Genre: Comedy
Premise: When her Mother goes missing on Black Friday, a strong-willed Teen is forced to quest into the shopping chaos with the person whose company she enjoys least – her perpetually immature and inebriated Uncle.
Why You Should Read: Why should you read My Druncle Kevin? I can sit here and make bold, downright blasphemous claims about my script being “Hughes-ian” or in the vein of a “Family Style Hangover,” but no one wants to hear that. Instead, here are ten stone cold bullet points…
1. It’s a comedy with heart for days.
2. It’s a script set during a time of year that is oddly underrepresented in movies.
3. It centers on a refreshing “buddy coppy” duo not often seen in film.
4. It’s all about family at its core.
5. It features the best dopey small car action since “The Italian Job.”
6. It cracked the ScriptShadow 250!
7. Too much pressure, skip to #8.
8. It’ll make you appreciate your mother.
9. My friend Joe said it was “pretty good,” and he doesn’t even read scripts!
10. It will put you in the holiday spirit just in time for… Spring. I’m nothing if not topical.
Writer: Vin Conzo
Details: 102 pages
It was nice to see those two Uber projects (one a spec script) sell last week. There was a time when comedy used to rule the spec roost, the sales vastly outnumbering the number of specs sold in any other genre.
But that’s not the case anymore, and it’s no surprise why. Comedy doesn’t travel well internationally, so studios are less excited about the genre in this new global-driven marketplace.
Because of that, there are less comedy slots open. The problem is that the average comedy writer hasn’t adjusted to that. They’re still writing like all you have to do is come up with a half-baked premise and a semi-funny hero and you’re good. Remember how there were like 8 bro-mance specs sold when “bro-mance” was a thing? Yeah, that ain’t reality anymore, bro.
These days, if you want a shot as a comedy writer, you either have to grab onto a trend right when Hollywood wants it, like the Uber thing, or you have to be on point in all three key areas: Great marketable premise, great main character(s), great execution. To me, the gold standard is still The Hangover.
Does Druncle Kevin pass this test?
32 year-old Kevin Stanley is the loser uncle of the year. Hell, he’s the loser uncle of the millennium. His older brother-in-law died awhile back, and the addiction-challenged Kevin freeloads off his widowed sister, Sarah, sleeping in her basement while she desperately tries to raise a family of two children and an aging father.
On this particular Thanksgiving evening, Sarah is heading off to pre-Black Friday sales madness, and gives Kevin one task. Hold down the fort. He’ll have to do so with a father who despises him and a 16 year-old niece, Paula, who used to love her uncle until he turned into the most unreliable loser in history.
Well, breakfast comes around the next morning and Sarah is nowhere to be found. When a good samaritan shows up at their door soon-after, saying she found Sarah’s purse in the Target parking lot, Kevin and Paula start freaking out. Could something have happened to Sarah?
Paula reluctantly teams up with her druncle, and the two head to a Black Friday crazed mall to put together the pieces of what happened. What they eventually find is that Sarah, who was planning to surprise her daughter with a new car for Christmas, accidentally stumbled upon two Black Market car criminals, who subsequently kidnap her, and who are probably going to kill her.
Will the inadequate and irresponsible Kevin be able to save his sister in time? Or will his contentious deteriorating relationship with his niece sabotage any shot at a Black Friday miracle?
So I can tell you why I didn’t advance My Druncle Kevin past the top 250. And most of it has to do with the opening scene. We’re immediately thrown into this chaos that is a Thanksgiving dinner, which is supposed to be humorous, but isn’t due to one problem: I don’t know anybody yet.
I don’t know these characters. I don’t know whose house we’re in. There’s an empty chair that’s supposed to represent a recently deceased person. But I don’t know who that person is/was. I’m able to piece together some things – this is called “My Druncle Kevin” so I figure Kevin is the drunk uncle. But I don’t even know which side of the family he’s on.
And that may not sound like a big deal but it’s a HUGE deal. If Kevin was the dead husband’s brother, that’s a whole different story than if he’s Sarah’s brother. If he’s the dead husband’s brother, he represents him. The dynamic between him and the others would be more complex. But if he’s Sarah’s brother, that’s more of an “annoying brother” type of thing and way more simplistic.
Not that one is better than the other. The point was, I didn’t know. Just like I didn’t know any of the characters yet. And therefore it was more an exercise in my trying to figure out who was who and what was going on as opposed to enjoying and laughing at the scene.
In one of my favorite comedy dinner scenes of all time, the famous dinner in the original Meet The Parents, the reason that scene works so well is because we’ve established not only the characters, but the relationship DYNAMICS.
Relationship dynamics are crucial to comedy. We need to know what’s going on between people before we can laugh at what’s going on between people.
So in that Meet The Parents scene, we know that the father doesn’t think Ben Stiller’s character is good enough for his daughter. That allows us to play with that dynamic. We can have Ben Stiller desperately try and impress the father. In doing so, we can have him repeatedly screw up. And with each successive screw-up, he can dig himself a deeper hole. And as that hole grows deeper, we can laugh while he tries to pull himself out.
When we don’t know the relationship dynamics yet – and this isn’t just in regards to dinner scenes but ANY scenes – it’s hard to find comedy outside of broad random humor. It’s what I call “clown comedy.” Because basically the only comedy that can work in a scene without context is a character acting like a clown. They can say and do wacky crazy things for laughs. And that’s basically what Kevin’s comedy amounts to in this opening. He drifts from wacky line to goofy impression to silly screw-up.
We talk about structure in relation to screenplays all the time. But structure is required in character. It’s required in jokes. You need that form to give the moment context. When you don’t have structure, you’re leaving your story or your character off on an island and you’re saying, “I’m not going to give you anything to work with. But be entertaining.”
So really, My Druncle Kevin was screwed (contest-wise) before it even got out of its first scene. Now once it did get out of that scene, it got better. A story began to emerge. There was a mystery there. There were personal stakes involved. So I did become engaged.
But here’s another reason why those opening pages are so important. They color the reader’s opinion on everything moving forward. Since I was confused by Kevin in that opening scene, even when the story gained form, I still never felt connected to him. That first scene always lingered.
It’s no different from real life, guys. A first impression is always the strongest impression. Characters are the same deal. We form strong opinions on them when we meet them and carry those opinions forward, even if the character evolves or becomes more interesting in some way. We never forget that first meeting.
And I’m not saying a character can’t start in a negative place. I’m saying you need to know EXACTLY how you want your character to be perceived and you need to be super-diligent in clearly conveying that. Like I said, I didn’t even know if Kevin was Sarah’s brother or the dead husband’s brother in that opener. And to me, that’s crucial.
I still love this title. That’s a huge reason why it advanced into the 250. And I think this is a premise worth working on. But I don’t feel like I know Kevin well enough after reading this. Comedy characters need to be clear. Say what you want about the recent hit, Daddy’s Home, but I knew who Will Ferrel’s character was in that movie after his very first scene. He’s an overly-sensitive “nice guy” desperate to be respected as a father. Who’s Kevin? He’s a drunk. He’s a clown. What else? That needs to be figured out.
Script link: My Druncle Kevin
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Build your comedy characters from a place of humanity, not a place of comedy. Let’s look at Alan (Zach Galifianakis) in The Hagover for this lesson. When building the character of Alan, instead of saying to yourself, “I’m going to create this zany guy who says the weirdest things at the most inappropriate moments,” say, “I’m going to create this guy who has no friends and is babied by his family, and because of that, he’s painfully socially unaware.” This way, the comedy is coming from a place of truth as opposed to a place of “Let’s see how wacky I can be!” Big difference.
