Part two of the interview with Megan Ganz

• Cooperative Calligraphy is the first episode of Community that Megan has a “written by” credit for.
• Season 2 always intended to contain a bottle episode. Megan had wanted to write one and was scheduled to write the 8th episode.
• In discussing potential plots for a bottle episode, Dan casually threw out “just have a mcguffin that people have to care about, like, I don’t know, someone stole a pen.” Of course when your boss suggests something, why not run with it?
• Annie was picked to be the driving force since it was decided that her character would be most likely to care about a pen from the very beginning.
• Bringing Britta in further establishes that the fight becomes about principle, not the pen.
• The monkey being the root cause of the pen disappearance was chosen very late.
• Original it was a breeze from the air-conditioner setting off a Rube Goldberg like setup resulting in the pen going missing.
• Dan later on had the idea about Annie’s Boobs stealing the pen.
• Unlike many episodes, this episode was shot in order.
• Chris McKenna came up with the Abed tracking the menstrual cycles gag based on a documentary he had seen about a kid with autism who had tracked his mother’s moods, and had unknowingly tracked her menstrual cycles.
• The Beetlejuice gag continues here, but only in Season 3 did the writers retro-actively realize they were going to do the Beetlejuice joke.
• It was not planned from the beginning, but in season 3 a line was written referencing Beetlejuice, Megan joked “you know what happens when you say Beetlejuice three times.” Dan did not remember referencing Beetlejuice so much, but Megan had such intimate knowledge of the show she could remember the exact episodes. That led to the famous Beetlejuice conjuring in the Halloween episode.
• The writers knew that at this point, Jeff and Britta were sleeping together. “Gwennifer” was Jeff’s codename for her and the fake call was to let her know they had to stay for the bottle episode.
• Crystal the monkey was so good, she grabbed the pen on the second take.
• On Britta’s character change over time, Megan attributes that to the goofy energy Gillian brought to the part, which all of the writers fell in love with.
• While Megan has no info on whether or not a movie is happening, she would love to see it.

Research Thanks To: MinotaurMan