Genre: Comedy
Premise: Alex O’Hara is struggling through a divorce when everyone in Los Angeles County starts receiving emergency alerts on their phones, revealing the details of Alex’s depressing life. Unable to stop the alerts from coming, Alex decides to lean in and try to use the newfound accountability to turn his life around.
About: This script was bought by Sony! All hail! The comedy spec…… is back????
Writer: Donald Diego
Details: 99 pages
I’ll start off with this.
Fun idea!
I’ve seen just about every idea under the sun so it’s always nice when one pops up that feels fresh. And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t remind me of those late 90s early 00s high concept comedy spec sales.
I’d also be lying if I said it’d be nice to have those days back! Especially comedy specs. I don’t know what happened with comedies. Actually, I do. But whatever the reasoning for why comedy movies went out of style, I’d be shocked if a Hangover-level premise didn’t bring in plenty of buckaroos for a studio.
Buy some comedy specs, guys!
I guess that’s exactly what Sony did. Let’s see if they did it well.
Alex O’Hara has been married to Dana for 20 years and has an 18 year old daughter named Sloane who’s heading off to college. On the eve of her leaving, Sloane confesses to Alex that she overheard mom and Aunt Cara talking and that mom plans to leave Alex as soon as Sloane leaves for college.
That turns out to be true and when Alex is faced with living in a giant house all alone, he breaks down and starts crying. But that isn’t the worst moment of his day. The worst moment is when an alert goes out all over Los Angeles that says this: “Alex O’Hara, a grown man and resident of La Cañada Flintridge is currently in the fetal position, crying his eyes out next to his kitchen island because his wife just left him.”
More alerts start shooting out, all of which appear to be motivated by emotion. So, whenever Alex feels something very powerfully, an alert goes out. “Alex O’Hara, a grown man and resident of La Cañada Flintridge has just furiously masturbated to a picture of his ex-wife in a red bikini.” Alex races over to city hall to ask what’s going on but they don’t have any idea. In the meantime, he’ll just have to get used to these alerts going out.
What follows is Alex living a life of misery. He hates his car dealership job. He hates living home alone. He hates that his wife has a new boyfriend. But something funny happens. Alex becomes a sort of mini-celebrity and people start rooting for him. With the warm embrace of the masses behind him, Alex takes a hard look at his life and realizes everything he did wrong that led to his divorce.
Alex then decides that he wants his wife back. But in order to get her back, he has to change. So he starts going to the gym again. He quits the job he hates. He develops new friendships with people he’d otherwise overlook. He starts taking initiative for the first time in his life. And because these are all emotional highs, they go out as text alerts, letting not just all of LA know what’s up, but Dana as well. And slowly, but surely, she becomes intrigued by her ex-husband again.
That is until Alex sees an IG post about Dana’s new boyfriend. He gets so mad about it that his thoughts go out as an alert, and the next day, masses of people who are rooting for Alex destroy the boyfriend’s house. Dana is furious and says that’s it, that Alex needs to give up on rekindling their marriage because she’s done with him.
Soon after that, LA discovers the reason for the errant text alerts (which is shockingly believable) and is able to shut them down. Which means that Alex is just a regular guy again. In spite of this, he still wants to get his wife back. So he decides to do one final grand gesture in the hopes of convincing her. It’s a long shot. But maybe, just maybe, it will work.
Alex Alert is a script that falls on its face in the first half and, much like Alex does at the end of the movie, somehow redeems itself when it’s all said and done. It is not an accident that this happened. There is a very specific script-related moment that took this screenplay from forgettable to charming. And I’ll tell you what that is in a second.
First, I want to talk about mining your premise. Because when you have a big flashy premise like this, you need to mine it for every script possibility it can provide for you. Most writers never get past the 70% mark of mining a big premise. And a ton don’t even get that much out of their scripts.
That’s where I’d put Alex Alert. This is a 70% mining of the premise. It could do so much more. And I’ll tell you exactly where you mine those extra percentage points. You find them in rewrites. With big concepts, every rewrite is an opportunity for you to figure out even more regarding the uniqueness of your premise, and then utilizing that by building story developments and character advancements around it.
Back to the Future is a great example of this. As I’ve stated before, the time machine was originally a refrigerator. It was only through rewrites that it became a car. And once it became a car, the multitudes of awesomeness the script improved by were unquantifiable.
Where did Alex Alert fall short? I loved this idea that people started to become Alex fans. And it made perfect sense, too. This guy was struggling in his life and every struggle was being shared with everyone. It only makes sense that people would feel sympathy for him and start rooting for him. Almost like a character in a movie. There’s a version of this screenplay where that becomes a much bigger part of the story. These people coming to him and supporting him and pushing him to become better. We get a little of that here and there. But the writer could’ve gone much further with it.
Then there were small things. For example, one stage of the script is Alex utilizing the alerts to let his wife know that he’s changing for the better. And she’s taking notice. Then that alert happens that gets her new boyfriend’s house destroyed and she’s done with Alex. Then, AFTER THAT, LA stops the alerts.
What would’ve been better is if LA stopped the alerts WHILE ALEX WAS IMPRESSING HIS WIFE. Cause, as a dramatist, that’s when you want to hit your character – when they’re on a high and they’re getting closer to achieving their goal (get my wife back). It’s way less interesting if they stop after he’s already failed at his goal.
Okay, so getting back to how this script saved itself. It’s pretty “Screenwriting 101.” The mistake that was made here was there was no goal in the story. The first half of the script was objective-less. Sure, it was kind of fun to see Alex’s life fall apart and all the alerts go out. But 40 pages of that without any story direction? That’s storytelling suicide. I was bored out of my mind.
The script saved itself at the midpoint by simply adding a goal with high stakes attached to it: GET WIFE BACK. As soon as the story did that, it gained purpose. It gained momentum. It gained A POINT. And pretty much everything after that was good. Not game-changing. But good.
So, writers? Add a goal. It does wonders to your screenplay.
Now, if this writer were debating this choice with me, I assume he’d say that he first had to establish the gravity of losing his wife in order to introduce a storyline where he tried to get her back.
To that I say… dude? This is screenwriting. Tons of screenwriting is about doing as much as possible inside as little space as possible. It’s the nature of the beast. If you’re efficient, you can have your hero introduce the goal of trying to get his wife back at the beginning of the second act. Worst case scenario, you can get it in at the 3/8ths mark (around page 40 for a 100-page script). To wait all the way to the midpoint before the story has a point? That’s too risky.
But as I always say here, it’s better to have the bad part of your script be the first half than the second half. Cause that means we finish the script happy. And that’s what happened here.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Jerry Seinfeld talks about this a lot – the idea that there are funnier words out there for you to use when you make a joke. It’s why he made that Pop-Tart movie. He thinks the word “Pop-Tart” is an inherently funny word. It’s more funny, for example, than “bread.” So, you always want to look for the funniest word or expression, especially at the climax of the joke. There’s this moment where an alert goes out after Alex leases his ’divorced guy’ apartment, talking about how sad and lame it is that he’s done this. Alex is in public at the time, and tries to defend himself to the people around him who just read the alert. “Okay, just so everyone knows, the apartment I just leased isn’t crappy. It’s totally nice! It’s conveniently located next to the grocery store I like. There’s a pool that I have access to everyday until 10. None of that is in the alert, but it should be!” “10” isn’t funny. It’s too bland. “9:30” is funnier. It’s funnier because it takes longer to say, it sounds goofier, and it’s more specific. These are small things in a comedy. But if you’re writing comedy, these are exactly the kinds of details you should be obsessing over. Comedy lives and dies in tiny choices like this. If you’re not constantly hunting for the funniest possible word, you’re leaving laughs on the table.
