Genre: Comedy
Premise: A married couple who never got the opportunity to go to college due to having their son at such a young age, find themselves experiencing it for the first time 18 years later, during their son’s first Parents Weekend.
About: Parents Weekend is a hot spec that was snatched up last month by Lotus Entertainment. Writer Peter Scott has written two books and seems to specialize in the humorous adventures of married couples (one of those books is titled “In My House: A Humorous Journey Through The First Years of Marriage”).
Writer: Peter Scott
Details: 111 pages
I liked this idea as soon as I heard it. And I haven’t read a good comedy in it seems like forever so reviewing it today, on the 61st annual Comedy Day, it felt right.
I don’t know why comedies are struggling so badly. They used to be the number 1 spec genre out there. People would pick up anything as long as it had a scene where seven consecutive gay jokes were made. I guess the fact that the box office has gone global and comedies “don’t travel” has hurt the genre.
But people will always want to laugh. And comedies are still cheap to make. So there might be a chicken-or-the-egg scenario going on here. Is the reason there are less comedy scripts because there’s less of a need for comedies? Or have comedy scripts gotten so bad that the studios stopped buying comedies, which resulted in less good comedies, therefore tricking the studios into believing that comedies weren’t worth the risk anymore? I’m not sure that that’s a chicken-or-the-egg scenario but I just like any opportunity to use the phrase “chicken-or-the-egg scenario.” It also reminds me of breakfast. And breakfast is my favorite meal.
Personally, I think comedy scripts have always skated by on this “only needs to be okay” law. And that lowered the bar so low, that when comedy actually needed to be good all of a sudden to compete with dinosaurs (cause dinosaurs travel – I mean, they don’t travel with like suitcases or anything. But they travel in the sense that everybody knows who dinosaurs are. Except for maybe Sweden. I don’t think there’s ever been a dinosaur in Sweden), comedy writers didn’t have the tools to compete.
It was like, “What? You mean my ‘main character who only speaks in the language of projectile vomit’ isn’t good enough??”
Anyway, so, Parents Weekend. Sean is your typical grungy college freshman. However, Sean puts a little more effort into studying than your average student due to the fact that it’s been made abundantly clear to him that he was a mistake.
So big of a mistake that his parents, who had him when they were 18, couldn’t go to college and get real jobs. Which is why Mommy Sean (Amanda) works as a traffic court reporter and Daddy Sean (Nick) works as an assistant pharmacist.
Amanda and Nick are having empty nest syndrome since Sean left a few months ago. But unlike normal empty nesters, who are like 80, they’re only 36! Which has them stuck in a play-doh like haze wondering how they’re supposed to act (are we young and hip? old and responsible?).
Naturally, then, when they show up at Indiana University to visit Sean, they decide to see what they missed. And that means heading straight to the nearest party, where Nick’s pharmacy score of something called “Cholestrolux” becomes a huge hit at the party, making Nick an impromptu college legend.
Nick’s legendary status gets back to Sean, who’s beyond embarrassed. But Nick only wants more. So the next night he goes to an ABC party (Anything But Clothes – where was this party when I was in college??), meets a girl who swears her vagina tastes like raspberries, before finally being arrested by the cops for becoming one of the biggest drug dealers on campus.
This in turn gets Sean kicked out of school, and Amanda furious with him. And then all three of them die in a horrible car accident. Just kidding. Sean gets back into school and Amanda and Nick live happily ever after.
So what’s the verdict?
Well, let me put it this way. There was only one cafeteria at my college, and the guy who owned that cafeteria was so cheap, he only bought food that had some sort of defect, but still passed the minimum health code laws. Like he’d buy potatoes that had started to rot on one side, and then just cut off the rotting half and serve us the “good” side. Or he’d buy milk that was blue. Outside of the color, the milk was totally fine (or so we were told).
I’m not sure what this has to do with Parents Weekend….. Oh yeah! I never liked eating at that cafeteria. But after going 2-3 days without food, I had no choice. Especially after the local McDonald’s caught on to my Cambodian Fry Scam. I would go to that cafeteria and find just the right combination of retarded foods to satiate myself.
And that’s a little like Parents Weekend. This is not The Hangover or Ted. It doesn’t have any big huge laughs. It’s more like a steady diet of smiles and chuckles that satiate you and you go with it because you’re starving for funniness.
I do want to take this opportunity to discuss an issue I run into with comedy screenplays all the time though and that’s the “false conflict” plotline. Conflict is really important in comedy. Whether it be straight up butting heads (Rush Hour), sexual conflict (When Harry Met Sally) or something more nuanced (the weird conflict between Alan and Stu in The Hangover).
But for it to work, it has to be honest. If you try to force conflict that isn’t there, the comedy never plays well. So here, we have this whole plotline where Amanda and Nick “break up” in the middle of the script due to a fight (which was a false plot point – but that’s a lesson for another day).
From there, Amanda runs into a handsome professor, and the two start a flirtationship. The conflict is supposed to come from the possibility that Amanda will hook up with the professor. But we don’t believe she will for a second. We’ve clearly established how much she loves her husband and the script never established that it would do anything risky, so we knew it wasn’t going to start with these two.
If you’re going to add conflict to your comedy (and you should – lots of it – just like you should do lots of drugs in college), you want that conflict to feel honest. Because if we really believe that Amanda could be with this guy, the story gets more interesting and the jokes play better, because real life (as opposed to safe-movie-life) is always funnier.
None of this is to say that Parents Weekend is a bust. To go back to my college analogy, it’s sort of like when the weird guy who lives down the hall from you who you don’t know that well invites you to his room during Easter Break weekend because everyone else went home and he makes you drink a case of 40s with him while he tells you that he wouldn’t be surprised if his girlfriend committed suicide earlier in the night. You’re so drunk that you’re kind of having a good time. But something in the back of your head is telling you that this isn’t right.
Parents Weekend was comforting like that. And, truth be told, it’s a clever way into a sub-genre that hasn’t had the most success (college comedies). I mean how many great college comedies have their been? Animal House? Lady and the Tramp? By changing the perspective of the main characters to parents, it gave rise to a lot of unique opportunities.
Kind of like my college experience. Which reminds me, it may be time to end this interview. By the way, to get in the mindset to write this, I may have smoked something illegal. Not that it had any effect on me.
Peace and sama lamaa maka.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: False conflict is an extension of “movie logic.” Remember, to you the writer, it may be a movie. But to the characters in your script, their world is real. So those characters need to act like real people would. That’s the only way your script comes off as truthful. So Amanda entertaining this relationship with this professor sounds great as a plot twist. But it doesn’t work because we don’t buy that Amanda would really do this. Her character and this script hasn’t been set up that way. So the moment doesn’t play truthfully and truth is essential if you want laughs.
Just 24 days left. The contest is FREE. Winner gets their script optioned by Grey Matter. There’s no better contest deal on the planet! Submit now!
The schizophrenic 2015 Summer box office refuses to go away! Neither of this weekend’s contestants, Terminator: Genisys or Magic Mike XXL, finished in the top two. Those spots went to stellar holdovers Inside Out and Jurassic World. The studios responsible for the new entries, Paramount and Warner Brothers, are trying to blame a weird July 4th weekend layout (where July 4th didn’t fall on a weekday), but come on, let’s be honest here. Nobody wanted to see these films because of a simple reason: they didn’t look that good.
I mean Terminator: Genisys did so bad, it finished 20 million dollars below Terminator: Salvataion’s opening weekend box office, a movie that famously found a way to make a post-apocalyptic world dominated by killer robots boring. What’s strange is that every single person on the planet knew this movie was dead in the water EXCEPT for the Terminator producers and Arnold Schwarzenegger. How can a group of people be so out of touch?
Well, I have a counter-argument for that. I believe that if the script for Terminator: Genisys was good, and that script translated into a good film, word-of-mouth and slamming reviews could’ve saved this film. So why didn’t that happen?
Well, the writers of Terminator: Genysis made an age-old screenwriting mistake. They wrote a complicated time travel story. I’m going to say something here that I BEG all sci-fi writers heed for the remainder of their writing careers: COMPLICATED MAINSTREAM TIME-TRAVEL MOVIES DO NOT WORK.
Time travel is one of the trickiest sub-genres to get right. That’s because they intrinsically don’t make sense. If you travel back in time to stop something and it doesn’t work, you just travel back and try it again. The genre is a black hole for plot holes. And the more you keep travelling around in time, the more of these plot holes keep popping up.
Terminator: Genisys is all about characters travelling back in time to stop moments from previous Terminator timelines. Like an aging Arnold Terminator growing up with Sarah Connor and then fighting his younger Terminator self when he shows up in 1984.
This is a DEADLY but common mistake with young eager sci-fi writers. They say, “Ooh, that’d be so cool. The old Terminator fighting the young Terminator when he arrives in the past!” And it is kind of a cool idea. But if you manipulate a time-travel timeline that’s already iffy as it is solely to accommodate a cool scene, you’ve upset the entire foundation of your story.
When you write anything, whether it’s a complex time-travel plot or a simple coming-of-age film, you must avoid “But wait” moments. “But wait” moments are where your audience pulls out of the movie to ask, “But wait. If that happens, then the other thing doesn’t make sense.” Or, “But wait. If he did this then how come he couldn’t do it earlier?” Time travel movies are cess pools for “But wait” moments.
For that reason, when you write a time travel movie, you keep the time travel stuff as simple as possible. It’s why the original Terminator worked so well. A terminator came back from the future to kill a woman. The whole movie, then, was not about Sarah Conner jumping through time portholes to escape the Terminator. It was a chase movie. Plain and simple. No gimmicks. That’s why it worked.
James Cameron knew this going in for the sequel as well. He didn’t add some silly time-travel plot. The only thing he changed was adding a new Terminator. There was some stuff about trying to destroy Skynet before it could take over the world, but that was still easy to understand and buy into.
Another example of time travel screwing up a movie was Back to the Future 2. Now I can already hear some of you guys grumbling. “Back to the Future 2 was great, Carson!” No, it wasn’t. The plot was borderline ridiculous. What you liked about Back to the Future 2 (as did I) was that it still had 2 of the most lovable characters in cinematic history, Marty McFly and Doc Brown. Those two are what made Back to the Future 2 watchable.
But the travelling to the future only to find out that they needed to travel to the past to save an alternate present. It was a mess. And I remember Roger Ebert pointing out that even the characters looked confused trying to explain it (needing a chalkboard to do so). And this is yet another reason to avoid complicated time travel movies. They require tons of exposition, which eats up valuable story time.
Now some of you might point out movies like Primer as examples of complicated time travel movies that work. But Primer isn’t a mainstream movie. It’s a $7000 indie movie that nobody outside of cinephiles saw and when you make a movie for that kind of money for that kind of audience, you can take risks and play around because you’re not necessarily required to make sense (and it’s debatable whether Primer does make sense).
My point is, time-travel is a plot device that you can get lost in. And I get it. It’s fun to play with. Who doesn’t want to solve a time travel problem by adding more time travel! But I’m warning you as someone who reads A LOT OF BAD TIME-TRAVEL SCRIPTS, if you’re writing a sci-fi movie, it’s best to keep the time-travel plot as simple as possible. You can be complex with character development and the plot itself. But don’t add layers upon layers of time travel unless you want to “But wait” yourself out of a movie.
Speaking of time travel, I bet the producers of Magic Mike XXL are wishing they could go back in time and not make their sequel.
Granted, my understanding of why this movie didn’t work isn’t as complete as Terminator: Genisys, but I have some ideas. For starters, this isn’t a sequel-type movie. Sequel movies are action movies, adventure movies, sci-fi movies, and comedies. There’s nothing about this particular concept that screams “need more of these.” It feels very much like a “one-off.”
The producers didn’t seem to realize this and that cost them. Because even without that issue looming, sequels need to abide by one law. You need to give the audience MORE. Something bigger. And when you watched the Magic Mike XXL promos, it looked like we were getting the same.
This was the same mistake The Avengers 2 made, which isn’t coming anywhere near the domestic box office of the original. They went as big as they could in the original, leaving them no room to go bigger with the sequel. So people said, “That looks the same.” And it was. It was the same movie (probably even smaller). And that’s death for a sequel.
Using Terminator as an example here, Terminator 2 brought in a bigger badder Terminator. That’s why people showed up to that movie. Because we were getting something new. Magic Mike should’ve realized, “We aren’t a typical sequel film. So we definitely need to find something bigger to bring people in.” I don’t know what that would be. The promise of Channing Tatum full-frontal? Based on the audience for the film, maybe. But a carbon-copy stripper film isn’t going to be enough to lure people to theaters.
Unfortunately, next week doesn’t look much better. Minions is the only major film opening. But the following week we get Ant-Man AND Trainwreck, so that should be fun. And remember, screenwriters – following and dissecting box office is an essential part of your jobs. You need to know what’s doing well and what isn’t, and also WHY. Studios are fickle and terrified and reactionary and one major bomb in a genre can change the development tracks of all six studios. For example, you don’t want to go out wide with your complicated time-travel stripper script this week. Table that for awhile and work on something else. Like dinosaurs attacking Los Angeles or something. I’m only half-kidding. It’s not like Jurassic Park has IP on dinosaurs. Man, the more I think about it, the more I think a studio would actually buy that. Anyway, as always, good luck!
Just 26 days left. The contest is FREE. Winner gets their script optioned by Grey Matter. There’s no better contest deal on the planet! Submit now!
Again, Amateur Offerings is when YOU the Scriptshadow readers submit your own scripts in a Battle Royale format. The script that gets the most votes in the Comments section gets a Friday review, where, if the script is good, good things are known to happen. And it’s a special Amateur Offerings post since one of the scripts comes from an idea of mine! Shadows Below is based on an idea I threw out there in an earlier post. Gregory took that idea and he and his partner ran with it. I don’t want to weight script reads though. Try to read as many scripts as you can. Then vote for your favorite in the comments!
Title: Shadows Below
Genre: Action Thriller
Logline: After terrorists attack China on the 4th of July, a submarine commanded by the President’s Daughter and a team of Navy SEALs are all that stand between the US and Nuclear Armageddon.
Why you should read: Hidden around the world are submarines with only one mission: Nuclear Counter-strike in the event of war. Known as doomsday subs for their ability to destroy the world, redundancy protocols give their Captains absolute authority to launch ballistic missiles if communications with command ever stops. — SHADOWS BELOW is a modern day action / thriller that revolves around the President’s Daughter and the US submarine she comes to lead. After American terrorists nuke China’s Naval Command on the 4th of July, a Chinese doomsday sub Captained by a legendary Admiral goes rogue and has just under four hours to start a war by nuking Washington DC. — SHADOWS BELOW highlights every aspect of our Navy, from SEALs to Top Gun Pilots, submarines, and aircraft carriers, all engaging in a desperate battle just off the coast of DC to save America. — It is INDEPENDENCE DAY meets THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER with a female protagonist.
Title: Nerd Got Game
Genre: Teen Comedy
Logline: A high school science prodigy attends a State science convention where he meets a local girl who turns his world upside down.
Why you should read: Nerd Got Game has been through ten plus drafts, including a page one rewrite. The end result is a lean 90 page script that’s ready to go. I love the old John Hughes films from the 80’s and more recent teen comedy efforts like Sex Drive (2008), Easy A (2010) and The DUFF (2015). But teen comedies, like romantic comedies, seem to be a rare bird these days. Time for a comeback.
Title: Sessions of Lead Belly
Genre: Biopic
Logline: A Southern black folk singer walks the line between a violent criminal life and becoming a great American musician.
Why you should read: Inspired by the likes of “Raging Bull” and “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould”, “Sessions of Lead Belly” is stylistic bordering on surreal and strives for quality even at expense of authenticity. — The nonlinear structure throughout different periods in Lead Belly’s life of the early 1900’s is patterned to best draw interest and convey information, exploring who Lead Belly is and why, as well as the futility of triumph and meagerness of survival against all odds. — Every sequence is nearly standalone, playing out as ambitious mini-stories and innovative short films, each with a calculated build and unique style.
Title: The Feed (based on the novel “Feed” by MT Anderson)
Genre: Sci-fi
Logline: In the 22nd century, a complacent teenager’s life is thrown into disarray when a rebellious girl shows him that his Utopian world isn’t as perfect as it seems.
Why you should read: Yes, this is another teen dystopian sci-fi story. In 2100s America, our brains have been supplemented with “Feeds”. Feeds are amazing sources of information, communication and connectivity. Yet people are further apart than ever, unable to express anything but boredom and materialism. It’s a script full of big ideas like dependence on technology, corporate control, and big-brother paranoia. But more than any of those things, it’s about people. People who are still people, despite being profiled as consumers, targets, and cogs in the machine. — This is my first attempt at a feature-length script, something I finished working on last summer but was just inspired to submit (as I think adaptations are ineligible for SS250). I’ve written two shorts; one was made into a tiny indie and the other was the recipient of a large cash award within my university. The Feed is based on a novel I truly love, and I hope that the script shows that love for the core story and characters.
Title: LEGACY
Genre: Horror
Logline: A newlywed discovers her family has secretly been hunting down werewolves for centuries and must now choose between the life she has and continuing the family legacy.
Why you should read: This is a dark monster tale with some humorous character interactions to ease the ride. It is a telling of how secrets and betrayals can remold us while perpetuating the cycle of revenge no matter how desperately we fight against it. We are, after all, human. I am a nobody putting my spec out there hoping for an “Immaculate Reception” just to get it read. I have submitted this before to you, and you are probably sick of hearing from me however, I am persistent. Although I thought it was ready for contests, and I did send it to Scriptshadow 250, I highly doubt it will make the cut in any contest, because after I sent it, I found errors (I truly suck at proofing), but there may be other reasons it won’t make Carson’s list, or any list this year. However, since that time, it has gone through some revisions that I believe have removed these reasons, while painfully proofing it, and:
— In June 2015: LEGACY was requested by 2 production firms to read.
— Has nabbed a Wildsound contest WIN for a screenplay read, and is scheduled for August 2015.
— Made the semi-finals for 1/2015 “Table Read My Screenplay” Park City, Utah contest.
So, that’s progress, which I would like to continue by having it reviewed here by the SS community, so I have to ask, Carson, are you my ‘Franco Harris?”
