by Angela Guess
Keith is a bit of an expert in the field. His book, Writing the Comedy Blockbuster, shares the wisdom he’s gained over the years writing for such companies as Paramount, Walt Disney, Universal, Warner Brothers, and Spyglass. Keith, who was named UCLA Extension’s Instructor of the Year in 2009, currently teaches screenwriting at Syracuse University and enjoys every minute of it.
I heard Keith speak at the Great American Pitch Fest a few years back, and he didn’t disappoint. In this first half of our conversation, Keith and I discuss the basic structure of R comedies, the one rule of comedy, and setting inappropriate goals.
LA Screenwriter (LA): How’d you get your start as a screenwriter?
Keith Giglio (KG): I had gone to NYU grad, where I learned absolutely nothing about screenwriting. Then I wound up — because of a college buddy whose brother had worked at Saturday Night Live — I wound up, strangely enough, working as a writer’s assistant in Madison, NJ, for one of the hottest comedy writers of the time, Andy Breckman. I learned my trade working for him for about a year and a half, and then my wife and I left New York.
I had written a thriller, then we decided to write a comedy together. We sent it to four or five people, and someone liked it. It was kind of similar in tone to a Sleepless in Seattle… The next thing we knew we had an agent and the script was going out. After that, you know, you start to go to meetings, and then I guess our first break was writing Archie for Universal, which never got made. So I got my start like everyone else: just by writing scripts and sending them out.
