SevenCo-Creating Character
“Just because you are a character, doesn’t mean you have character.”
—Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel), Pulp Fiction
One day, Billy Crystal called Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel and pitched an idea: Three guys from New York go on a fantasy cattle drive.
“Right away, more than anything that’s ever been pitched to us, we said, ‘That’s funny!’” Ganz tells Written By. “‘If we can’t make that funny, then we can’t make anything funny.’”
But they didn’t start with the jokes about saddle sores or stampedes and other set pieces we laughed at in City Slickers. They started, as they always do, with one simple question.
“The first thing we do is we sit down here and we say, ‘Who are they?’” Ganz says. “They can’t just be generic.” ...
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