Comedy vs. drama is a subject near and dear to my heart. During this Fresh Air interview, Terry Gross asks Jason Segel about the Dracula musical featured in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which Segel wrote:
that wasn’t written for the movie, that Dracula musical. Sadly, I had a really bad out-of-work period from like 21 to 25. I couldn’t figure out what I was going to do with my life because I didn’t have a college education, and I thought I was going to have to, like, live with my parents for the rest of my life. Looking back, I was such an arrogant kid, I thought the two options for me were either movie star or live with my parents. Get a real job, like, never entered my mind. But so I thought the way that I could jump-start my career was to write a Dracula musical to be done with puppets. But I was writing it without a sense of irony. It wasn’t a comedy. It was going to be like a slow, labored drama. So anyway, I finally finished a few of the songs, and I took it to Judd Apatow to play for him. He was the first person I played it for. And the first song starts and about halfway through, he pushes stop on the CD player, and he looks at me, and he goes, Jayce, just take my advice. You can’t ever play this for anyone ever….he said never let anyone hear it. And I’ll tell you how it ended up happening. Judd has the same feelings about romantic comedy as I do, specifically how hard it is to come up with an original ending, you know? And so we were sitting around, brainstorming, like what could be an original ending for a romantic comedy. And I looked at him half-joking, and I said well, we could always use my Dracula musical. And he looked at me, and it was, like, you know, Judd Apatow is a comedy genius, and you just saw, like ding. You saw this look in his eyes like oh my God, that’s weird enough that it might work. So I just rewrote it that night that my character’s been secretly working on a Dracula opera, and that’s how that happened.
A couple of lessons from this:
- comedy is often > drama
- artists are terrible judges of what’s their best material – one has to be open to feedback and reaction
- shelve things, throw them in a drawer, but don’t throw anything away, ever – you never know when you might use it
- it helps to have a good mentor
betzistar
