Genre: Comedy/Sci-Fi
Premise: A disastrous Grindr hookup goes from bad to worse when a meteor unleashes a horde of aliens on New York and the two ill-matched men must depend on each other to make it through the day alive.
About: This is another breakout script for a writer, Thomas Kivney, who made it onto last year’s Black List with Max and Tony. Kivney got his MFA in screenwriting at the American Film Institute Conservatory. He previously worked at a literary scouting agency for four years, which is “where I started becoming more involved in film. It was a rewarding experience that meant getting to work closely alongside Warner Bros and Netflix, advising them on the acquisition of books for adaptation to TV and film.”
Writer: Thomas Kivney
Details: 115 pages
Perfect comedy vehicle for Jerrod Carmichael?
With Billy Eichner’s “Bros” (produced by Judd Apatow) coming out in two weeks, the LBGTQ community is looking to make a push into the mainstream instead of being relegated to speciality releases. If that film does well, expect today’s script to get immediately greenlit. To be honest, this should’ve been the movie Eichner made. It sounds a lot more fun.
Max and Tony match on Grindr and immediately agree to meet and bang at Tony’s place. If this is how fast all gay hookups come together, I need to seriously reevaluate my sexual orientation.
The hookup doesn’t go exactly as planned, though. Max can’t stop talking about his ex he just broke up with, Oliver. And Tony is extremely determined to shut out all the noise (from Oliver’s mouth) and just have sex. After the clumsiest sexual encounter ever, the two aren’t really sure what to do so they go to sleep.
The next morning, Max gets the text he’s been waiting for. Oliver wants to get back together! Max can’t dance out of Tony’s apartment fast enough. Until he sees a dog-sized monster in the hallway devour a frat bro. Time to reassess the morning’s activities.
Max races back inside Tony’s apartment, inadvertently allowing the monster-alien-thing in with him, and Max and Tony tag-team the cosmic creature, killing it through sheer luck. After realizing the city is under attack, they decide to team up and get to Hell’s Kitchen, where Tony’s brother and Max’s boyfriend, Oliver, live.
They instantly realize these aliens identify as ‘stranger danger,’ as they’re able to combine with each other and eat humans to turn into even bigger scarier aliens. Oh, and they also spit goo in your face, and if it gets in your eyes or mouth, you turn into an alien within the next ten minutes.
While Max wants to help everyone they meet along the way, the more selfish Tony just wants to get to their destination. After a particularly gruesome encounter, Tony finally reveals why he was so awkward in the bedroom. It’s that he only recently came out! More sympathetic to his reluctant teammate, Max starts to fall for him, which puts his and Oliver’s relationship in serious jeopardy.
Today’s script is maybe the hardest of all to read.
No, I don’t mean that in a negative way.
I actually mean it quite positively. The script is well-written. It moves fast. It’s got a nice fun vibe to it.
But the problem with the script is the real problem with most of the scripts in Hollywood. Whenever I tell anyone I’m a screenplay reader, the first thing they say is, “Oh, it must be so hard to read all those bad scripts.”
Well, no. The bad scripts aren’t the hard scripts to read at all. I actually enjoy reading bad scripts because nothing serves as a better reminder of what doesn’t work than a bad script. “On the nose” dialogue is a vague term that means nothing in a vacuum. But all it takes is reading one bad script with a ton of on the nose dialogue to remember exactly what on the nose dialogue looks like.
But scripts like Max and Tony’s Epic One Night Stand – they don’t do anything technically wrong. The script has two main characters, each with a strong goal. It has really high stakes. It has urgency galore. There’s the perfect amount of conflict between the two leads, which allows for a lot of chirpy comedic dialogue.
And that’s the problem. The script does exactly what it sets out to do and not an inch more. Which means it’s hard to identify why you don’t like it. Cause I didn’t really like the script. And I can’t really tell you why.
I suppose if you put a serrated knife to my throat and started mimicking a sawing motion, I’d start with the characters. Max kind of comes off as the stereotypical 90s gay character. He’s dramatic. He’s flamboyant. No matter what I did, I could not *not* think of Sean Hayes in Will & Grace.
And then with Tony, he didn’t have any personality at all. Now, in the writer’s defense, it turns out there’s a reason for that revealed later. Tony is hiding a lot about himself. But that doesn’t get you extra points. It’s more important for the audience to like the character than to be bored by the character but then get a really good reason for why they’re boring 80 pages into the script.
And since I’m so focused on dialogue these days, I’d make the argument that the dialogue here falls into that same category as the story execution. It’s never bad. But it quickly establishes a pattern – Tony tries to calm Max down, Max can’t help himself and continues to freak out – that it never deviates from.
If there’s a lesson to be learned about dialogue from this script, it might be that. If you keep doing the same-rhythmed joke over and over again, it starts to lose its power.
It’s a good reason to think long and hard about your characters before you write the script. Are they going to be able to deliver not just funny dialogue, but a VARIETY of dialogue, for 110 pages?
I felt like we needed one extra character who had a style of talking that was completely different from Tony and Max just to mix up the rhythm in places. With that said, there was one line that made me crack up. The ‘totally-in-denial-that-he’s-gay’ car service driver says: “You two are a real cute couple you know that? You remind me of this one gay dude I used to date and the other gay dude he left me for.”
I wished there were more clever lines like that. But most of it is just Max going crazy and saying something silly.
I did like the mythology of the aliens, though. I liked that they kept getting bigger and could mesh with each other. And essentially adding zombie rules along with it added another dimension. But the script could never overcome its expectedness. We always knew what was next. Maybe if the characters were sharper and more original, I wouldn’t have cared about the predictability as much. But since that was a problem, I definitely noticed it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A common issue I run into in these comedic team-up scripts is that the writer makes one half of the team the “funny character,” and then, in trying to make the second character the opposite, they just make him bland. And that was the issue with Tony. He was too bland. The “non-comedic” half of your two-hander still needs personality. The Other Guys is a good example of this. Mark Wahlberg plays the hot-tempered comic relief cop. But Will Ferrel is still hilarious as the ultimate rule-follower.
