Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: After Georgia accidentally receives an out of the blue invitation to her on-again, off-again boyfriend’s wedding, she and her best friend Keely make the ill-informed decision to attend.
About: This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List. It’s Carrie Solomon’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Carrie Solomon
Details: 117 pages
The nice thing about reading screenplays is that you can cater the day’s read to whatever mood you’re in. Today, I needed a pick-me-up so I decided to read a comedy. Now if there’s one thing I’ve learned about comedies, it’s that if you don’t laugh on the first page, there’s a good chance you won’t be laughing at all.
I started with a script called “Dude Ranch,” which had a premise I didn’t understand. When his ex-wife starts dating another guy, our hero follows him to something called the “Dude Ranch” where you compete in manly activities, except they’re the woke version of manly activities. On top of this, the first ten pages were all about religion. So I had no idea what was going on. And I didn’t laugh once in ten pages.
I then moved to a Black List script called, “Assisted Living.” Here’s the logline on that one: “When a thief on the run needs to go into hiding, disguised as an 81 year old, she checks into a retirement community shared by her estranged grandmother.” Not the worst idea. And the first page did make me laugh. A young girl is helping her mom steal something by distracting the store owners, pretending to be a lost French girl looking for her parents. She doesn’t actually know French. She’s just throwing out a bunch of random French words together. It’s working until a guard walks over who speaks fluent French.
So I said, okay, we might have something there. But we follow that up with that same girl, now 35 years old, going to a club, noticing a bunch of bitchy 20-something girls making fun of her age, so she goes out on the dance floor and twerks like a maniac to prove she’s still got it. All I could think was, “What does this have to do with the premise?” Talk about random. So I x’d out of that after 15 pages.
That led me to this script, My Boyfriend’s Wedding. The first scene, which had our heroines out clubbing, begging for the defiant DJ to play “Alone” by Heart didn’t make me laugh. But it did make me smile. And I liked the banter between the friends and the DJ. I was getting tired of opening new scripts so I said, screw it, I’m in.
30 year old Georgia is a commitment-phobe. She has this great guy named Adam she’s known since high school who routinely flies out to visit her from Atlanta, and every time they’re together he asks her to become his committed girlfriend. But every time, Georgia resists.
So one day Georgia and her best friend Keely are hanging out and they receive an invitation from Adam’s parents… TO HIS WEDDING! What??? Georgia is confused. This man has spent the last three years proclaiming his love for her. They just had sex a few weeks ago. He’s getting married?? What’s going on???
Determined to straighten this out, Georgia accepts the invitation and makes Keely her plus-one. They fly to Atlanta where Georgia makes a bee-line to Adam at the pre-wedding party. Adam apologizes. He admits he’s been dating his fiance, Missy, for a couple of years. He’s only ever wanted to be with Georgia but since she wouldn’t commit, he decided to finally tie the knot.
Meanwhile, Keely bumps into Missy and the two start a friendship that quickly becomes sexual. When Georgia and Keely reconvene, Keely doesn’t tell Georgia she’s now sleeping with the bride. Georgia then loses control and sleeps with Adam again. It’s a wedding catastrophe!
Keely is determined to break up the wedding because Missy is such a great person and she shouldn’t be marrying a man who’s secretly in love with another woman. Georgia eventually becomes convinced that Adam is selfish and he wanted to keep two girls on the line and tells him as much.
Georgia and Keely then head home where the movie decides to explore their broken friendship for the third act. I guess the movie was about their friendship all along? Maybe? I don’t know. I had a hard time figuring this one out.
“My Boyfriend’s Wedding” needed to nail down the screenwriting basics better. Character, structure and theme.
For starters, nobody’s sympathetic here. Every time Adam has professed his love for Georgia, she blows him off. So we don’t like her. It turns out Adam has been hiding this whole other girlfriend from Georgia. So we don’t like him. Missy moves in on Keely, so we don’t like her. And Keely is straight up annoying. So we don’t like her.
Who are we rooting for here?
I prefer you have more than one sympathetic character in your script. But at the very least, your hero needs to be sympathetic. Everybody else do whatever you want with them as long as they’re funny. But Georgia has to be sympathetic. And she isn’t. We’re not even sure why she’s mad at Adam. She friend-zones him whenever he tries to make her his girlfriend so why is she getting all angry that he has someone else?
You may have been able to get away with this if Adam was a HUUUUUGE a-hole. Like he was super-manipulative and is banging three other women on the side. Sometimes you don’t need a sympathetic hero if the audience is obsessed with taking the villain down. But Adam and Georgia are high-school sweethearts. So it’s odd. We’re not sure if we’re supposed to hate the guy or like him, root for them to get together or stay apart.
If the audience isn’t sure what they’re supposed to root for, you don’t have a story.
The structure was odd as well. It’s a movie titled My Boyfriend’s Wedding yet the final act takes place after the wedding in another city. Not only that, but the movie becomes about Georgia and Keely becoming friends again after their wedding fallout. That would be okay if you’d established that there was a deep-rooted problem in their friendship through the first two acts. But they were fine in the first two acts. They disagreed on a few things but were otherwise great.
Your third act is the act that needs to resolve all of the things you’ve set up in the first two acts, both in the plot and with the characters. So for you to all of a sudden say, “Oh, this is about friends now,” is jarring.
The characters also had motivation issues. You establish in the first scene that your hero doesn’t like someone. Adam tells Georgia he loves her and she tells him she’s not interested. So why would that person care about breaking up his wedding?
This is what a lot of comedy writers don’t understand. They only focus on the jokes. But if the fundamentals don’t make sense, the jokes won’t land. You have to set everything up so that we go into each scene understanding where each character is coming from. That’s why we laugh. When we see their plans get screwed up and turned around.
Take Bridesmaids, for example. Look at how clearly they set up the main dynamic. Kristin Wiig’s character is jealous that this other woman has become best friends with her best friend. So in every one of their scenes, she’s trying to out do her. Like the toast scene. She will not be topped. She has to keep going and giving a better toast. The motivations in My Boyfriend’s Wedding were never clear and therefore we weren’t sure when we were supposed to laugh.
I guess the argument for this as a script is that it’s a romantic comedy that takes a look at female friendship. We don’t see a lot of those. But if that’s what this movie is going to be, there needs to be a lot more focus placed on the friendship. You can’t throw all that in at the last second. It’s thematically inconsistent.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get into this one. What did you guys think?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In comedies, you need to define who it is we’re rooting for to win and who it is we’re rooting for to lose. In other genres, you can play around more in the gray. But even then, I advise you give us clear good guys and bad guys. If it’s muddy, like it is here, it leaves the audience unsatisfied. They’re not really sure who won and who lost.
