- I wrote a script for Adi Shankar's "Crowdsourcing the Cure For The Simpsons" contest.
- My script did not make it to the final round of said contest.
- You can download my script here.
- This is a spec script, not officially associated with the Simpsons orFox Broadcasting.
I think it's a time in our culture where people love to pretend they're offended. Matt Groening
The episode and Groening's response did not sit well with some people. In particular, Adi Shankar, producer of DREDD (one of my favorite movies). Shankar felt "Much Apu About Nothing" didn't really address the problem at all. He launched a crowdsourcing campaign for anyone to write a spec Simpsons script that did a better job of addressing/retconing Apu, hopefully in a way that's more responsive to current-day audiences and to the South Asian community. A Simpsons spec script contest? Thrown by a guy who made one of my favorite movies? I was all in. THE MOST CHALLENGING BIT: The Simpsons is an episodic show. That means every episode is a standalone story, where at the end everything "returns to normal," just as it was in the beginning. You can watch the episodes in any order, there's no persistent plotline connecting them. That made this contest really challenging. You can't dismiss 20+ years of the episodes as they are. You have to find a way to address the Apu situation, yet still fall in to the episodic nature ergo, the contest script had to return everything back to normal. That's a tall task, folks. But I love quality retconning, so I was in! WHITE DUDE WRITES MINORITY PART EASY PEASY: Being a White Dude writing a script addressing a racially sensitive issue, I didn't want to wade into this and possibly piss people off even more with the stuff that I didn't Know.
Me & Maria goofing during the holidays.[/caption] So I recruited my awesome friend Maria D'Souza Walters to co-write it with me. Maria is one of the funniest people I know. She is also Indian-American (she was born a citizen of India). Maria understands the Apu controversy on a level far deeper than I can. We had an absolute blast riffing off of each other for the funny bits, and I learned quite a bit about the Indian-American experience (if this sounds like a rainbow is about to pop up for a "The More You Know" effect, I'm not surprised). "We tried to come up with a way to resolve the stereotyping but keep the humor and goofiness that is such a big part of what makes the Simpsons work," Maria said. "The character of Apu is so obviously a Western caricature of an Indian person that the only way I could see to resolve it was to make Apu not actually be Indian at all, but an American who believed that he was doing a great impression of an Indian person." And that strategy worked, peeps. And we got to tip our hats to a wonderful ludicrous John Travolta/Nicholas Cage movie in the process ... TO PAT OURSELVES ON THE BACK ... Seriously, Maria and I think this script is killer. It tries to address the concerns, it properly honors the brilliance that is the Simpsons franchise, and it magically brings everything back to "normal" at the episode's end. Think writing a Simpsons script is easy? Fuck no it ain't. After this, I have so much more respect for the Simpsons creators and writers. They make it look easy episode after episode, and easy it ain't. LOSERS! Sadly, our script did not make it to the final round of the contest, so I'm sharing it with y'all. If you like The Simpsons, I think you'll dig it. It goes deep into Simpsons lore, which we thought was important for a character that has been such a big part of the show's history. We hope you get a laugh out of it. We did.
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