Marley Sims – Home Improvement

Posted by admin on March 20th, 2009 filed in Personal

A couple days ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Marly Sims, who wrote over 23 episodes for Home Improvement in the period of 7 years, full-time. Marly Sims was here in Charlottesville at UVA speaking about “Gender and the Politics of writing in Hollywood.” Marly Sims is from Brooklyn, NY where she got her start in acting on Broadway then moved on to writing. 

A couple interesting points that I took away from Marly Sims lecture are;

(1) Basic Comedy Writing: always write the funniest line at the end

(2) Write with a partner and you need others because you lose perspective

(3) Basic Comedy Writing: too may “the’s” will kill the joke, rhythm is everything

(4)  As far as writing Actions for TV series, only write the comedic action

(5) If an Actor/Actress can’t remember a line, it shouldn’t have been in the script