hecklongtree

This morning I received my coverage (evaluation) from the Slamdance Screenplay Competition for my script "Jilted." While it contained some very favorable comments ('law school...is often lampooned brilliantly "), it also comments that really upset me. There's a line early in the script ("We're reformed Jews. In fact, we're so reformed we're practically Nazis") which the script reader says I lifted from a "famous Woody Allen stand-up routine."

I never had heard this supposedly famous routine, but a few months back (long after I had written my script), I saw it on a Yahoo Woody Allen Group post. Woody's joke is something like "My Rabbi is from a reform order. He's so reformed he's a Nazi."

The genesis of my line is this: I read, in a book of Lenny Bruce's stand-up material, a joke that went something like: "In my family, we're reform Jews. In fact, we're so reformed, we're ashamed to be Jewish." I took Lenny's set-up (we're so reformed) and added my own punchline (we're practically Nazis).

So I didn't steal Woody Allen's joke, which if it is famous--it's unjustly famous. Reform order? Catholics have orders--not Jews. Anyway, I bet Woody took the set-up from Lenny, same as I did.

The second comment that bothered me, though not as much as the first, was that the legal material should be cut significantly since it didn't "advance the plot, entertain, or develop any kind of thematic subtext." I don't know--maybe it's my fault-- but I didn't include scenes just to show Jim in the law school classroom and to give the audience lessons in law. Rather, I put the scenes in the script to reveal aspects of Jim's character. Thus, during the Socratic dialogue regarding Pierson v. Post (the fox hunt case referred to in my Feb. 15 journal entry), after the discussion of Roman law, English law, etc., Jim asks the impertinent though obvious question: Why can't we just come up with our own law?" That's the way Jim thinks: Why can't come up with our own rules--not just in this case--but in life? He might well have asked: Why can't we come up with our own identities, instead of the ones imposed on us by parents, culture, religion, etc.

The Palsgraf case is also important. First, it explains why the hang-out is called "Mrs. Palsgraf's Sandwich Emporium. Second, it shows that Jim adheres to the Andrews Dissent (We owe a duty to the whole world), both in the narrow sense, as it applies to proximate cause, and, in the broader sense, as it applies to life.

Also, these discussions are important, since they set up the crazy final exam questions, which everybody seems to find hillarious, even though they're hardly different from real law school exam questions!

Anyway, no one seemed to get any of the subtext. It just seemed to go over everyone's head. I guess, when all's said and done, I really am like Jim, the protagonist of my script--a stand-up comic who wants to tell jokes in Latin.