Blunt Talk: No Unkind Humor

Jonathan Ames on writing about friendships, his rules of screenwriting, and ideas for a film of his cult show Bored to Death.

Jonathan Ames is becoming a television staple, writing comedic television with depth.

The New York native first made his presence known as a novelist and essay writer, before moving his self-deprecating stories into the realm of television.

On his first show, Bored to Death, Jason Schwartzman played a novelist also named Jonathan Ames, who began an unlicensed detective agency, alongside his friend Ray (Zach Galifianakis) and mentor George (Ted Danson). The show lasted three seasons on HBO and still has a positive cult following online.

In his newest creation, Blunt Talk, Patrick Stewart stars as Walter Blunt. The show follows a British newscaster who recently moved to Los Angeles with an alcoholic, eccentric manservant named Harry. The duo try to navigate showbusiness, news, and the ins and outs of life behind-the-scenes of a talk show.

Creative Screenwriting spoke with Jonathan about the unlikely inspiration for his new show, writing about friendships, his rules of screenwriting, and ideas for a film of Bored to Death.

Seth McFarlane approached you to create a show for Patrick Stewart. How did you decide to make Patrick a news anchor?

I got an email from my agent asking if I would like to get on the phone with Seth McFarlane. I asked what it was about and my agent told me that Seth was talking to writers to see if they could come up with a show idea for Patrick Stewart.

The night before the phone call, I happened to be channel searching and I saw Piers Morgan on CNN. I was taken by his set—my memory says that it was this bright Neon blue—and in that moment, I just imagined Patrick Stewart behind that desk.

The Larry Sanders Show had also been brought up, so I thought we could emulate that tonally. Seth McFarlane had been a big fan of The Larry Sanders Show, so I thought this could be kind of like, that but instead of a late night talk show host, it would be a news show host. Like Larry Sanders, we would live behind the scenes.

That’s how that came about. It was luck that I was channel surfing CNN. I could have seen anybody. I could have seen Anderson Cooper, but because I saw Piers Morgan, an Englishman, on an American news show, I thought, “This could happen.” That was the idea I pitched the next day to Seth McFarland and he gravitated towards it.

Is this a typical manner in which you develop character?

I don’t know if it’s necessarily how I develop character, but it’s how the imagination works, which is mysterious. It’s odd what can trigger things. For a lot of what I do, on Blunt Talk or in my other TV work, it has been inspired by images that I may have seen in films, where I want to recreate, pay homage, or recreate the feelings that those images gave to me.

Some of those images are subconscious. Like in Bored to Death, I had a scene with the Jonathan Ames character, where he was hanging from a huge clock on the Williamsburg Bank Building. I don’t think that I had ever seen the film with Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock, or maybe I had seen an image of it, but it wasn’t until I wrote that, that the director said it was like the film Safety Last! So then we went and looked at the clip, which informed how we shot that scene.

Another time, with Blunt Talk, I happened to be watching this movie with Alec Guinness on AMC, The Upstager. Alec Guinness plays a criminal who is hiding out in some shadowy place, where he decides to make shadow puppets with his hands. I thought that could be something fun for an episode, where we were trying to save some money while making fun visuals. So we did a whole thing on shadow puppets where we brought in a professional who stood in for Patrick Stewart.

That’s a digression, as I’m not always sure how I come up with character, but they are usually inspired by some other form of art or character—in addition to autobiographical features.

Several of your characters are self-deprecating, but they’re very loving towards one another. This is different to most network comedies, the leads mock one another. What advice do you have for creating uplifting comedy?

This is something that people have noted with my two shows, and I’m glad they have. I guess it was something that I was aware of from the beginning, on Bored to Death, which was my first foray into writing lots of scripts and running a television show, so I had to hire writers.

All of the sample scripts that I was sent had characters that were terribly unkind to one another, or as you said, “mocking,” but supposedly they were friends.

I haven’t watched a lot of TV myself, so I don’t necessary know what’s out there, but I got a glimpse by reading these scripts. So I told the writers that I hired that I didn’t want that kind of humor. I didn’t find it funny and I just thought it was mean.

It didn’t seem like how human beings are with each other, or maybe I have an unrealistic notion. My friends and I might tease each other, but not to the derision or mocking that I was reading in most of these scripts.

So that became an ethos that I started with Bored to Death and continued with Blunt Talk. The characters can give each other a hard time, but they shouldn’t be hateful to one another. If they did, how could we believe that they cared for each other?

Starting from that premise, maybe that’s how people should be with their own friends. Ultimately, I guess that I want people to feel good at the end of an episode with the comedy I write. With characters who are mocking one another the whole time, it would seem that you would just feel like you’ve been indulging, or perhaps you feel superior to these people.

In Blunt Talk, Harry and Walter have a unique friendship, as did the three characters on Bored to Death. Can you elaborate a little more about how you write friendship on television?

For Walter and Harry, that relationship began as an homage to me as the master and valet relationship I had enjoyed in the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, specifically the Jeeves books. I had actually written a novel as an homage to Wodehouse, which even included a character named Jeeves.

As I was conceiving Blunt Talk, I created that dynamic again, because it’s a dynamic I enjoyed writing. In some ways they are Ego and Id, or they could be conceived as the two voices in one’s own head—our crazy thoughts and then the voice of council.

But then it switches, especially in this season. Now, Harry loses it a little and Walter has to come to his aid. It’s idealized caring, but my friends can be very good to me and I try to return that, though I’ve personally fallen short from time to time. I’ve hurt people. But nobody is perfect.

With both Blunt Talk and Bored to Death, the characters are somewhat outlandish. How much improv makes it way to the set?

Most series are very scripted and I’ve worked with actors that like to stick to the script. But during rehearsal—even though with television, you don’t get much of a rehearsal due to time—when the camera is rolling, they’ll fool around and see the line in a different way or maybe use a prop on set. So sometimes something comes to them and I’ll say, “Do that again.”

With Zach Galifianakis, more than anybody, we would try to have at least one take where he could fool around and improvise. With television, there just isn’t much time. When you write a script, you’re thinking of time and one page equals one minute. But with improvisation, it can sometimes take too long to pay off.

But we definitely find little moments, but we mainly stick to the script compared to other shows. An actor on Transparent told me that sometimes they start with the scene and then improvise the next take, but they stay with the gist of the scene.

What advice can you share about writing a book versus writing for television or film?

I made the transition years ago, and I now write scripts more than I write prose, but I do want to get back to prose.

Scripts are a form. It’s not as controlled as certain poetic forms, where a certain numbers of syllables are required, but it’s very much a blueprint for a lot of people to read. These are the people that are going to pay for things, along with the production designer, wardrobe, and actors. The fun writing is in the dialogue, but even there, you don’t have as much flexibility as when you write prose.

In prose, you can have someone give a long speech and it seems believable, but on a TV show, you can’t have long monologue. It will get boring and it’s difficult for the actor. Scenes can’t be too long due to pacing where everything will slow down.

There are a lot more rules in episodic, comedic television. When writing movies, I think it’s an even harder form. You have to keep something moving and give it breathing room. The 100-page script is more difficult. I’ve had more success in the 30-page TV script, but I have a lot of little personal rules for screenwriting. I didn’t have these when writing prose.

Like I said, I try never to have a scene longer than two pages in a half-hour comedy. That’s true unless I have multiple characters coming in and out of the scene, or something that is changing up the scene.

I try not to have characters speak for more than four or five lines of dialogue. That’s not a hard-and-fast rule. Sometimes I do let people speak longer, but monologues are somewhat rare.

I try to keep the description to a minimum to keep the writing tight. Everything needs to be clear or else you’re using up page-count time. There are also people who have to approve the scripts and you don’t want them to get bored.

You want to write scripts that are entertaining to read.

Have any of your methods changed over the years?

I don’t think so. I think my method is the same. There is a lot of procrastination and then you finally sit down.

There are some basic principles. I used to teach a lot of writing and you always set a reasonable goal. I may want to get five pages done in a day and while I might have to finish a script over a weekend, I would never think that I could write a whole script in a day.

Fives pages in a day is a good goal to achieve, and there was one day for Blunt Talk where I wrote eighteen pages in a day. That doesn’t sound so Herculean but when you’re under a deadline, those pages have to work, so they couldn’t be shitty pages. So set a reasonable goal.

I still carry a little pad where I write down ideas or notes. A lot of times its good to look at things like that before you start writing, so you don’t have to start with totally a blank page.

So there are some tricks there, but my philosophies haven’t changed much.

Is there anything else you would like to share about Blunt Talk?

There are a lot of cinematic allusions in this season of the show. I can’t remember them all, but in the first episode, we allude to the end of Doctor Zhivago, when the character is on a bus and they spot a long lost love out the window.

When he is in the lights in front of the museum in LA, we wanted a Hitchcock feeling.

So I make lots of illusions to the things I’ve enjoyed. I think that’s an interesting aspect of Blunt Talk.

With every episode, I try to come up with some beautiful image, that will resonate with the audience, in addition to the comedy. It is a visual medium, so we want to have those moments.

In your written work, you’ve mentioned being an avid reader and book collector. What books would you recommend for storytellers?

I don’t know about storytellers, per se. For the last decade or so, I’ve mostly read genre-fiction, especially mysteries. I’ve come to love the page-turner, as opposed to the more literary novel that doesn’t compel me to turn the page the same way.

Mysteries are a good way to learn the basics of storytelling.

The basic principle is, “What happens next?” You always want the viewer or reader to wonder, what happens next? People might enjoy either giving mysteries a chance to including that page-turning quality into their prose or scriptwriting.

There have been rumors of a Bored to Death movie, but you’ve quoted that you felt something was missing. Are there any details you can share?

I did write two drafts. I guess they weren’t working, but I may have given up on them too soon. One of them wasn’t working so well for the HBO executives either, and then I did another draft, but I started getting busy with Blunt Talk, so I had to let it drop.

I think of revisiting it. I have Jason Schwartzman in Blunt Talk, along with Ted’s wife Mary Steenburgen, so we’re all still very close. Zach has said he would do a movie as well.

I guess one thing that I haven’t really mentioned before was a thought that if I did do a movie, then by continuing to represent my own life, we could have the Jonathan character living in Los Angeles. That would really return him to his Philip Marlowe roots. That’s where Bored to Death began, with his obsession with author Raymond Chandler.

The Brooklyn that was so important to me at the time has sort of slipped away from me. I was capturing the tail end of the commercialization or the new discovery of Brooklyn. Now it’s completely exploited. So that’s one thought, to return the Jonathan character to his Philip Marlowe roots.

But I’m looking forward to Blunt Talk. As I learn to write for everybody, we can go deeper and deeper into the story. I hope people give the show a chance. The second half of the season is especially strong, so hopefully people will check it out!

Featured image: Patrick Stewart as Walter Blunt in Blunt Talk. Photo by Justina Mintz/© 2015 Starz Entertainment LLC – © © 2015 MRC II Distribution Company, LP

[addtoany]