I have a confession to make… And as everybody knows – if you say it on your blog in front of strangers – it must be true.

I’m super sexy.

I’m a geek.

Not quite Wil Wheaton jabbering in binary capital ‘G’ geeky, but treading pretty damn close.

You see, back in the day when I was but a budding writer (yes, we bud, you didn’t think we had sex did you?), I got it in my head that in order to write a grand and magnificent GB screenplay, one must first endure a tremendous right of intellectual passage called ‘research and preparation.’

(Now, older and balder, I realize all I needed were Caesars made by Canada’s greatest amateur Caesar maker.)

So I know what you’re thinking, -what in Gozer’s name do Caesars have to do with Ghostbusters? And – are you really an alcoholic?

If you’re scoring this at home, the answers to both are – not much. And no.

But alas, lacking a serious introduction to this post I thought, “hey, I might as well disabuse my few remaining readers from thinking I am sane.” Bye-bye twitter followers. I shall miss you and you’re automated DMs promising vast blog wealth.

But I digress. And occasionally regress.

So, not really clear on what it meant to write a good Ghostbusters versus a bad one (as that movie sample pool was admittedly small), I imported GB1 and GB2 into my wonderful screenwriting program Sophocles and started with the brass tacks of analysing what worked and what didn’t. My basic mathematical formula for comparison broke down as follows:

GB 1 = GOOD

GB 2 = NOT AS GOOD

While I of course had to make some arbitrary judgements, I discovered some interesting stats that informed the decisions I would then make to write my own GB3. Here’s the Reader’s Digest condensed version of my stats and inferences:

• GB1 had more speaking roles. (67 vs.43 in GB2). Translation: more interaction with other characters means there were more opportunities for the main characters to be illuminated.
• GB1 had more words (24.4k vs. 23.1k in GB2). Translation: more dialogue = more haha.
• More Action words (52% vs. 44% GB2). Translation: GB1 had more action.
• GB1 had shorter sentence lengths. Translation: more quick patter to keep the wit and story tempo up.
• 51% of action paragraphs were followed by another in GB1. (vs. 31% in GB2).Translation: GB1 had more action.
• GB1’s average scene length is longer. Translation: in the 80’s, films took their time to get the message out. Today it’s Cut. Cut. Cut. Spoon feeding the story with quick edits.
• Gb1 had more speaking roles introduced sooner. Translation: makes sense they had to quickly get past the origin to the guts of the story.
• Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) appears in more scenes and has more lines but less words. Translation: Bill Murray had a bigger part in GB1, perhaps got to improv a bit more and introduce more wit.
• Peter Venkman had the 4 largest character interactions (dyads) in GB1. In GB2, Venkman had less impact dyad wise. Translation: GB2 seemed to lose touch with Venkman and focused on the story development more than the character development.

So there ya go. Now all I had to do was write a screenplay that tweaked most of the issues in favor of being more GB1-like. Easy peasy. Yeah right. 2 years later I finally had something I was proud of and felt right. Damn you stats. Damn you.

To support, the stats above, I made some fancy shmancy charts using my screenwriting program. Take a gander:

DOWNLOAD: Charts for GB1.
DOWNLOAD: Charts for GB2
DOWNLOAD: Charts for my GB3

You’ll see from the numbers, that at least statistically, my GB3 falls somewhere between Gb1 and 2.

Sad side note admission:  Shortly after the epiphany of this analysis, I went further down the geeky rabbit hole when, for my Wedding, I surveyed and created a 3 dimensional architectural rendering of the hotel penthouse including fly by and walk-thru. Sigh. Yes, there might have were lasers involved.

If enough of you comment below, I’ll consider making coolio flash charts that you won’t have to download.