I'm embarrassed to admit this, but it was only this past week that I finally saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time. This is one of the funniest (and most famous) scenes in the movie; Indy has survived a mad chase/fight through the casbah only to be confronted by a big guy with an even bigger sword and some flashy skills. Exhausted and in no mood to fight, Indy pulls out his gun and shoots the sword-wielding bad guy dead.

Legend has it that this famous scene came about because Harrison Ford had a developed a terrible case of dysentery filming the movie in Tunisia. As scripted, the fight scene between Indy and the swordsman would have required three days to shoot, so Ford - presumably motivated by a desire to spend less time suffering in the heat and more time on the toilet - suggested "why don't I just shoot the guy?".

As the cliche says, necessity is the mother of invention.

This simple gag probably plays much better than whatever fight scene had been originally scripted and is a good example how simpler is almost always better. I was reminded of the "K.I.S.S." principle today while working on the Bear Town script on the way home from my office. The script was originally written as an independent feature and I have been carving it up in to small chunks that will work as 3-5 minute webisodes.

There are sections of the script I really don't like; the dialogue is clunky and the story doesn't feel like it flows naturally. I was really struggling to figure out how to make a couple scenes work tonight when it suddenly occurred to me that I could just cut them. That in turn inspired me to reorder a couple other scenes and eliminate a few more. In a span of fifteen minutes on the bus I probably cut thirty pages of script down to ten. Everything is much shorter, simpler and (most importantly) funnier.

Simple really is better.

Posted by Andrew at 10:21 PM | Permalink

---