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Writing: Jargon PreservationPOSTED BY JOHN ROGERS OVER AT Kung Fu Monkey.
Had an interesting moment talking to Alex Epstein the other day. We were discussing a script moment, I used a term, and he'd never heard of it. I realized that a.) if you don't apprentice in one of the big writing rooms in LA, you've probably never heard any of these terms, and b.) the older writers who taught we staff newbies these tools are -- especially with the nuclear winter of the half-hour -- not around as much. A valuable sub-cultural tool is fast disappearing. Most movie writers have no experience of this whatsoever.
Not that you need to know these things to be a writer. But it just seems a pity to me that this great oral tradition is dying. One of my favorite moments happened during my first week at Cosby.
Saul Turtletaub (father of director Jon) and Bernie Orenstein had sort of taken me under their wing -- having a stand-up around, rather than a film-school grad, reminded them of the old days of writing. During a run-through, Saul turned to Bernie and asked "Didn't we use that joke on That Girl?"
Beat. "You were on That Girl?"
We then did the math, and realized that Saul and Bernie had started their first writing job together one week before my birth. I was, literally, their career.
Thirty-odd years of solving every script problem -- and more importantly, every practical shooting script problem -- imaginable. Couple that with a ... hmm ... chaotic shooting process, and it was boot camp. One of the best things to come out of staffing was learning that for many, many situations, there was a shorthand to help codify and communicate a problem in the script that was often tantalizingly just out of reach, just at the edge of your writer's "something's ... off" radar.
So, put these in your toolbox. I'll be collecting more as we go. All origins recorded as they were explained to me.
"a Bono": a place in the script that, no matter what joke you put there, it fails.
Sonny Bono once opened a restaraunt up near the studios, called, of course, "Bono's". It failed, quickly. That's unremarkable. But then, every restaraunt that opened on that corner after Bono's also failed. Something like a DOZEN of them, and all flaming out spectacularly in six months. That corner was cursed, and so the script term "a Bono" was born. It's hard to really explain a Bono to you unless you've seen one, but they're real.
To learn more hilarious terms, follow this link.
//John Rogers
Categories: [television_] [industry_] [general_]Labels: general, industry, Kung Fu Monkey, television
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