Pumping the Breaks, Straight Manning Yourself

Sometimes you go too far in a scene. You heighten too quick and you make a huge game move and everyone on your team freezes because it was so crazy. Because everyone knows the scene just crossed a threshold where it’s gonna be hard to keep this going. This happened to me Friday.

I threw a chair across the stage last week at UCB's Let's Do This. It got a laugh, but it was crazy and pretty big for so early in the scene. I got caught up in the moment. So I did what anyone can do when they make this heightening too late mistake:


PUMP THE BREAKS. 


Instead of taking this huge game move and trying to heighten it for the rest of the scene, I straight manned myself. It wasn’t incredibly clever but, I just said, “Ok, guys, I went too far, I’m sorry.” I didn’t break the reality of it. In character I called myself out as I going to far. This effectively grounded the scene in reality and allowed everyone to keep moving forward without having to worry about having a character in the scene that's obviously crazy.

I think my teacher Joe Wengert first said to me that this could be done, and I fairly recently started putting it into practice. Slowing down and reassessing a scene allows you to not have to play at too high of a level for the rest of the scene. Let’s imagine that a hypothetical scene has ten game moves in it (basically, time, which will be on the x-axis). And each game move has varying levels intensity, from 1 being the least intense to 10 being the most intense possible game move (y-axis). Here’s how a scene would go if you decided to try and heighten a too early big move for a the rest of a scene:

At the third game move we basically threw a chair and we decided to heighten from there. At a certain point, we keep making level 10 moves, and we're just doing big crazy moves and they’re losing their funniness because it’s not growing. Now here’s an easier way to do this scene:

In this version of the same scene we threw a chair and apologized. We took the craziness and grounded that craziness in a reality. Then we worked our way back to a different big move. This way we slow down the game, and we can find a way to get back to a heightened move. And it’s gonna pay off better because the audience knows that the craziness is there, and they’re looking forward to another one coming back. Do this a couple times and an audience will loose their shit.

If you pull out a gun 5 lines into a scene, there's nothing to stop you from going, "Listen I'm sorry, I would NEVER threaten you with a gun, I just got frustrated." This move is a lot closer to reality than you deciding to heighten from there and pull out a grenade then a rocket launcher then a tank then a aircraft carrier then a nuclear bomb.


You can straight man yourself, you can organically find a way back to a game, and you can still have a great scene if it goes too big too early.

Ever go too big? What happened? Do you have a better way to handle the situation? Comment and we’ll talk about it.