“How I wrote the script for Groundhog Day in less than a week”

In a recent Guardian article, screenwriter Danny Rubin reflects on writing Groundhog Day:

One afternoon back in 1990, I was sitting in a cinema in Los Angeles waiting for the lights to go down. My wife Louise was at home with the baby, so my companion that day was a book about vampires.

Before even cracking the cover I started drifting, thinking about these near-people and their super-human ability to live forever. I wondered what that would be like. What would you do for an eternity? How long would it take before it stopped being fun or interesting or worthwhile? How would an eternally long life affect a person, particularly one who seemed incapable of change within his own normal lifetime?

Danny Rubin

It was at this point that I remembered an old story idea I had left buried in a box of index cards: a man wakes up every morning and it’s the same day, over and over again. That’s when my head exploded. Putting those two ideas together was the birth of Groundhog Day.

Two years after first getting that repeating day idea — just a gimmick, really — I had found its deeper purpose. Now it wasn’t just about a man repeating the same day but a story about how to live. Whose life isn’t a series of days? Who doesn’t feel stuck from time to time? I had found a way to portray eternity not as a straight line, but as a circle. And in doing that I was able to clear out the distractions of history and focus on this epic tale of a very long life — all taking place on the same day.

Two takeaways here:

• As writers, we need to be mindful of potential story ideas all the time. Anything can be the source of inspiration as with Rubin and a “book about vampires,” one he didn’t even have to read to evoke some thoughts about what it would be like to live forever.
• When we get story ideas, even tiny snippets, record them somewhere and keep those files available. I have a Word file which is 20 years old filled with story ideas and concepts. 99% of them will never see FADE IN, however 1% have, and some of that 1% wouldn’t have come into being had it not been for the other 99%.

Of course, the headline — “How I wrote the script for Groundhog Day in less than a week” — is to get you to click on the link to the article. It’s so easy to write a hit screenplay, you can do it in a week! But let’s put that into a broader context:

So I wrote it. My house in LA had a large windowed closet that would soon become the baby’s room, but for about eight weeks it was my writing room. After seven weeks of sketching and note-taking I wrote the script in less than a week.

A couple of years to come up with the precise story concept. Seven weeks of story prep. And then one week to write the script. That’s considerably different than the headline would indicate.

By the time the movie was produced, director Harold Ramis had reworked Rubin’s draft to the point they shared screen credit, so the script had an even more complex journey to eventual theatrical release. But all that inspiration and hard work paid off in what is arguably one of the best comedy scripts ever written.

For the rest of The Guardian article written by Rubin, currently a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English at Harvard University, go here.