Austin Improv

Crosstalk: Is Improvisation Ruining Film Comedy?

A nifty little article from The A.V. Club.

Interesting.

Though it brings up an important distinction, in my mind. There's improvising, which is telling a story without a script, and there's ad-libbing, which is more like just saying a funny one liner. Just because actors are trained improvisers, it doesn't mean they're really improvising when they're saying something that isn't scripted. Maybe that doesn't make sense. To me, a sequence of funny, un-scripted, one-liners is barely improv, so I don't think it's fair to say that "improv is ruining film comedy."

I like the shout-out to Joe vs the Volcano as an example of the power of the singular writer... Shanley's one of my favorites

Plus, any director worth a damn will make the actors (especially the ones prone to improvisation) do a few takes with the scripted lines. If they then use the improvised take, and it ends up being unfunny, it's also the editor/director's fault. There's lots of shit that can make a movie bad. Blaming it on one thing doesn't seem fair.

In some cases though, it can be blamed. I have seen too many people make improvised films where the end result wasn't funny and had a "you should have been there" feel to it. I think Christopher Guest did the same thing with "For Your Consideration". I think the film did not get the scenes it wanted out of the process and the editors tried to do the best they could with what they had. That is why you had those very strange scenes where you are watching the reaction shot of someone while the person who is talking has their back to you and the audio is clearly not from what we are seeing. That is a trick that is done when you need to take a larger piece of audio and cut it down into usable snippets that may be too small. So you cut away to something because the video would show all of those flaws. Even then, the editors could not make "For Your Consideration" work.

There are some great, mostly improvised films, and there are some great, mostly scripted films. There are some bad movies as well, the improvised and scripted kinds both.

I think the writer's just disappointed by Owen Wilson and Will Ferrell (and others like them) movies, which is understandable.

I keep hearing from different peeps about The Office being scripted/unscripted/whatever. I've read both in several forums, publications, overheard both at parties where the people talking were industry people so they could have known what they were talking about. And my Studio8.net co-owner pal Brock LaBorde has been Amy Heckerling's personal assistant for over a year now and she directed an episode of The Office and said that there was no script for her. Another friend of mine wrote a spec script for The Office and when I said, "i thought it was improvised" she responded with a "no no way. i've talked with ____ and he worked on the show and it is very tightly scripted."

We're talking about it, so I guess The Office wins.

I'm not sure about the American Office. I know the British one was pretty tightly scripted, though.

That's just crazy talk. Dodgeball was AWESOME.

majcher wrote:That's just crazy talk. Dodgeball was AWESOME.

God, Dodgeball just cemented my hatred for Ben Stiller. He plays 2 characters: an over-the-top, cocky jock and an over-the-top awkward fish out of water.

I used to think "Man, what happened to Ben Stiller. He used to be so funny!" because I remembered loving his sketch show when I was in high school. I rented it a while back and couldn't even sit through the entire first disc. Terribly dated pop culture references.

Ben Stiller can go away now.

kbadr wrote:

majcher wrote:That's just crazy talk. Dodgeball was AWESOME.

God, Dodgeball just cemented my hatred for Ben Stiller.

Those parts have been surgically removed from my brain. All I see is a silver blur during those portions of the movie. In my worldline, Ben Stiller died in a tragic cutlery accident shortly after the filming of Mystery Men, and hasn't appeared in a movie since.

kbadr wrote:I rented it a while back and couldn't even sit through the entire first disc. Terribly dated pop culture references.

I had the exact same reaction recently.

considering the plots of the american office i find it hard to believe that it's not scripted at least to a certain degree. some of the interviews and maybe some of the dialogue is ad-lib but for an episode to be truly improvised in that environment gets expensive and hard to manage with such a huge cast.

also, i didn't read the article.

arthursimone wrote:I like the shout-out to Joe vs the Volcano as an example of the power of the singular writer... Shanley's one of my favorites

i LOVE this movie, but no one I know has ever admitted to loving it as well. High five simone!!

I love Joe Vs. The Volcano as well. Visually there are a bunch of Gilliam-esque touches, like the recurring lightning bolt.

Flibbertygibbit.