Genre: Comedy/Action
Premise: An everyday guy who accidentally starts working as a barista inside the CIA headquarters building gets lured into a spy mission by a beautiful secret agent, known only to him as Carmel Machiato.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List with 12 votes. The writers, Nico Bellamy & Chase Pestano, are very green. They have the type of IMDB credits that seem unsure of themselves, stuff like, “talent coordinator” for “The Voice.”
Writers: Nico Bellamy & Chase Pestano
Details: 114 pages
Lil Dickey for Dick?
Yesterday’s script was quite heavy. And with this writer’s strike, there’s an overall gloom in the air that’s getting everyone down. So I thought, let’s read something fun today – a comedy!
I was actually talking with a producer earlier today about comedy and The Hangover came up. I asked the question…. When’s the last time there was a good comedy??? I get that most comedy writers have moved to TV. But I find it hard to believe it’s *this* hard to write a good comedy feature film, to the point where nobody’s written one in a decade.
As I’ve said here many times before, when it comes to comedy, if I don’t laugh out loud in your very first scene, your comedy script probably sucks. My confidence-o-meter drops 90 points if I’m not laughing in that first scene. So that’s going to be the first test for The Americano.
I’ll tell you if it passed after the plot breakdown.
Dick Freeman is not exactly “killing it” in life. He’s in his mid-30s, he still lives at home, he doesn’t have a job, and his only source of socializing is with his online virtual reality game set, where he mainly teams up with pre-teens to take down other virtual pre-teens in first-person shooter games.
But Dick’s mom is getting restless. She’s just met someone. She’d like him to move in. But it’s not going to happen if Dick continues living here. So she tells him he has to move out. But how is he going to pay for moving out, he asks. You’ll have to get… A JOB.
Dick is mortified by this requirement. Jobs are hard. They’re stress-inducing. You have to leave your house to go to them. After a lot of whining, he agrees to take an interview at Starbucks. But on his way there, he’s ATTACKED, kidnapped, and taken to a dark room. His captors confirm his name, that he has no friends, that he’s never had a girlfriend, that he doesn’t do anything productive or useful. And that’s all they need to know. Welcome to Starbucks!
It turns out these were CIA agents screening him for his new Starbucks job in the main CIA building. The reason he was chosen, they tell him, is because he’s the ultimate loser and not in danger of making any connections with any other human being, considering that he’s so socially inept.
The funny thing is, Dick’s actually pretty good at his job. And one customer, a pretty female agent who always orders a caramel macchiato, takes a liking to him. One day, after work, Dick realizes that she left him a message on one of the cups. It’s an address. Dick heads to the remote location – a deserted church – and Caramel Macchiato proceeds to tell him that there’s a double-agent inside the CIA and they’re working with the Cubans to potentially do something dangerous.
Since nobody would suspect the coffee guy, she enlists his help to steal data from the CIA director’s computer. Somehow, some way, Dick is able to do this. But when Caramel’s hacker bails on his file-decrypting duties, she’s forced to use one of Dick’s people, Dragon, a pre-teen he plays Fortnite with.
Before Dick realizes it, he’s in the middle of a live CIA secret mission. But when he suspects that Caramel is using him, he realizes that the next venti iced latte with three shots of espresso, one pump of caramel syrup, one pump of peppermint syrup, a sprinkle of cinnamon, a dash of sea salt, and dollop of whipped cream he makes could be… in the afterlife.
All right. So I know you’re on pins and needles here. Did I laugh during the opening scene? Here’s the scene so you can decide yourself if it’s funny.
I thought THIS WAS HILARIOUS.
I could totally imagine whoever’s the current “young Jack Black” going crazy in this scene. Remember, one of your jobs as a screenwriter is to put the actual image of what the reader is going to see in their heads. I thought the writers did an A+ job of that. I literally felt like I was watching the movie. And it was a funny image to boot. So the script passed the first test with flying colors.
Remember, if you come up with a funny main character, he does most of the hard work for you. Because we’re probably going to be laughing at most of the scenes in the movie since he’s in them.
And I didn’t just like the goofiness of the character. I liked the essence of him. That he was, basically the single biggest loser in the world which, ironically, is why he gets hired. That’s hilarious. If he was social, the people he knew could be used against him. If he was cool, he might potentially form relationships at the CIA. He needed to be the world’s most pathetic individual to get this job. That setup right there is gold. Cause I’m laughing even before I see him work.
In general, I like “in over your head” comedy. You risk a little bit when you make your hero incompetent. If a protagonist is too dumb or too idiotic, the reader can rebel against them. Hubie Halloween comes to mind. But as long as he’s funny, we’ll forgive a lot of that incompetance.
Where the script runs into some trouble is with the plot. It’s not that the plot is bad but it’s not very funny. In comedy, we love those initial moments of watching our funny protagonist deal with his situation. But around page 45, fifteen-to-twenty minutes into the second act, we start to get used to the joke. So if your plot doesn’t kick in and add something funny, we start to lose engagement. We’re still watching. We’re still laughing here and there. But we’re not INVESTED.
This is why comedy is so hard. You gotta have a hilarious main character, which is hard enough. But then the plot has to create funny situations as well. Yesterday, I highlighted that inventive railroad heist set piece. You need to do the same thing with comedy. You need to come up with big hilarious set pieces. And this script was missing that. Which is a problem because there’s no such thing as a great comedy film that doesn’t have memorable comedy set pieces.
I’m on the fence with this one because it started out well. And although it never got bad, it started coasting. Still, I think it’s better than most of the comedy scripts I’ve been reading lately. So, for that reason, I think it’s worth the read.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re going to include the CIA and its agents in your screenplay, the audience is expecting HIGH STAKES. This script shot itself in the foot by making the bad guys Cubans. It just felt like a second-rate foe. And you may think that shouldn’t matter in a comedy. But it does. The higher the stakes, the more we care. The more we care, the more tension builds up in our bodies. The more tension we have, the more we need a release. And how do we get that release? Laughing. If this was a small-town comedy then, no, the bad guys shouldn’t be Russia or China. But a CIA movie, yes. You need big enemies and big potential consequences.
