Genre: Comedy
Premise: A morally bankrupt woman kidnaps her left-at-the-alter brother to the Amalfi Coast, posing as his wife to secure the $250,000 Honeymoon Prize he won.
About: This one finished in the middle of the pack on the 2016 Black List. It was written by Zoe McCarthy, who I’ve reviewed before. Her script, “Cut and Run,” followed a female urologist and a retired hooker as they took down a notorious sex trafficker in Miami. She also has a project in development called “Bitches on a Boat,” which covers similar territory to today’s script. It’s about a female sports agent who’s dumped by her fiance minutes after she embarks on a cruise ship bachelorette party. McCarthy is still looking for that lucrative “written by” credit, a process that shouldn’t take much longer if she keeps displaying this level of talent.
Writer: Zoe McCarthy
Details: 110 pages
I think I’ve reviewed every script rated higher than this one on the 2016 Black List. So what’s taken me so long to read Hart You? To be honest, the logline made me feel icky. I was skeptical that an incest-joke could work for 110 pages. I wasn’t even sure the joke could work for a scene. Do I really want to read an entire script where a brother and sister have to pretend to have the hots for one another? Is that funny? Let’s find out.
32 year old Naomi is what you might call a lost cause. She has no significant other. No job. She spends most of her days getting high and stalking her hot musician ex-boyfriend on Instagram. Her younger brother by two years, Brandon, conversely, has a picture-perfect life. He’s a lawyer and is about to get married to Jessica, the kind of stunner he couldn’t get in high school.
One thing of note about these siblings: Brandon HAAAAAAAATES Noami. She’s done nothing but make his life miserable (starting all the way back in high school, when she slept with his prom date). Brandon tells Naomi there is no way in hell she’s coming to the wedding. Of course, that night, Naomi ignores her brother and visits Jessica, who confides in Naomi that she never loved Brandon.
When Jessica dumps Brandon at the alter the next day, Brandon is convinced this is all Naomi’s fault. While he goes off to drown his sorrows, Naomi finds out that Brandon won a dating site prize that picks the perfect newly married couple and flies them to the Amalfi Coast where their trip will be documented and they’ll collect 250,000 dollars. Broke-ass Naomi grabs an obliterated Brandon and has a photographer take a bunch of pictures of them as “newly married,” then sneaks a passed out Brandon onto the plane the next morning.
When Brandon wakes up at the Honeymoon location, he freaks out, potentially ruining everything. That is until he meets the gorgeous Rachel, the prize’s organizer who will be documenting their trip. After Naomi reminds Brandon that he’s bankrupt because of how much money he spent trying to get Jessica to love him, Brandon reluctantly agrees to go along with the ruse.
But not even he could’ve predicted what they’d have to do. The website’s purpose is to show the power of love. So Brandon and Naomi will need to have everything documented, from their kisses – blech! – to “intimate” couples massages. We know Naomi can keep up the ruse. But can Brandon, who hates his sister more every minute? Survey says: Not likely. But in this anti rom-com? You never know.
A tell-tale sign that I’m not going to like a script is when a line of dialogue includes references I’ve never heard of. So when a photographer in Hart You barks out the line, “Gimme more Travis Scott, less Brendan Dassey,” I figured I was in for a long ride.
But here’s the thing about McCarthy. She’s one of the rare screenwriters you can read even if you’re not into the story. If I worked at a production company and this script came in, I’d say, “I don’t love this script. But this is definitely a writer we want to keep an eye on.” What makes me say that? Well, take a look at the introduction of Noami’s apartment. As far as conveying who a character is, I’d put this description in my top 5 of the year…
Naomi’s dingy abode hosts a floor-to-ceiling stack of career instructional/reference books, The Easy Way series, with subjects ranging from fortune cookie writing to sea lion taming to dreamcatcher making, etc., a broken lava lamp, a fish-less fish tank, a chunky laptop, and pot paraphernalia. Three posters bring the room together: El Chapo, Janis, and Oprah.
There aren’t a lot of writers who can creatively convey a character like that, and if you can stand out from the pack anywhere in writing, readers are going to respond to you. That creativity extended to the dialogue as well. When Naomi locks herself in the bathroom after a fight, a worried Brandon doesn’t say what the typical screenwriter would write – something like, “I’m not going to fall for your shenanigans, Naomi!” He says, “Naomi, I refuse to drown in your manipulation quicksand.” Way more creative.
Props also go out to McCarthy for overcoming the Herculean task of navigating an impossible-to-believe premise. Granted, she chose the premise in the first place. So explaining away the plot holes was a disaster of her own making. But she’s so funny that she’s able to hide a lot of these issues with humor.
For example, how do you get a brother on a plane who hates your guts? She gets him wasted and high the night before, so he’s incapacitated at the airport. “Ma’am, could you please wake your companion before boarding?” the airline employee asks, looking at Brandon, drugged in a wheelchair. “My husband’s um… How do I put this… He’s a Stephen Hawking situation. This is as awake as he gets… We’re actually on the way to Europe to see a specialist.”
Unfortunately, some explanations were a bridge too far. With social media these days, how do you fake identities? How did not one person at the wedding take a picture of Brandon with the real Jessica and put it on their Facebook page? The answers to these questions were a) Naomi conveniently doesn’t use social media. And b) Noami drugs the punch at the wedding so that everyone’s too high to take pictures.
It’s a warning sign to anyone with a mistaken identity concept. It’s very hard to pull these off in the social media age. I once had an idea about a college freshman who has the same name as the big quarterback recruit for UCLA, who, incidentally, doesn’t show up. The freshman is then assumed to be the recruit, and when he sees all the perks that come with life as a star QB, goes along with it, despite the fact that he’s never played football in his life.
The more social media blew up, the more changes I had to make to the idea. First the real QB was from a small school on the East Coast. By the last draft, I had him as a QB in a tiny town in Alaska, since that was the only place I could place him where it would be believable that nobody would be able to find out our imposter freshman wasn’t the real QB. By that point, I realized it was pointless. When you have to jump through that many hoops to sell your premise, your premise is probably faulty.
Despite all this, McCarthy is talented enough and funny enough and a good enough writer, that she keeps the script entertaining. It’s the definition of a writer with a “strong voice,” and why the industry will pay you even if your spec scripts haven’t been produced. It’s definitely a good script to read if you’re an aspiring comedy screenwriter.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: While I don’t think traditional rom-coms work anymore (stuff like Pretty Woman and Notting Hill), I do think “rom-coms with an edge” work, like this one. Stuff where you’re not being all ooey-gooey, but rather rock-n-rolly. Morally bankrupt characters. Morally bankrupt premises. Stuff with more edge to them. The industry still responds to this, especially if it has a strong female lead.
