Evolution of Filming, Part 1 – Swearing

WARNING:  This post is rated R for language.  If you’re offended by words like fuck and shit, then don’t read this post. You have been warned. So there.

Every now and then I’ll be writing a post about certain things that evolved while filming over the past sixteen years.  The vast majority of people in the cast and crew where in high school – including me - when everything started and many of those people still participate from time to time.  Being young and (in my case at least) somewhat sheltered and not really or at all into drinking, smoking, sex, swearing, etc. But as I and the others matured (or in my case just got older), went to college, and included new and older company members, many of these things were slowly introduced into the productions over the years.   This is the first in a randomly published series about how and when those changes occurred and what level their at today.

First up - Swearing! (I would say “cursing” but that has different meaning in SFF given the content of certain shows)

Evolution of Filming

Part 1

“I can’t use swear words? Fuck that!”

The Early Days: 1996 – 1998

Ah, we were so young back then – so innocent and naïve.  Well, I was.  I knew about swear words of course, but I good little girl and never (or rarely) used them. So naturally I didn’t put them into my scripts.  They weren’t really necessary, and most of the actors at the time might not have been comfortable saying them.  Mostly it just didn’t occur to me to use them since they were not a part of my vocabulary.  The worst word used during this time on screen was “damn”, not “god damn”, that came later.  In fact I didn’t even know how to spell “damn it” when I wrote the script for Destiny and spelled it as “dammit”.  Yeah, that got a lot of laughs – worst part is I didn’t know why they were laughing until I spell check.

Some of the actors did swear after messing up a line or after multiple takes (multiple takes of a single line is enough to make any swear, honestly), but those were often college people.  They were like, all grown up and stuff.  I think if there had been swearing on the set or in productions in general then Frumpy Gets It would have held the record, considering how chaotic it was. 

The Swearing Starts: 1998-2000

The first scripted swear words appeared in Mind Games which began filming in the summer of 1998 and continued until the spring of 1999.  There were a lot of “damn it"s (so much so for Captain Vesper that it became sort of a running joke), and quite a few “shit”s and even a “fuck” or two (and now I’m giggling like an immature idiot).   The script was written by my college age brother, Ed, who also co-directed it.  This is still one of the best movies SFF has ever made, but not because of the swearing just because it’s a great story, great script, wonderful actors, and very talented director (Ed, not me - I learn a lot from watching him film). 

 Still, it broke the swear word barrier and made me realize sometimes it’s appropriate, even necessary, for a character to swear.  If your main character is screaming while being forced to watch their friend and secret crush - who has gone insane - brutally murder one of their comrades (who is unconscious and helpless) and doesn’t use a swear word, then that actually seems pretty unrealistic.  A “gosh darn” just doesn’t work in that situation.

I went back to swear-free scripts for two-thirds of the next production – Pandora’s Box.  I wrote and filmed several episodes in the summer of 1999 right before I went off to college.  Writing and filming continued through the year, and even though I was suddenly around people who swore all the time – including someone who used the word “fuck” in every other sentence – I still didn’t feel the need to add swearing into the scripts.  However, by the summer of 2000 I was ready to break the barrier within my own writing and put a few swear words in the last set of Pandora’s Box scripts (Episodes 8-9, 20, and 21-23).  The big moment came in Episode 10 (Chosen Darkness, Part 3) when Cat screams “Get away from me you fucking asshole!!!” – she was being held down on an altar by several black clad extras while another guy loomed over her with a knife about to sacrifice her to the big baddie, so it seemed pretty appropriate. 

Actually, that was the first scripted swear in Pandora’s Box.  The first on screen swear is actually a few moment before when Turlo betrays her, Brother Bob calls him an traitor and Cat replied “Traitor?!? Try asshole!”.  Those lines were added in on the set though.  I’m not sure if there was any swearing in the three-part story Together Again, but there might have been.  Frankly, the fact that neither Cat, who was a general in the army for several years, nor any of the other soldiers really swear much if at all is very unrealistic.  Not that realism is what we were going for overall, unless most of the people in the future wear vests and tan Ford Mercurys from the late 80s are the majority of cars to survive the apocalypse. 

The College Years: 2001 – 2003

After that the door was open.  The next production was The Curse, which was filmed in the winter/spring of 2001. There was swearing, but it was fairly minimal because I knew I would be airing it on SPC-TV and didn’t want to have to do a lot of bleeping.  The swearing in The Curse was mostly from a couple of characters who were really pissed off at the time – primarily Tony Tarino who used the f-word three or four times in the episode, but he had just been shot multiple times for no good reason by a serial killer and died while attempting to be a good samaritan to the main hero.  Who wouldn’t swear repeatedly after having a day like that?

The Gift Bearer, filmed from the fall of 2001 to the spring of 2002, is what really opened the flood gates.  By then I was swearing a lot, and obviously there’s a high correlation between how much I swear and how often swearing appears in the scripts I write.  Being at college, I was surrounded by a lot of people who were swearing like I was – it seems like a natural progression that if you didn’t swear the in high school, you would probably start to at some point in college.  

At one point the person I mentioned before who used the word “fuck” so many times that I could pay off my college loans if I had a penny for every time she said it, looked at me somewhat shocked.  I asked what was wrong and she said she’d never heard me swear before – let alone swear so much.  I think I asked where’d she had been because I’d been swearing for a while by that point.  It was just a funny, eye-opening moment to realize how slowly it had crept in and become a part of my vocabulary – the same way it slowly invaded my scripts.  The first season of The Gift Bearer (Episodes 1-14) had quite a few swear words in it – all the tried and true ones like “fuck”, “shit”, “asshole”, “god damn”, etc.  But I still tried to keep it to only one or two per episode because I didn’t want to have to bleep much out, and some episodes (especially the early ones) didn’t really have swears at all. 

But, by the second season I clearly didn’t care.  The second season that was filmed is not too bad, compared to some of the later productions, but the original, unfilmed second season has a huge amount of swearing.  In a scene in what would have been Episode 25 the script contains some version of the word “fuck” eight times in three pages – for me that’s really high volume.  It’s a good thing I didn’t film the original Season 2 episodes – they’re so full of swearing that I would have spent at least 20% of my editing time bleeping stuff out. 

And it just kept going.  Dream Chasers, filmed in the fall of 2002, has swear words wherever I felt like putting them.  However, as in most of my scripts, there’s one or two characters who swear a lot – usually having a favorite swear word – and the other characters don’t really swear much.  In Dream Chasers the character of Marion Smith was very fond of the F-word, and Zoey enjoyed “asshole” (probably in multiple ways – oh my!).  The interesting thing about shooting DC is that one of the actors did not want to swear at all – even a little bit -and asked me if she could either cut out the words or change them to something different.  For example instead of saying “she’s a bitch”, she said “she’s a rat”.  

I hadn’t considered “bitch” a swear word for loooong time by then and had used it frequently and liberally since Mind Games – since I didn’t have to bleep it, it didn’t seem any different then saying a character was a jerk or an ass.  Naturally I had no problem with the changes, and it’s an interesting quirk for the character and says something about her.  Since I never pay people more than quarter for acting in a production (and such payments only began in 2009), I try to take things like that into account.  But it made me realize just how many swear words had crept into my scripts and made me question whether or not they were necessary, even to color a character in a certain way.

Post-College and Beyond: 2003 – 2013

The next production was Eidolon which began pre-production in the spring of 2003 and finished filming in the spring of 2005.  Since it seemed less likely that it would be aired, at least not for a while, I didn’t bother censoring myself.  Overall I’d say the swearing is on par with Dream Chasers, however the actors did a lot of swearing on set after messing up which just shows how much we’ve all been corrupted by the evil vocabulary of college and the “real world”. Probably about half the swearing that occurs on screen in Eidolon was actually added by the actors, either on purpose or without realizing it.

At this point the swearing seems to have started decreasing.  I don’t think there’s any swearing in Cursed Destiny – 2006, and minimal swearing in Quatrain – 2007-08.  There’s some swearing in the short films produced in 2009 to the present day, but not a lot and it’s always situation or character specific – such as in the dark, modern version of Little Red Riding hood where Red becomes a prostitute being chased by a bounty hunter.  Swearing occurred in that one. 

Now that I am living with small children and have been since 2008, I’m forcing myself to dial back the swear words in my own vocabulary and that has resulted, of course, in less swearing in the scripts I write.  Now, I still swear – a lot when I’m pissed or faced with yet another box of unsorted fabric (that shit is fucking everywhere in my mom’s house, god damn it!), and there’s still swearing in the films that are tense and dramatic and um…stuff...that I write when I’m pissed. 

I was going to include a video of some funny bloopers involving swear words, but decided that actors might not want a video of them swearing online.  Sorry folks.  Guess you’ll have to buy the dvd.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this post.  I’m not sure if anyone else finds it interesting how things like this evolve while filming, but since we all started so young and relatively innocent, I find it fascinating to look back and see where it all went wrong…ie when we grew up.  Thanks for reading.