E4, “The Perfect Crime,” as it is both a crucible and was inspired by Reservoir Dogs. See what I did there? With the dogs and everything?

Fine, screw it, the episode, talk about the episode, Andy, jeez.

As I’m sure I’ve stated somewhere before, I treat the writing of every episode as though it’s an improv scene. That is to say, not a whole lot of planning goes into it. I have character names, but their personalities are only discovered through their dialogue. I have a general idea of what the story will be about, perhaps even how it will end, but the middle is usually left up in the air. It’s kind of like Curb Your Enthusiasm, where they have a template for every scene while the content is discovered in the moment, only maybe even looser than Larry David’s brainchild. Usually, after I’ve been writing a story for a bit, I can get more of a general sense of where it should go, including certain beats I would like it to hit. The danger with that, however, is that I may suddenly find myself lost in the weeds of plot, inexplicably reliant on what that plot dictates and forgetting that it’s the characters who are meant to drive the story. When this happens, the end result is a lot of stopping and starting and stopping again, multiple Final Draft documents now taking up space on my hard drive, no actual “final draft” in sight.

“The Perfect Crime” was one of those types of stories, if that wasn’t obvious from my over-explanation. I spoke about this in the blog entry for S1 E6, “The Party Crashers,” but just to reiterate, the whole thing started with the image of my friend Anton, sitting in the middle of the stage, in a spotlight, wearing a party hat and holding a red balloon. Wanting to expand the cast a bit, I changed the concept from a simple home burglary to a full on bank robbery. It opened on Shepard Smiley going into the bank, seemingly in a rush, and finding his task of depositing money slowed down by the nosy and talkative teller. Then that slowed rush screeched to a definitive halt when three robbers burst into the bank demanded the vault be opened. The bank manager, after some pleading, reluctantly opened the vault, but instead of various riches, the only thing inside was the little boy, balloon in hand.

I thought I had a good idea on my hands. But as I wrote this first iteration of “Crime,” I started to become overwhelmed by some of the characters secret motivations and all the logistics that would have to be in place for it to make sense for a little boy to be locked away all by himself inside a fucking bank vault. I wanted there to be a passing of the mantle, of sorts, when it came to who the audience considers the hero, with Smiley starting off as the de facto hero, only for Jade, the main bank robber (and eventual roll over character in “Party”) to suddenly gain the moral high ground when it’s revealed Smiley knew about the kid in the vault and was depositing money to keep him in there, which led me down a rabbit hole involving ideas around the Anti-Christ and other weird shit that’s just too confounding to get into. Basically, the ideas I was coming up with couldn’t fit inside the box in which I wanted to fit the story. So instead of watching the thing overflow, I took the excess parts, placed them into new stories: the original concept for “Party” took Jade and the name Houston, which I eventually changed to Brody; and Liana Bruun, who was the perky bank teller, went through a mild character revamp in order to become “The Intrepid Reporter.”

Meanwhile, I still wanted to make something around the idea of “The Perfect Crime,” only I knew this time, like with “Party,” I needed to keep things simple. I looked at some of the best heist movies, Reservoir Dogs in particular. A lot of heist movies, they have twisty and turny schemes, double crosses and questionable loyalties, and loads and loads of characters. Dogs primarily takes place in one room (not counting the flashbacks), deals with only a handful of characters (two of which are dispatched early on and don’t even receive that much character development), but still has the twisty, turny stuff, albeit in a simple way: one of them is a cop. That’s all. So, taking a move out of Tarantino’s playbook, I packed the characters into one room, gave them distinct archetypes, and made the whole fuss about some cookies.

And I still got stuck.

Three times, I got stuck. Everything up till the accusations thrown at Philly basically stayed the same, but after that, I started to lose energy. In one iteration, there was a time jump while the rest of the crew searched the room for the cookies. That time jump was necessary, as listening to people scrounge around an abandoned office space wouldn’t be too interesting, but it turns out having the characters be in that room for multiple hours didn’t do much for forward progression. I honestly don’t think it was until I introduced Popejoy’s Tamagotchi that something sparked inside of me and gave me the fuel necessary to finish the script. Who knew the secret to foiling writer’s block would lie in a digital egg baby?

One thing I was definitely interested in experimenting with for this episode was having an all male cast. I do my best to diversify my casts, but with “Crime,” I wanted to make a point about toxic masculinity, so this decision acted as sort of a meta-commentary on that. I don’t want to dive too deep into toxic masculinity here; I said most of what I needed to say in the opening monologue for the episode. But I will say I’ve been fortunate enough to meet male improvisers who aren’t chauvinist pricks. Oh yes, there are plenty of those fuckers around, perhaps even hiding in secret, but for the most part, there are more guys who are doing their best to break out of the patriarchy and kick it in the nards than who prefer to nestle themselves deeper into it. And five of those guys are the five featured in “Crime,” Andrew J. Barlow, Daniel Burt, Matt Dunn, Andrew Portner, and Gabe Sanchez.

Clockwise from left: Matt Dunn (Smiley), me, Daniel Burt (Nash), Gabe Sanchez (Popejoy), Andrew J. Barlow (Houston), the tiny head of Andrew Portner (Philly)

Matt, I met in my level 401 class, and he provided the perfect Lawrence Tierney-voice. Dan was a teacher when I first joined Endgames (though I never had him) and I was always intimidated by him and his talent, but as the years rolled on, he’s become a great friend, and he brought his relatable weirdness to Nash. Gabe I first saw host the Endgames cage match show, Thunderdome, in character, as a spunky older woman, and eventually we found ourselves on a Harold team together; he’s the nicest guy around, so he was perfectly and sweetly innocent as Popejoy. Portner started performing with Endgames on a few teams fellow improviser, Sam Turnbull, put together to battle it out in Thunderdome and ended up going on long winning streaks; with his super quick wit, I knew he was perfect for Philly, and he brought a fun smugness I could only dream of. Barlow, like Will Luera in “The Butler Did It,” was another fortuitous connection made through Conor Allen’s weekly pandemic-prov show, Improv All-Stars; his voice matched the character perfectly, but you’ll be happy to know that he’s the complete opposite of Houston in real life.

I don’t know if Barlow’s in character or not as he takes a bite of that sandwich…

The end result, I believe, is a fun episode. My goal is to include at least one “grounded” episode every season, which is to say, something that doesn’t involve anything fantastical, like aliens or ghosts. “The Butler Did It” could be considered something grounded in our reality, but “Crime,” even with its exaggerated cookie obsession, feels like something that could occur.

At least until I tell you that they were dogs the whole time WHAT NO WAY HOW DID YOU WHAAAAA???

Joking.

—Andy

A surprise cameo from comedian and improviser, Shosh Brodman!

She popped into the frame to say, “Fuck you, Portner.” Playfully, of course.