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Genre: Comedy
Premise: (from writer) The Sock Gnome aspires to be promoted within Legendary Inc to respected positions, like Santa or the Tooth Fairy, but compromises this when he accidentally steals money from a bellicose Drug Dealer and must bring him down to save his life.
Why you should read: (from writer) I’m Freddy and I’ve been doing stand-up for years… mostly in Minneapolis, but really all around. If I can find an open mic, I’ll grab it and talk and hope people giggle. It started as a way to hook up with girls (obviously) but then I really fell in love with it.
One of my buddies suggested I take my humor and give screenplays a shot. He told me they were a hundred pages and things needed to be spelled write so I of course said no. But he insisted I try and I’m glad he did. Since then I’ve written two. This is the second and I find it delightful (so does this bum I paid $15 dollars to say so). I’d be thrilled if you gave it a shot.”
Writer: Freddy Gee
Details: 107 pages
Zach Galifianakis for the Sock Gnome??
I have seen SO many people try to get this holiday mascots idea right. I’ve probably read 3 dozen different takes on it over the years. I’ve even seen a few get to the big screen (Rise of the Guardians). And strangely enough, nobody has figured it out. Every single version of this idea has failed. And the thing is, it SOUNDS like a concept bursting with comedic potential. You make Santa a badass. Make the Easter Bunny a weirdo. Come up with some wack-a-doodle plot. Hilarity ensues, right?
Except hilarity has definitely not ensued yet. The closest anybody’s gotten to ensuing was The Nightmare Before Christmas. And that only used two of the holiday mascots. Or wait, is Jack in “Nightmare” the Halloween mascot? Does Halloween have a mascot? I don’t know.
Anyway, you’d THINK this would deter me from continuing to read these scripts. But I admit the whole “sock gnome” thing made me chuckle. And with Legendary seemingly winning a close race with last week’s Amateur Offerings, I figured I’d give it a shot.
Lion is a 38 year old sock gnome. You know how there have been times when you looked in your drawer and found 18 different socks without a match? Well, this man is responsible for that. Now why would anyone purposefully do this? Well, Lion works for this corporation called “Legendary” that’s funded by companies like Hanes, and OBVIOUSLY it’s in Hanes’s best interest if your socks disappear. It means they make more money.
Lion is joined by Jess, The Stork of Unwanted Pregnancies, whose job it is to go into households and prick people’s condoms, and then Ari, a level 2 bogeyman whose job it is to shake people when they sleep??? This rag-tag little team goes from house to house, basically leaving unhappiness in their wake.
So one day, while on a job, Lion accidentally steals a sock stuffed with money from a couple of drug dealers, Buddy and Vince. Once they realize what they’ve done, they return the money, but the damage has already been administered. Buddy wants to take these weirdoes down.
And thus begins a strange chase where Buddy and Vince try to kill Lion, eventually leading them to kidnap Jess, which results in Lion and Ari trying to save her, and ends with Buddy resorting to his original plan, which is to kill Lion and Co. And that, my friends, is the screenplay.
Oh boy.
Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy.
I sooooo want to be nice here but Legendary represents a LOT of what I find wrong in comedy scripts these days. However, it appears that Freddy is still fairly new to this screenwriting thing so I want to be constructive. But there are a lot of issues here.
To start, the plot doesn’t make any sense. Lion steals some money from Buddy. He then returns the money to Buddy. Buddy then spends the rest of the script trying to kill Lion. I don’t understand. If Lion has returned the money, why is Buddy trying to kill him?
I have a feeling this choice was chalked up to, “It’s a comedy. It doesn’t need to make sense.” Nothing could be further from the truth. All the comedy spec sales I read have strong logic, strong motivation, and high stakes involved. Legendary has none of these, leaving the entire plot feeling empty and pointless.
Next was the humor. There isn’t a single joke in Legendary that took any thought to write. Every joke was crass and in our face and obvious. We’ve got dick jokes, rape jokes, blow up dolls, cum rags, little girl sex jokes. Every joke here was a line of dialogue meant to shock and there wasn’t any variation in that humor whatsoever.
I wanted ONE clever joke. Just one. I wanted comedy based on character (the way Phil Dumphey in Modern Family so desperately tries to be the perfect father to a fault), I wanted comedy based on situation (the way Jason Sudekis’s character in We’re The Millers must talk his way away from another family where the father is a D.E.A. agent), I wanted comedy based on misunderstanding (the way Tom Hanks in “Big” thinks he’s having a sleepover at this woman’s house when she thinks they’re having sex). I wanted SOME version of comedy that wasn’t, “Go fuck yourself with that cum rag, Sock Shit.” (not an actual line from the script – although this is how many of them sounded to me).
New comedy writers think it’s all about the crass, about the shock value. No. No no no no no no. It’s not that you can’t use shock humor. But you want to sprinkle it in there. You don’t want it to be THE ONLY JOKE YOU USE. We’ll be tired of it by page 3!
And I don’t mean to generalize here, but it made sense when I found out Freddy had only written two scripts. When you’re on your second script, you’re still at that stage when you think half-baked will do. And this script is very half-baked. Take Ari for example. I have no idea what his power is, what he’s doing, or what the point of his character is. He’s a level 2 bogeyman who becomes invisible when he’s vertical? Lion and Jess are actually trying to do things. What does being vertically invisible do?
Or Lion and Jess. Clearly, there should have been a love story here. Either Lion always liked Jess but was too nervous to make a move or Jess always liked Lion but was too nervous to make a move. Maybe Jess always liked Lion but he was in a relationship. This way, when Jess gets kidnapped, the stakes are much higher. We know there’s a potential relationship on the line here.
We needed a bigger clearer goal as well. Lion, who hates his job, has only ever wanted to be a real holiday mascot. He’s been trying to get out of this Sock Stealing gig for two decades. He’s finally given one night to [steal a certain amount of socks, steal one super important sock, solve a sock mystery, whatever], and if he does, he’s anointed to a real holiday mascot. But of course, on this night, something goes terribly wrong. Stealing drug money feels wrong for a holiday mascot. The sock he steals should have something a little more sophisticated in it. But he must solve all of that before the night is over or he’s going to be a sock stealer forever.
Now you have stakes. You have urgency. You have a clear storyline. As it stands, we’re never really sure why anyone was doing anything in Legendary, and that just can’t happen in a spec script. Once the reader is no longer sure why things are happening – YOUR SCRIPT IS DEAD. It’s dead. Plain and simple. People never finish a script and go, “Man, I barely understood what happened but that was awesome.” You, the writer, have to put in the effort and give us a strong story with a big goal that’s always clear. ESPECIALLY with comedy.
And that’s just for starters. That’s the easy part (especially if you read this site, since I always talk about it). The hard part is creating fresh characters that are going through compelling inner dilemmas, creating interesting relationships between them that need to be resolved, creating story beats that feel fresh and new, throwing in enough obstacles and twists to keep the story unpredictable. THOSE are the hard things. The structure? The part where you lay out what your hero needs to do and why? Then adding consequences and immediacy to that goal? That should be the easy stuff.
So there’s a part of me that wants to get angry here because I know how hard screenwriting is and I know how many people put in months (even years) to get all those things I just mentioned right in their script. And then you have writers who think they can slap something together in a month and it’ll stand up to the biggest scripts on the market but it doesn’t work that way.
That’s not how this business works. Readers know the difference between genuine effort and half-baked. But this is only Freddy’s second time around the block so I’m guessing this is the first time he’s hearing this. I want him to use this as a learning experience. If you really want to make a go at this, Freddy, learn about goals and stakes and urgency. Learn about character flaws and conflict and obstacles (check out some of the bigger articles here on Scriptshadow). Learn to push past those initial obvious first choices and to look deeper to those fourth or fifth choices when creating a character or a scene or a plot point. Learn to vary the comedy in the script. Don’t be a one-trick pony. And, of course, read a TON of comedy specs. I’m sure some people here in the comments can help you out with that. And I’ll be happy to send some to you as well if you e-mail me.
Good luck, my friend. Legendary may not have been ready for prime time, but if you keep working at it, one of your future scripts may be.
Script link: Legendary
[x] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Vary your comedy! Go ahead and use dick jokes. But make sure to include character-based humor, situational-based humor, and the classic misunderstanding as well. If you only use one type of humor, those jokes are going to get really stale really fast.
