Hi there! Welcome back to another edition of our blog Why Aren’t You Famous Yet? We missed you last week and hope you had a great holiday! This week you’re hearing from Dan about the two main characters of our script Mean Streak and how we infused with them life! Enjoy.

When writing a script, sometimes the idea for a character comes to mind first. Sometimes it’s the scenario or setting and then figuring out which character would fit best into this scenario or world. Either way the two need to complement each other. You’ve probably heard the trope of “a ‘straight’ character in a crazy world” or “a crazy character in a ‘straight’ world”, it’s basically the idea that the protagonist of a story and the world they inhabit should offset each other to create dramatic tension. Angel and Denise are… insane. But to be fair they are a by-product of the insane world we live in. We tried to mirror the world of the script to the reality of what it’s like living in Los Angeles in your 20s and how that can drive you to insanity, or give you a really good story. 

Angel & Denise are our children. Our fondest, silliest friends. In some way they are the truest but most exaggerated versions of ourselves. Best friends desperately trying to figure their shit out. Desperately. On quite a regular basis we will send each other screenshots of our own texts and say “this is so Angel & Denise.” 

After coming up with the idea for Mean Streak, it was about developing characters that would best fit in the scenario of “girls in their twenties who become assassins.” Very quickly we knew that one character had to be more type A and try to keep them on track with the task at hand (Angel) and the other character was on a mission to derail all of that (Denise). I would say these characters really came into sharp relief when we worked on a short script about roommates who have to clean out their refrigerator and the smell or look of the mold nearly kills them, but then later in the evening we see them disposing of a gruesome body completely unfazed. For both the original opening of Mean Streak and this short I decided to name the characters Angel and Denise. 

You can go back to the past couple blogs to read about how we used moments in our own lives to influence the stories told in Mean Streak and what we have experienced as millennials to shape the tone and the plot. At this point in time, though, Angel and Denise feel like they’re their own entities separate from us. They’ve taken on a life of their own; they are their own people and make their own decisions. Granted, we type all of those into the computer, but who’s to say they don’t have their own dimensional lives away from us? 

Since I do know the inner workings of these two so much, I would say they are like my best friends. The girls who I will grab wine with at the end of a work week and they will tell me about the mess of a week they had, and then that wine will turn into tequila shots, different bars, clubs, waking up in a stranger’s house, and staggering to brunch the next day. Basically the 22-year-old version of Janette & Giovana I wish I could hang out with today, but more crazy and with a looser grasp on their morals. The people we wish we were brave enough to be. Not assassins, but with a bit more of their fearlessness. 

The takeaway of this whole blog would be how much we nurture these fictitious people. We bleed ourselves into them. Our emotions, our experiences, our relationships. No, we’ve never been contracted to kill someone for money, but we have been incredibly broke fantasizing about ways to climb out of the deep, deep hole we found ourselves in. And we put every ounce of those feelings and love into Angel & Denise. Our alter-egos.

Here’s a short excerpt from Mean Streak with annotations of how we pulled from our real life to help write the script. In this scene Angel and Denise are trying to sneak into Coachella by convincing two girls they meet in the parking lot of the festival to hand over their wrist bands.