Genre: Comedy
Premise: When a young man can’t come up with enough money for his wedding, he’s forced to enlist the help of his estranged crazy grandmother, who will only provide the dough if he helps her kill herself.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List with 12 votes. This is writer Patrick Cadigan’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Patrick Cadigan
Details: 111 pages
Everybody in town thinks that when the pandemic is over, Hollywood’s going to want to buy a bunch of dramatic pandemic material.
I’m sure a couple of those projects will sell.
But if you’re looking for to play the smart money, it’s going to be in comedy. In times of stress, people want to laugh. So expect every studio to stock up on comedy projects. Netflix especially. They have the fastest concept-to-distribution model by far. So they can get a lot of these comedies in front of our eyes quickly.
Speaking of comedies, I’m happy that today’s script doesn’t involve a group of female characters going on a raunchy trip together, since that’s all Hollywood was buying for a good five years there. We might actually get back to seeing a variety of comedy projects. Let’s see if “Grandma” starts us off on the right foot.
30-something Ben works the phones at a dying insurance company. So while his career isn’t exactly on the upswing, he does have Mary, his partner-in-crime fiance who he’ll be marrying in a few months.
Mary is perfect in every way except for one. HER FAMILY. They suck. In fact, her father, George, corners Ben at a family gathering and informs him he can’t pay for their wedding. Which means Ben is going to have to come up with 30 grand.
This forces Ben to call his grandmother, Minnie. Minnie is one feisty old broad who tells it how it is. When Ben’s parents died unexpectedly when he was a child, Minnie raised him. The two never got along and Ben escaped the second he was of age to do so. He hasn’t talked to Minnie since.
Ben explains his predicament to Minnie and she comes up with an idea. She’s been planning to euthanize herself for years but she’s needed a family member to sign off on it. If Ben signs the suicide papers, she’ll give him the money.
Ben is thrilled with the arrangement… until he learns that they have to wait 30 days for the suicide. Which means Minnie will be helping Ben and Mary plan the wedding. When she suspects that Mary’s family is a bunch of cheating lying sleazeballs, there’s a good chance that she’s going to blow this wedding up before Ben and Mary can walk down the aisle.
Let’s start off with the good.
A comedy about a wedding where the love story isn’t about the bride and the groom, but rather the groom and his grandmother, was clever. I loved how, at the end, when the priest is reading the vows, Ben stops because he wants to go get his grandmother. It’s the the exact opposite of these “last minute sprint to the wedding” climaxes.
Also, this movie will get made.
It’s basically Bad Grandma and just like Bad Grandpa was able to get Robert DeNiro so it could make its movie, this will get an older famous female actress that ensures this moves into production as well.
But I don’t have any praise beyond that.
One of the hardest things about comedies is getting the balance between plot and comedy right. I’ve read hundreds of failed comedy scripts where my critique was, “You focused so much on the humor that the plot fell apart.” I’ve read almost as many failed comedies where my critique was, “You were so obsessed with structuring this thing that you squeezed out all the comedy.”
The best comedy scripts balance these two things.
Unfortunately, “Grandma” falls into the latter category. It’s so plot-centric that there aren’t any stand-out scenes. In fact, the only stand-out lol scene in the script is the opening flashback funeral (for Ben’s parents).
It shouldn’t be surprising that that’s the only scene that isn’t structurally attached to the story. It’s a flashback separate from everything. Without the constraints of plot, Cadigan only had to worry about being funny. Which is probably why it was the only scene that made us laugh.
Another problem is that Cadigan can’t decide whether Grandma is a comedic character or a straight up caricature. A caricature is a one-dimensional cartoonish character built solely for laughs. Mr. Chow in The Hangover is a caricature.
A comedic character is someone who’s funny, even goofy, but who we actually care about. Jack Byrnes in Meet the Parents is a comedic character.
Cadigan seems to shift Grandma between these two classifications when it’s convenient. She’s a loud-talking swear-a-minute pistol through many of the early scenes. But in the second half, we’re asked to see her as this fully fleshed-out human being with flaws. In the wise words of LaVar Ball – “Pick a lane.”
Finally, I never cared enough about the wedding.
Those are the stakes, right? If Grandma doesn’t help Ben, they can’t have the wedding. But does that mean he’ll lose Mary? Can’t they just get married in Vegas or at the courthouse instead? I never felt like the wedding falling through was the end of the relationship. So the stakes were never high enough.
Contrast this with Meet the Parents where you felt that if Greg didn’t win Jack over, he was going to lose his fiance. They did a great job establishing how much stock she put into her father’s approval.
But let’s be real. LOLs trump all. If you make this funny, we’ll overlook any issues. I’ve consulted on scripts like this before and what I tell the writer is to go through every single big scene and make it as funny as you can without worrying about the plot. Just come up with the funniest possible scenario you can think of.
Then, after you’ve done that, go back and gently edit those scenes so that they retain their new hilariousness but also fit back into the plot, even if that fit isn’t as perfect as before. Again, if we’re laughing, we’re not thinking about whether the script performed a proper “break into Act 2.”
Not a bad script but it’s going to need a few rewrites to get where it wants to be.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The stakes have to be present in the logline. If the stakes feel weak in the logline, you need to rethink your concept. Guys needing to find their kidnapped friend and get him back to his wedding within 24 hours (The Hangover) – high stakes. Guys trying to tag the one friend in their group who’s never been tagged yet before his wedding (Tag) – low stakes. The stakes for this wedding never felt that high to me.
