Best comedy script of the year??
Genre: Comedy/Action
Premise: After his beloved cow is senselessly killed, a peaceful dairy farmer becomes a vengeance-obsessed one-man wrecking crew, setting out through our modern, curdled world to take on a corrupt conglomerate and the violent enforcers who protect it.
About: This script was optioned by super production company, Davis Entertainment. They most recently produced Predator: Badlands. On the comedy side, they produced Game Night.
Writers: Lucas Kavner & Dylan Dawson
Details: 109 pages
Driver for the Milkman?
Subconsciously, I’m always tracking HOW HARD THE WRITER’S WORKING.
Are they doing everything within their power to entertain you? Or are they taking large chunks of screenplay space for granted? Putting in a bunch of filler until they get to their next funny scene idea?
You know that, when a writer is working BEFORE HIS SCRIPT EVEN STARTS, that’s a writer you want to read. And here, we get the best use of the title page I’ve seen in years. Never have I seen a title page so accurately prepare you for the screenplay you’re about to read than this one.
That made me smile. But what I was desperately hoping was that this title page wasn’t the best thing about the script. Let’s find out!
The Milkman is a pure soul in a dying age. He doesn’t know what TikTok is. He knows how to extract milk and deliver it. At that, he’s an expert.
But one day, when he’s delivering milk to a local diner, a giant influencer, Scronk, shows up and starts making fun of the diner’s waitress. The Milkman can’t take it and proceeds to beat the living hell out of the influencer’s posse. Then he utilizes a humiliating ritual, forcing Scronk to drink an entire glass of milk like a good boy.
A couple of days later, Scronk shows up to his farm with goons and they try to kill him. While the fight rages on inside, Scronk goes to the cow barn and kills the Milkman’s favorite cow, Dina! She’s named Dina after the Milkman’s dead wife. In many ways, the cow serves as his current wife. But now she’s dead too!
When the Milkman learns that Scronk is on his way to a big influencer conference in the city, he visits his old stew-obsessed mentor, Creech, and prepares for revenge. Going incognito as a Gez Z “wood milk” influencer at the conference, the Milkman inadvertently becomes the hit of the conference, with former music icon Moby offering 30 million dollars to buy the wood milk brand.
Milkman eventually locates Scronk and chases him through the conference. A misstep throws Scronk into a vegan shark tank. But the sharks break their vegan diet to devour poor Scronk straight into his expiration date.
Seemingly, this chapter in the Milkman’s life is over. But what we learn is that Scronk is the son of multi-billionaire online retailer, Benedict Valabont, THE ORIGINAL CREATOR OF THE MILKMAN DIRECTIVE. Benedict is determined to get revenge. So the Milkman goes on the run with the mysterious Cassie, a bean bag influencer, and try to hide from Benedict’s men. But that isn’t going to last long. Whether you like your milk straight, chocolate, or strawberry, there’s going to be a milk showdown. And only one man’s milkshake is going to bring all the boys to the yard!
This is how you write a parody script.
This was really funny. Right from the start, it had these little moments that made me giggle, such as the Milkman first revealing his shrine room to his dead wife.
There’s also this hilarious moment where he runs to the dying cow after Scronk has attacked it and takes it in his arms. The cow’s face turns into his dead wife’s face briefly and she apologizes that she’s dying. And the Milkman starts making out with her and we briefly flash back to reality to show that he’s making out with a dying cow.
And yes, I know that some people will find that stupid. But what’s actually quite clever about it is that it’s a parody of the motivation in the original John Wick movie. The whole reason John Wick went after the Russian mob was not because they killed his dog. It’s because they killed the dog that his wife gave him before she died. And so these writers take that to the next level. So there’s some meta comedy going on here.
I always love when writers milk their concept for scenes and jokes, no pun intended. Later in the script, the Milkman meets Cassie. And there are clearly sparks flying. But then, a couple of scenes later, Cassie casually tells the Milkman that she’s lactose intolerant and you’ve never seen someone so devastated in his life, lol.
And then these writers go to town on all this acronym stuff. It’s one of the best running jokes in the script. Milkman and Cassie run into the “DELIVERY MAN,” (Deep Extraction Logistics, Intellect, Vigilance, Elimination, Reconnaissance, Yield – Mobile Assault Node). They run into ELEVATOR GUY (Elite Level Enhanced Vanguard Agent Trained for Operations, Recon, Guerrilla Undertakings, Yields). They run into a lady named DIANE who swears she’s innocent. BUT SHE’S NOT. She turns out to be D.I.A.N.E. (Distractingly Innocent And Normal, Evil).
They even make fun of those epigraph quotes writers put after their title pages. In this one we get, “Sometimes what I actually love to do is go to a farm and get fresh milk.” – Jake Gyllenhaal.
And then there’s just totally crazy batshit out there stuff that is hilarious. Like when Milkman goes to his old mentor’s excessively booby-trapped house in the forest and must navigate ten thousand traps before finally getting to Creech.
And it’s all done with love and humor. I thought The Beekeeper script was great. This totally makes fun of it. And I’m sure Kurt Wimmer, the writer of Beekeeper, who I’m friendly with, would think it’s hilarious as well. That’s the key with these scripts. If you write them with hate in your veins, they come off as bitter and unfunny. You gotta have that love if you’re going to write a comedy that actually makes the reader feel good.
And I loved the little touches here. As I noted above, at the influencer conference, Moby approaches the Milkman and tells him he wants to buy the wood milk brand. Milkman couldn’t care less. He’s trying to follow Scronk but the “surprisingly agile” Moby keeps getting in his way. It’s a fun little scene.
And then, later, when the Milkman almost gets to Scronk but has to battle a bunch of his bodyguards, we break into Moby’s big 2003 hit, “Porcelain,” and in this slow motion operatic ballet of a fight, we watch the Milkman take down the goons one by one.
That may seem like a small thing. But you have to understand that when I read scripts, I almost always read the most basic version of any scene that can happen. So, if a weaker writer is writing this scene, they’re just writing the Milkman fighting a bunch of goons. They’ll add some funny little moments in the fight here and there. But nothing about the sequence stands out.
When writers do little payoffs like this, it elevates the scene. It makes it different from what the reader usually reads. And that helps separate you, the writer, from everyone else. If you want to separate yourself, you gotta do something that other people don’t do!! And, often, that’s just taking a little extra time and trying to be creative. Like today’s writers did.
With comedy scripts, one of the big questions I ask is, “Do they understand the assignment?” Or, in other words, do the writers understand what their premise is and how to get the most out of it? And these writers ace that test. I mean, they freaking ace it.
This is a definite recommend. It didn’t quite get to “impressive” status mainly because the first half is funnier than the second half. If they would’ve kept up that same level of laughs throughout the whole thing, this becomes the best comedy script in the last five years. It may not be that but it’s still really funny.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you divide a script into four quarters, the quarter that writers have the most trouble with, by far, is the third quarter. It’s the quarter of the script that is least defined in the teachings of screenwriting. And there are legitimate reasons for that. The further into a script the story unfolds, the more unique to that specific story it is. So to try and turn that section into some “must follow” set of story beats would hurt more than it would help the screenplay. The way this bleeds into comedy screenplays is that this is always the section with the least amount of laughs. And I think that may be because the writers are so focused on plotting the story towards its climax. Just remember that if you’re writing a comedy, laughs are always the priority. They’re the priority over character. They’re the priority over plot. Never forget that you have to make people continually laugh in a comedy. If you go three or four scenes where there isn’t a good laugh, you’re going to lose the audience. I saw that a little bit here in Milkman’s third quarter. But, that’s what they made rewriting for. :)
