Genre: Comedy
Premise: When a misogynist explorer meets his sudden (and violent) end, his long-overlooked understudy seizes the moment and embarks on an adventure that will earn her a place in the annals of history.
About: Matt Roller is a seasoned TV writer who comes from the Dan Harmon tree, writing on both Rick and Morty and Community. This script landed him on last year’s Black List. Also, Tristar purchased the script last year.
Writer: Matt Roller
Details: 108 pages
Annie Murphy for Abbi?
Abbi and The Eighth Wonder hooked me almost instantly with this line, which happens after studly explorer and proud misogynist, Channing Smith, bumps into our heroine in the jungle while they’re being chased by cannibalistic locals: “I thought they got you when I pushed you in front of me and ran.”
“Nope. Still alive,” our hero, Abbi, replies.
“That’s good news for both of us. I may need a decoy. I don’t understand how that damn Goldblum found us.”
“I did mention we weren’t covering our tracks. Also you left our map in that bar. Bragged to a lot of people about where we were going…”
“Yeah, he’s cunning.”
But Abbi and the Eighth Wonder makes a critical mistake not long after we meet our heroes that reverberates throughout the script. It’s a common choice a screenwriter will face whenever writing a two-hander. And, therefore, learning from it could help save your script in the future.
It’s 1936 and Abbi Rhodes is the assistant to world-traveling explorer, Channing Smith. As we’ve established, Channing is kind of a sexist d#*%head. A woman, in his mind, is someone who will always be an assistant, never an explorer.
He’s been able to string Abbi along precisely because he’s promised to one day make her an explorer. So during a big celebration party after Channing’s latest successful adventure (where Abbi did all the work), Abbi presses Channing on when he’s going to introduce her to the Council of Explorers when – KABOOM! – Channing is blown up by an exploding cannonball he was playing with.
At Channing’s funeral, Abbi meets Jo, a gossip journalist who wants to be a real journalist. Her only problem is that she hates everyone and drinks too much. But much like Abi, she’s tired of men getting all the cool jobs. And when Abbi gets a hold of a rare medallion that is said to be the key to finding the eighth wonder of the world, Jo wants in.
So the two head down to South America to look for a suitcase that is said to have the famed map leading to Firebeard’s treasure (aka ‘the eighth wonder of the world’). There they run into Adam Blaze, the evil male explorer who has dutifully filled in in the absence of Channing. Oh, but Abbi and Jo are about to get the surprise of a lifetime. That’s because Channing is still alive! He faked his exploding death and is now teamed up with Adam to find the Eighth Wonder!
The two teams fight on trains, bi-planes, and inside lavish parties, before making their way to an island that has Firebeard’s treasure. All parties will have to navigate a pirate ship graveyard to locate the single most lavish treasure known to history. Will Abbi prove that she’s worthy of being a true explorer? Or will she fail, confirming that once an assistant, always an assistant?
First off, this is a funny script.
However, it could’ve been an awesome funny script.
And I think that the writer made a key mistake early on.
Abbi and Channing were hilarious together. Every exchange of theirs was funny. Him with his over-the-top sexist comments and her exasperatedly pointing out how wrong he was with every single decision he made. They were perfect together.
Then they killed Channing off. And in comes Jo. Jo, meanwhile, isn’t nearly as funny as Channing. Channing was a very clear archetype, which is important in comedy. We need to know the type of person someone is to laugh at them. Jo, meanwhile, was a mix of conflicting ideas and was hard to pin down. She’s a feminist. But she’s also kind of a clueless ditz. So her actions didn’t quite line up with her label.
More importantly, when you put Abbi and Jo together, they weren’t funny. I wasn’t even sure what the dynamic was. For example, in the Marvel films, Captain America is the super serious “everything by the book” guy and Iron Man is the loosen-up sometimes you gotta improvise guy.
Establishing dynamic is critical to a two-hander working and the writer HAD TWO CHARACTERS WITH THE PEFECT DYNAMIC. Yet he destroyed it by killing off Channing in favor of Jo, who was, quite frankly, lame.
Why did he do this? I suspect the angle was to focus on women working together as sort of “feminism is awesome” creed. But the irony is that you’re able to get that message across much better if Abbi is teamed up with the world’s biggest chauvinist.
I realize that there’s a creative choice here. And there are pros and cons to each decision. But the rule that trumps everything is that the best dynamic in your movie should be the dynamic that’s on the screen the most. Abbi and Jo do not have the best dynamic. Not even close. Abbi and Channing do. So that’s the movie right there. Full stop. End of discussion.
Now, you may think this killed the script for me but it didn’t. The writer wrote a lot of funny scenes and a lot of funny characters. He’s so funny, in fact, that he makes up for this mistake. One of my favorite characters is Abbi’s love interest, Michael, who’s this openly beta magician-on-the-weekends map-maker who is perennially dealing with bouts of diarrhea. He’s so opposite of Channing and Adam, you can’t help but laugh.
This is both the curse and the benefit of writing comedy. If you’re funny, you can make up for major creative mistakes. But if you’re not funny, you can write the most technically perfect script ever and it won’t matter. In other words, even if Roller had paired Abbi up with Channing, it wouldn’t have mattered if he wasn’t naturally funny.
What is “funny?” What does that mean?
Well, obviously, “funny” is personal for every individual. But there just seems to be a little more imagination in people who are funny. For example, fellow misogynist explorer, Adam Blaze, is such a douchebag that, during big parties, he loves showing off his backflip, despite the fact that it’s the clumsiest backflip ever and he should not be proud of it at all.
Then, later on in the script, Abbi is about to steal the gold medallion from the museum, but a masked man is able to grab it before she can get her hands on it and he runs off. She chases him towards a busy street, effectively cornering him. “Who are you?” Abbi asks. “You’ll never know,” he says, deadly serious.
The “mysterious” masked man then proceeds to do the clumsiest backflip ever onto a passing truck bed.
It was just fun stuff like that that had me giggling the whole way through.
Whenever I post about a script I laughed at, I get a million comments declaring, “That’s not funny, Carson!!! You’re wrong!!!….. and DUMB!” All I have to say to that is, step into my shoes for a week. Read seven comedies that are truly TRULY not funny, and you might change your definition of funny. Because this writer is definitely funnier than the majority of comedy writers out there.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: CRITICAL mistake. The writer did not give his two leads ages when they were introduced. I know that sometimes writers will do this at the request of the producers in order to cast a wider net of which actors they can send the script to. But you need to tell us Abbi’s age here. As any woman will tell you, their life at 25 is a lot different than their life at 35. And I didn’t know where, in that spectrum, Abbi’s age was. And it prevented me from truly understanding who she was as a person.
