Genre: Comedy
Premise: A married couple who never got the opportunity to go to college due to having their son at such a young age, find themselves experiencing it for the first time 18 years later, during their son’s first Parents Weekend.
About: Parents Weekend is a hot spec that was snatched up last month by Lotus Entertainment. Writer Peter Scott has written two books and seems to specialize in the humorous adventures of married couples (one of those books is titled “In My House: A Humorous Journey Through The First Years of Marriage”).
Writer: Peter Scott
Details: 111 pages
I liked this idea as soon as I heard it. And I haven’t read a good comedy in it seems like forever so reviewing it today, on the 61st annual Comedy Day, it felt right.
I don’t know why comedies are struggling so badly. They used to be the number 1 spec genre out there. People would pick up anything as long as it had a scene where seven consecutive gay jokes were made. I guess the fact that the box office has gone global and comedies “don’t travel” has hurt the genre.
But people will always want to laugh. And comedies are still cheap to make. So there might be a chicken-or-the-egg scenario going on here. Is the reason there are less comedy scripts because there’s less of a need for comedies? Or have comedy scripts gotten so bad that the studios stopped buying comedies, which resulted in less good comedies, therefore tricking the studios into believing that comedies weren’t worth the risk anymore? I’m not sure that that’s a chicken-or-the-egg scenario but I just like any opportunity to use the phrase “chicken-or-the-egg scenario.” It also reminds me of breakfast. And breakfast is my favorite meal.
Personally, I think comedy scripts have always skated by on this “only needs to be okay” law. And that lowered the bar so low, that when comedy actually needed to be good all of a sudden to compete with dinosaurs (cause dinosaurs travel – I mean, they don’t travel with like suitcases or anything. But they travel in the sense that everybody knows who dinosaurs are. Except for maybe Sweden. I don’t think there’s ever been a dinosaur in Sweden), comedy writers didn’t have the tools to compete.
It was like, “What? You mean my ‘main character who only speaks in the language of projectile vomit’ isn’t good enough??”
Anyway, so, Parents Weekend. Sean is your typical grungy college freshman. However, Sean puts a little more effort into studying than your average student due to the fact that it’s been made abundantly clear to him that he was a mistake.
So big of a mistake that his parents, who had him when they were 18, couldn’t go to college and get real jobs. Which is why Mommy Sean (Amanda) works as a traffic court reporter and Daddy Sean (Nick) works as an assistant pharmacist.
Amanda and Nick are having empty nest syndrome since Sean left a few months ago. But unlike normal empty nesters, who are like 80, they’re only 36! Which has them stuck in a play-doh like haze wondering how they’re supposed to act (are we young and hip? old and responsible?).
Naturally, then, when they show up at Indiana University to visit Sean, they decide to see what they missed. And that means heading straight to the nearest party, where Nick’s pharmacy score of something called “Cholestrolux” becomes a huge hit at the party, making Nick an impromptu college legend.
Nick’s legendary status gets back to Sean, who’s beyond embarrassed. But Nick only wants more. So the next night he goes to an ABC party (Anything But Clothes – where was this party when I was in college??), meets a girl who swears her vagina tastes like raspberries, before finally being arrested by the cops for becoming one of the biggest drug dealers on campus.
This in turn gets Sean kicked out of school, and Amanda furious with him. And then all three of them die in a horrible car accident. Just kidding. Sean gets back into school and Amanda and Nick live happily ever after.
So what’s the verdict?
Well, let me put it this way. There was only one cafeteria at my college, and the guy who owned that cafeteria was so cheap, he only bought food that had some sort of defect, but still passed the minimum health code laws. Like he’d buy potatoes that had started to rot on one side, and then just cut off the rotting half and serve us the “good” side. Or he’d buy milk that was blue. Outside of the color, the milk was totally fine (or so we were told).
I’m not sure what this has to do with Parents Weekend….. Oh yeah! I never liked eating at that cafeteria. But after going 2-3 days without food, I had no choice. Especially after the local McDonald’s caught on to my Cambodian Fry Scam. I would go to that cafeteria and find just the right combination of retarded foods to satiate myself.
And that’s a little like Parents Weekend. This is not The Hangover or Ted. It doesn’t have any big huge laughs. It’s more like a steady diet of smiles and chuckles that satiate you and you go with it because you’re starving for funniness.
I do want to take this opportunity to discuss an issue I run into with comedy screenplays all the time though and that’s the “false conflict” plotline. Conflict is really important in comedy. Whether it be straight up butting heads (Rush Hour), sexual conflict (When Harry Met Sally) or something more nuanced (the weird conflict between Alan and Stu in The Hangover).
But for it to work, it has to be honest. If you try to force conflict that isn’t there, the comedy never plays well. So here, we have this whole plotline where Amanda and Nick “break up” in the middle of the script due to a fight (which was a false plot point – but that’s a lesson for another day).
From there, Amanda runs into a handsome professor, and the two start a flirtationship. The conflict is supposed to come from the possibility that Amanda will hook up with the professor. But we don’t believe she will for a second. We’ve clearly established how much she loves her husband and the script never established that it would do anything risky, so we knew it wasn’t going to start with these two.
If you’re going to add conflict to your comedy (and you should – lots of it – just like you should do lots of drugs in college), you want that conflict to feel honest. Because if we really believe that Amanda could be with this guy, the story gets more interesting and the jokes play better, because real life (as opposed to safe-movie-life) is always funnier.
None of this is to say that Parents Weekend is a bust. To go back to my college analogy, it’s sort of like when the weird guy who lives down the hall from you who you don’t know that well invites you to his room during Easter Break weekend because everyone else went home and he makes you drink a case of 40s with him while he tells you that he wouldn’t be surprised if his girlfriend committed suicide earlier in the night. You’re so drunk that you’re kind of having a good time. But something in the back of your head is telling you that this isn’t right.
Parents Weekend was comforting like that. And, truth be told, it’s a clever way into a sub-genre that hasn’t had the most success (college comedies). I mean how many great college comedies have their been? Animal House? Lady and the Tramp? By changing the perspective of the main characters to parents, it gave rise to a lot of unique opportunities.
Kind of like my college experience. Which reminds me, it may be time to end this interview. By the way, to get in the mindset to write this, I may have smoked something illegal. Not that it had any effect on me.
Peace and sama lamaa maka.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: False conflict is an extension of “movie logic.” Remember, to you the writer, it may be a movie. But to the characters in your script, their world is real. So those characters need to act like real people would. That’s the only way your script comes off as truthful. So Amanda entertaining this relationship with this professor sounds great as a plot twist. But it doesn’t work because we don’t buy that Amanda would really do this. Her character and this script hasn’t been set up that way. So the moment doesn’t play truthfully and truth is essential if you want laughs.
