Craig McNamara writes

In early 2025, I saw a competition for 10-minute plays that took place anywhere within an airport.    I assumed most people would naturally gravitate to scenarios around the most obvious settings – TSA lines, airport gates and baggage claims. So it seemed one way to stand out was to set my script in none of those.   Instead, I’d feature a family of four as they arrived at the airport with their bags. No interactions with airport personnel, no social or political commentary – just an all-out comedy about their inter-family conflicts, triggered by the stresses of traveling together.    I thought of it as writing a scene for the cast of a family sitcom –  All in the Family  in particular, not that I was trying to use their characters. But like that show, and other well-crafted sitcoms, I wanted every cast member to have a distinctive relationship to each of the other characters, that would guide their responses. In fact, I (sloppily) diagrammed out how ea...

Santa faces some uncomfortable truths when he’s subjected to the harsh scrutiny of a focus group.   Since I’d had early success getting  Red-Nosed Drunk  produced in 2024, I decided to try adapting another holiday essay I’d written years ago, this one about Santa Claus getting an image makeover. (You can read the original essay here .)   Because there was no actual narrative in the one-page essay, I created a meeting between St. Nick and two marketing professionals.    Admittedly, the premise made for a pretty static play. Still, I thought it could work in ten minutes or less. The marketers presenting research that undermined all the tropes of Santa, and his reactions to their bizarre recommendations, seemed surprising, absurd, and funny.    One big problem, though: My play, like the essay that inspired it, turned on a pop culture reference that was nearly 50 years old (a popular character from the 1970s-era sitcom,  Happy Days ).  ...

After a performance of my play,  Wanted Man  – wherein a woman comes up with a surprising way to meet somebody after she witnesses a bank robbery – the lead actress mentioned to me that she felt like the story was from another time, noting the absence of cell phones in the story.   A perceptive comment – because  Wanted Man  is indeed a remnant of a previous era. It was adapted from an unsold screenplay that I wrote in the mid 1990s.  The screenplay had one standout scene that drove most of the action that follows. I just had to figure out how to compress the whole two-hour story into that one scene. Despite this being more of an exercise in salvaging an old idea than a serious playwriting effort, it took me four drafts just to get everything set up right so it all pays off somewhat logically (for a romantic comedy, anyway).  When I finished, before I set it aside and went on to other things, I decided I might as well enter it into at least one play fe...

In a way, this was 35 years in the making.   Back in 1989, a local screenwriters’ group sponsored a public reading of a movie script I had written called  The Last Couple to Prom . It was an ‘80s screwball comedy wannabe, in which the protagonist, Ben, moved next door to his high school crush, Tracy, and spun an escalating series of lies and deceptions in order to get close to her. Instead, he becomes friends with her husband and learns a secret that could end their marriage and give him the chance with Tracy he was hoping for.   At the end of the night, I received a cassette tape recording of the production … which I never revisited for the next three decades.     Back then, I was weirdly averse to outlining, or even just thinking through, script ideas I had. I would just start writing, hoping my momentum would carry me through the next 90 to 110 pages. Spoiler: More than once, it didn’t. This time it did, but it also baked in some storytelling problems th...

A casual apology during coffee between friends leads a series of surprising confessions. That's my 10-minute play, The Besting of Friends , inspired by an occurrence in my life.  (Yes, I inadvertently lost a childhood friend's action figure. Yes, he had totally forgotten the incident when I replaced the figure decades later. No, nothing else that follows actually happened.) Over the last two years I've racked up a lot of rejections for plays I've submitted to various short-play festivals. (Part of the process, and a career in advertising has given me lots of experience in having ideas rejected.) So, at best, I was hoping that The Besting of Friends would at least make it into one of the many competitions in which it was entered. I was pleasantly surprised that it was produced  by two different theatre companies in the same month, February 2025.  The Rainy Day Artistic Collective, based in Seattle, included my play in their New Works New Writers 2025 showcase that was s...

  It's Christmas Eve in a dive bar, where Santa's most famous reindeer has a lot to say about "The Big Guy," commercialism, and his role as a holiday icon. I wrote this in response to the Theatrical Shenanigans podcast’s call for holiday plays.  Since this would be an audio production, I realized I could adapt (and extend) my 2003 short essay about a conversation between a bartender and grumbling Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and not have to worry about costuming.  Produced by the podcast for their "12 Plays of Christmas" Special, December, 2024. (The title graphic for the play was created by me.)

Last fall, I posted here about having a two-minute (yes, two-minute) play,  Thinking of Elephants , produced by the Minnesota Shorts Festival.    It was a simple idea for what was essentially a quick skit. Taking place in a laundromat, one person’s discomfort at having the “underthings” in her basket seen by a coworker ends in a kind of “mutually assured destruction” scenario; she demands a peek at his own “unmentionables.”   But even for that simple scenario, I wrote too much dialogue and had to throw out many lines to keep it to about two minutes.   But after seeing the two-minute production, I wondered if the idea couldn’t sustain the 10-minute length that most short-play competitions request. The key wasn’t just to add back in my excised dialogue, but to find an emotional core to the story that would make it about more than just embarrassment. Pondering this for a while, I realized that the text of the story – feeling exposed before a coworker – could be su...

Not just a vivid poster here. A vivid lesson in the impact of good cropping. I was reading an article on the movie-poster art of Al Kallis for American International Pictures. AIP was, per Wikipedia ,  "the first company to use focus groups, polling American teenagers about what they would like to see and using their responses to determine titles, stars, and story content. … a typical production involved creating a great title, getting an artist such as Albert Kallis who supervised all AIP artwork from 1955 to 1973 to create a dynamic, eye-catching poster, then raising the cash, and finally writing and casting the film.” Kallis had the pedigree. Along with his previous work as a poster layout artist for the influential Saul Bass, Kallis was the son of Maurice Kallis, a famed movie poster artist himself.   Perusing the work of Kallis the younger, I have to assume that his posters were likely more effective at evoking terror and dread than the movies themselves....

It’s not unusual for a product to undergo rebranding. In fact, one of the most successful was covered on this very blog .    But in this case, the product in need of a new image wasn’t found on a store shelf. It was projected on the silver screen.   In 1973, United Artists released its movie,  The Long Goodbye  to theatres in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Miami. The movie re-teamed director Robert Altman and star Elliot Gould of the box-office hit  M*A*S*H  three years earlier, in an adaptation of the Raymond Chandler noir novel.    “Nothing says goodbye like a bullet,” the movie poster announced, Elliot Gould brandishing a cigarette and pistol, looking as hard-boiled as Humphrey Bogart’s Marlowe in 1946’s  The Big Sleep.   And the audience stayed away in droves.    When the limited release ended, United Artists pulled the film from its next opening in New York and, baffled by the apathy of audiences (and the host...

Back in the late ‘80s, a Minneapolis screenwriters' group sponsored a couple of public readings for a movie script I’d written. It was small performance, for maybe 40 to 50 people, but it was professionally done, with local stage actors volunteering their time and talent to act out my words. And though the script never amounted to much beyond that, I still remember the thrill of hearing my characters come to life, hearing my jokes getting actual laughs.   I didn’t go on to become a screenwriter or TV writer, but last year, I started thinking about the possibility of again having something I wrote performed on stage, this time via those 10-minute play competitions that are popular with theatre groups. I had a story that I’d started to tell in a movie script 40 years ago, but never finished; I lifted a sequence from that screenplay, and through a lot of rewriting, turned it into ten-minute, two-person play.   Twenty-five submissions later, that play remains unproduced. But in th...

During their 5 decades of performing together on radio and TV programs, Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding have portrayed befuddled newsmen, quirky interview subjects, didactic soap opera characters another media mainstays.  But of all the targets of their deadpan, underplayed style, one the best has been their commercial parodies.  Sure, that sounds like faint praise, what with the glut of commercial parodies all over TV and the internet these days, but Bob & Ray appropriated the language of advertising with an insightfulness that's easy to miss while you're laughing at their off-kilter dialogue. Their commercials for fictitious sponsor Monongahela Metal Foundry -- "Casting Steel Ingots With The Housewife In Mind"  -- make a mockery of advertisers' attempts at consumer relevance.    Their Einbinder Flypaper slogan -- "The Brand You've Gradually Grown To Trust Over The Course Of Three Generations" -- was a typical heritage-hyping appeal and yet resonat...

I’ve been known to sum up my past co-dependent relationship with television by telling others that my parents used to say, “It’s such a nice day, Craig – why don’t you take the TV outdoors?”   Yes, I’m exaggerating – but only a little. I freely admit, I watched way too much TV growing up. Given that, you might think our modern era of “Peak TV, with streaming services multiplying like rabbits on Spanish Fly, would be a dream come true for me, right?    Let’s press pause and think about that for a second.   Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the freedom to consume entertainment programs on my own schedule without having to wait a week between installments or broken up by commercials. And I won’t argue the point that we’re in a Second Golden Age of Television, with more shows than ever before of high quality, diverse subject matter, and involving storytelling – The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, et al.   But here’s the thing: If you’ve ever own...

My years in college coincided with the comedy boom of the early 1980s.  Back then, every kid who was a former class clown, or used laughter to deflect their insecurities, thought about spinning their jokes into gold. And I was one of them (the insecure ones).   Spurred on by the then-revolutionary countercultural satire of Saturday Night Live and the rise of comedy clubs and the stars they nurtured (Steve Martin, Rosanne Barr, Sam Kinison, Robin Williams, et al); suddenly every two-bit bar with a brick wall was laying a sheet of plywood over a base of plastic milk crates and hosting “standup nights.”    One of the first venues in Minneapolis to feature standups was Mickey Finn’s (now The Union), a dive bar in Northeast Minneapolis, probably best remembered (if at all) as the stage where Louie Anderson got started.    Eventually, the ubiquity of standup comedy (thanks, cable TV!) and way too many “open mike” comedy nights and their cattle calls of uncom...

What's it like to create advertising for a living? What’s it like to work at an ad agency?  What’s to like – or not like – about certain ad campaigns?  What do I like in how advertising in portrayed in movies and TV?   Find out here, in essays, articles, podcast scripts, and blog posts – nothing too heavy and written with wit and style.  Like the writing on this blog?  It's like that, and more. $9.99 softcover – $4.99 ebook Read excerpts and order  here .

A few months back, I noticed there were lists making the way around the web that purported to be "The Greatest Movie Themelines Ever Written" -- actually, it seems to be more or less the same list everywhere. This list is pretty representative of the thinking. I'm not going to go through the choices movie by movie. But if you do, you'll see that most of the themelines chosen are are, at best, just clever wordplays, and at worst, too-clever-by-half puns. They may bring a smile to your face and they might even give you some idea of the subject matter. But by and large, most of these evoke no real desire to see the movie. And shouldn't that be the real yardstick by which you should judge the "greatest" themeline? It's not surprising that truly great themelines are few and far between. After all, it's not every day that someone comes up with "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water" or "In space, no one can h...