Genre: Comedy
Premise: During the summer of 1998, five camp counselors accidentally kill a stranger in the woods.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. This is co-written by Leigh Cesiro and Erica Matlin. Erica has been an assistant to Anthony Bregman, a producer on a number movies, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Writers: Leigh Cesiro & Erica Matlin
Details: 101 pages
Johnny Sequoyah for Sam?
I like killing people.
I’m speaking within the context of movies, of course.
More specifically, when a group of people kills a person, then have to cover it up and hope nobody finds out. As I’ve stated before, one of the most powerful things you can do with a character is give them a secret. A secret forces your character to lie. A lie means that every dialogue scene that character is involved in is going to be a dance – a dance to avoid suspicion, a dance to keep the secret intact. It’s built-in dramatic irony, which we all know is one of the most effective tools in screenwriting.
The year is 1998 and we’re at Camp Brower, a second rate summer camp. We meet best friends and camp counselors, effortlessly cool Jayne, self-assured Sam, sassy Alexis, and rule-following Benji, as they send a couple of sheep into a boys’ dorm to embarrass a sexist male counselor who’s teaching his young campers how to score chicks.
Afterwards, Team Sheep get together to figure out what they’re going to do for the rest of camp and get wind of a big party at the neighboring (and much ritzier) Camp Kensington. Everyone’s a little nervous cause Camp Kensignton is a lot cooler. But off they go that night and have a great time.
On the way back, though, the crew is messing around with a bow and arrow they find, drunkenly shooting arrows into the night, only to come upon a dead camp worker named Rat Tail, who’s got an arrow straight through his heart. When they realize they’ve killed him and that their lives are over if anyone finds out, they bury him in a shallow grave and agree to never talk about it again.
The next day they try and go back to normal but of course they’re all feeling guilty, especially Sam and Benji, who try to convince the others to tell the cops. Maybe the punishment won’t be so bad if they admit to it now. That idea gets shot down. Meanwhile, we find out that it was actually one of the other grounds people who killed Rat Tail. But our counselor group never finds this out.
They ultimately decide that a shallow grave won’t do the job and commit to moving the body. So they dig the body back up, put it in a bag, and try to lug it to a more secure location. Unfortunately, all the campers are running around, making it difficult. Will they be able to ditch the body of the man they think they killed but didn’t without anyone finding out? You’ll have to read Cruel Summer for the answer!
Because I’ve been so hard on the 2021 Black List, I’m going to try and take a more productive approach to today’s conversation. Cruel Summer, which is part Caddyshack, part Wet Hot American Summer, and part The Hangover, frustrated me. I’m all for a goofy comedy with a group of funny characters dealing with a difficult situation. But these scripts don’t work unless there’s at least one character who has some actual depth to them.
A lot of comedy writers screw this up. They just try and be funny. Which is good. You should be focusing on the funnies in a comedy. But we still need to connect with somebody in the story so that we care enough to keep reading. Because remember, we all have friends we can laugh with. In the majority of cases, we laugh a lot harder with them than we ever do at a movie. So a movie has to give us something else, and that something is someone to connect with and root for.
Check out Bridesmaids. Annie was a very well constructed character. In that first scene with the guy she slept with, we see her slip out of the bed in the morning, go into the bathroom, make herself look good, then sneak back into bed and, when he wakes up, she pretends she’s waking up as well, so he’ll think she always looks this good in the morning.
That scene showed us how desperate she was to find someone, to get married. This is what made the core plotline of her best friend getting married so clever, because we’d already seen that this is what she wants more than anything. The only thing she’s left with is her best friend’s friendship. So when that’s taken away too, we understand why she falls apart.
And it didn’t stop there. There was this whole backstory about her failed bakery. There was this self-sabotaging part of her where, when she finally finds the perfect guy, she screws it up, because she’s never had a guy who actually cared about her.
All of this was really well-constructed character development.
Meanwhile, I can’t tell you a thing about any of these girls lives in this screenplay other than that they like to goof around with each other. When readers complain about scripts being too thin, this is what they’re talking about. There was no effort to create any sort of depth to any of the characters, outside of a barely-explored battle for the open Assistant Director job between Jayne and Sam.
Bridesmaids was written over the course of six years. It takes time to get that depth and to get it right. This script may get there some day, but right now, it’s achingly thin. And if you sense the frustration in my voice, it’s because I’m frustrated.
When a reader sits down to read, the one thing they don’t want to question is whether the writer put their blood, sweat, and tears into the script. I have read some scripts I’ve disliked but still gave the writer credit because I could tell that they put everything into that script. The second I feel like that isn’t the case, I get upset. Because why should I invest if you haven’t?
“Mercury” set the bar for this Black List because you could tell that the writer left it all out on the field. There was no moment in that script where I felt they took a shortcut.
Now I understand that comedy is different from other genres because comedy has a naturally loose feel to it. It’s never going to be The Godfather. But the way I can spot a good comedy screenwriter is that they prioritize their main character. They make sure there’s a fully fleshed out human being at the center of the story who has flaws, who has inner demons, who’s imperfect, who needs something from this story to become whole.
And contrary to what you might think, that being obsessive about constructing your main character is going to make them too serious and unfunny, it actually makes the character funnier. That’s why Annie was so funny. Her jealousy was so well-established that every interaction that challenged it was a struggle for her. Her desperation to keep her best friend in her life was what led to the best scenes in the movie, like the toast-off.
If you don’t figure out what your main character is specifically going through, how can you create specific situations that she would be funny in? If I know my hero’s flaw is that she’s a chronic introvert, then you better believe I’m going to create a bunch of scenes where she has to be around a ton of people. And that her interacting with those people is going to matter to the story. That stakes are going to be attached to those moments. That’s what we’ll end up laughing at, her struggle to overcome that weakness.
Unfortunately, this is another example of a comedy that doesn’t have enough going on underneath the surface to create any real laughs, or any real investment. The plotting gets a little more intricate in the second act, resulting in a script that got better as it went on. But because I didn’t have anyone to latch onto, it wasn’t for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m going to go back on what I said a little bit. It is possible to write funny screenplays without character flaws or character depth. We saw it with Borat. Hell, Airplane is one of the funniest movies ever and it doesn’t have a lick of character depth. It’s just HARDER. It’s harder to write these movies because you have to compensate for the lack of character depth by not just making your script kinda funny, but historically funny. Borat and Airplane are GIANT exceptions to the rule. You can try to be the next exception. But I guarantee you we’ll laugh harder if we feel like we know the hero and the real life issues they’re dealing with.
