[spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] Trainwreck: The Game of the Scene By Jacob Krueger [/spb_text_block] [divider type="thin" text="Go to top" full_width="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [blank_spacer height="30px" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [spb_text_block title="TRANSCRIPT" pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] Before we even get into the structure of Amy Shumer’s Trainwreck, I want to start by talking about the inception of the movie, and how it came to the screen. Oftentimes if you're an emerging screenwriter, it's easy to imagine that the professionals must totally know what they're doing, write one draft and it magically comes to fruition. But the truth of the matter is that Amy Shumer’s process on this screenplay was very similar to the process that a lot of you go through. Writing a great screenplay does not happen overnight. This screenplay took Amy years and many drafts to write. And interestingly it started off as a completely different movie. Judd Apatow tells a story about working for about nine months with Amy on a completely different version of the film. And then one day the two of them realized that this wasn’t the story they really wanted to tell. And Judd Apatow told Amy Schumer, despite all the work they’d put into the draft, that he was really more interested in those personal stories that she was telling when he first heard her jokes. When she was talking about her father and his real experience with M.S. and what that real relationship looked like. And so, eight or nine months into the process, Amy Schumer completely reconceived the movie, refocused what it was really about, and made it personal. You can see how putting that personal stuff on the page brought this movie into instant focus. Not only for the writer and director, but also for the audience, and for the character. Trainwreck starts with a really amazing little vignette. Little Amy, whose character's name is Amy, and her sister Kim, whose character's name is Kim, are sitting across from their dad, whose real name is Gordon and whose character’s name is Gordon. Gordon, in his own funny way, is trying to explain his impending divorce to these little girls in terms of their dolls: "What if you had to play with that doll for the rest of your life? What if there were other dolls that you wanted to play with?" And the scene is hilarious, but it's also heartbreaking. Because by the end of this scene, dad has the two kids parroting back to him a mantra that will come to rule Amy’s life: "Monogamy isn't realistic." And what a wonderful place to start a movie about intimacy, about how hard it is to fall in love, how hard it is to actually break past our own walls. There's a wonderful journey for Amy in this movie and one of the things that I love about that journey is that even though it hits all of those traditional romantic comedy beats-- down to the big, theatrical performance in the end to prove her love-- it does it in a way that is extremely personal, and extremely vulnerable, and extremely truthful.It does so in a way that looks a lot more like real love, in all its messiness, than a lot of romantic comedies. Now I'm not saying that this is the real Amy Schumer, because when you write from your real life you're not trying to put your real, real self on the page. You're not trying to put your life experiences exactly the way they occurred on the page. You're trying to look closely at one specific aspect of yourself: one little broken piece of yourself, or one little beautiful piece of yourself. Or maybe, like in this movie, a mixture of the two. For example, Amy Schumer steals from her real life a very funny and very awkward breakup with an ex-boyfriend, which occurred at a time when she was starting to think about dating other guys. He was getting suspicious,