TEAM! A Thesis Project Adrienne Ogle Advisor: Winifred Wood Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in Cinema and Media Studies April 23, 2015 © Adrienne Ogle 2015 Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................. 3 Background: How did an editor become a writer? ........................................................ 3 How did you develop the premise? .............................................................................. 4 How did you create the world? .................................................................................... 5 Give an overview of your TV show. What is it about? What choices did you make? ..... 6 What did you find out about yourself as a writer? ....................................................... 8 Where do you think Team! could be broadcast? .......................................................... 9 How did improvisational comedy influence your writing? .......................................... 10 Timeline ..................................................................................................................... 12 Works Cited ............................................................................................................... 13 Select Influential Media ............................................................................................. 15 Scripts ........................................................................................................................ 19 1 2 Introduction This is the reflection portion of my Cinema and Media Studies thesis project. Here you will find interview-style contemplations on the decisions I made, the realizations I had, and the overall process behind my thesis. Background: How did an editor become a writer? For my thesis project I’ve developed a television sitcom series and written an entire season of episodes including the pilot. The series, inspired by the work of such writer/comedians as Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, and Amy Schumer, follows an ensemble of college women as they attempt to build an all-women’s football team at a fictional Midwestern, mid-sized, co-ed college. I proposed the thesis project at the end of my junior year. I was certain my thesis would focus on production. As a Cinema and Media Studies major, I had identified my primary strengths to be writing and editing. Through my involvement with Dead Serious, the improvisational Comedy troupe on campus, I also saw myself as a comic. During my sophomore year, for a 200-level independent study, I wrote a 20-minute comedy sketch show with fellow Dead Serious member, Katie Barsotti. The show was structured similarly to Key & Peele, Portlandia, and Inside Amy Schumer. Our sketches reflected on the absurdity of our every day lives; we wrote sketches about our Italian “nonnis” and Wellesley’s study-centric atmosphere. Together, we workshopped scripts and developed our voices. We also expanded upon other skillsets important to a CAMS major on the production track, including cinematography, production, set design, and editing. With this project I became more interested in editing, especially in figuring out how edits can contribute to comedy. The cuts you make in a sketch can make or break the joke. During my time “abroad” with the Movies from Marlboro program, we spent six weeks in Marlboro, Vermont, at Marlboro College working on pre-production for the film Peter and John, based on the novel by Guy de Maupassant. Marlboro puts students in important positions during the development of a professional feature-length film. I focused on editing. I was assigned to be the editor of the behind-the-scenes documentary. While my team filmed what was going on during pre-production and production of the film in Vermont and on the island of Nantucket, I took their footage and tried to make sense of it, with help from a wonderful professional editing mentor. I did not cut all ties with writing, however. As a part of a student writing team at Marlboro, I workshopped the script that the writer/director was still working on. I enjoyed continuing to develop my writing, but Peter and John was a dramatic period piece and I missed comedy. Outside of classes, Katie and I continued to write comedic sketches. 3 The professional editor that taught me in the Movies from Marlboro program suggested that I take classes at the Edit Center in New York City. Excited to further explore editing, I enrolled in classes the following summer and, after completing the program, was asked to be a teaching assistant. At the Edit Center I met Cindy Lee (’01), an accomplished editor. She expressed frustrations as an editor that deeply resonated with me. Editing is a rewarding and challenging field, but there are times when you must take a job out of necessity rather than interest or alignment with the director’s vision. When you find that most of the editing jobs involve a voice that the industry has already explored a million times, you begin to ask yourself, “Why can’t I just see where my own voice takes me?” As a woman who plans to enter the film and television industry, I am all too aware that voices like Cindy’s and mind are few and far between. With this realization I decided to put editing on hold while I worked on developing my voice as a comedy writer. I enrolled in Professor Margaret Cezaire- Thompson’s screenwriting class and developed the first half of two pieces – an original screenplay and an adapted screenplay. This course gave me the building blocks of formatting and pacing necessary for a new version of my thesis project. I became extremely interested in writing for television, a medium where the writer rules. I enjoyed the episodic quality that would allow me to explore my characters in more depth and different situations that I found interesting. Emily Nussbaum, a TV critic for The New Yorker, says of Steven Soderbergh’s ideas on television: “TV audiences, he has argued, are more open to character complexity, to ambiguity and risk-taking” (Nussbaum 1). Television offers so many possible ways to explore the world of she show, and audiences more eager to see what writers come up with. As I wrote, I found that my newly developed editor’s eye gave me a better sense of comedic timing. I used my editing skills to further my writing skills. How did you develop the premise? The summer going into my senior year I believed my thesis would be writing and producing a pilot episode about the (fictional) Wellesley College football team. I developed the premise of a women’s football team at a women’s college for one practical reason: I wanted to ensure that I could film my script even with limited access to college- aged boys. What I really wanted to do was to write a show about women that are real, that we know, and that are not always beauty queens or good leaders or graceful. I had fallen in love with the show Broad City and admired the realness of the main characters, Abbi and Ilana. Amy Poehler, a personal hero and the executive producer of the show, expresses how I feel about women in most TV sitcoms: “Women always have to be the eye rollers, as the men make a mess…We didn’t want that. Young women can be lost, too” (Paumgarten 4). College is one of the times in a young woman’s life when she is the most lost. She begins to ask herself the big questions: Who am I? What do I enjoy? Does every women have nipple hair or is that just me? What makes me happy? We make fools of ourselves and we make bad choices and all of this is perfect to explore in comedy. Inspired by Broad City, I wanted my female characters to truly resonate with the female viewers. My 4 characters aren’t eye rollers; they are the ones making messes and finding ways to fix them. With characters who were realistic, I could then push the boundaries of the plausible by putting them in situations that are hardly realistic. The comedy comes from that disjuncture. I ended up steering away from setting my show at Wellesley. I had thought that setting it here, a place I’ve known for four years, would help me. I wanted to write what I knew, but it became clear that grounding the show in the Wellesley universe could really hinder me at times. Trying to stay true to Wellesley would keep me from allowing my story to reach its full potential. By creating a fictional college, I was able to focus more on developing my ideas and creating a space that would serve these characters. I decided to write a sitcom about the absurdity of college as seen through the eyes of an all-female team at a fictional co-educational college. How did you create the world? In creating the world, I had two initial decisions to make: size and location. I did some scouting by going on an admissions tour at Harvard and posing as a shy high school senior in order to observe the atmosphere of the school. Although I did not want an Ivy League setting, I decided that the size of Harvard worked well. I did not want all of the students to know each other, but I wanted the campus to have a degree of intimacy and camaraderie that you do not find at bigger universities. I though about how Harvard thinks of its football team – it is not the center of life on campus, but the Harvard vs. Yale game is always a big deal. This is how I wanted the fictional college to function. I had decided that the men’s team in my fictional college would be abysmal. This would mean that no one would really turn up to the games anyway, but perhaps the Thanksgiving game evokes a certain amount of nostalgia or unifies the campus, and that brings a big crowd for just one game a year. While at Harvard, I recognized that setting my fictional college in a city wouldn’t work. I wanted more of a Wellesley sort of atmosphere – away from the city and in its own bubble. I decided to use a rural campus to increase this idea of the bubble.