Genre: Family/Adventure/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) When bad guys break into their home and kidnap their parents, siblings Kevin and Clancy are forced to confront the fact that there may be way more to their stay-at-home mom than meets the eye.
About: Today’s script leapt and grabbed onto the bottom rung of last year’s Black List and pulled itself into one of the final slots. Sarah Rothschild is a relatively new screenwriter. She has a project in development at Universal called 24-7 that has Kerry Washington and Eva Longoria attached.
Writer: Sarah Rothschild
Details: 111 pages
Sometimes I feel like every script is an attempt by a writer to rewrite their favorite movie growing up. And look, I get it. That’s the reason we got into this business! Because we fell in love with movies! But I also believe that one of the first breakthroughs a writer has is when he/she learns to stop trying to be someone else, and starts being themselves.
I know an amateur writer whose work I used to read six years ago. He’d send me script after script for consultations and he might as well have slapped a picture of Quentin Tarantino on each title page because they were beat for beat remakes of all of Tarantino’s films. But he was a good writer! And I told him this. But I said “If you’re going to gain any traction, you have to stop trying to be Quentin Tarantino.”
It took him five years but last year he got a script on the Black List and got an A-list actress attached to the project. Lo and behold, it was as opposite of a Quentin Tarantino script as you can imagine. I’ve since realized that you can tell a person to stop aping a writer or a favorite film all you want, but the change has to come from within. They have to see that light themselves.
Today’s script is an obvious riff on Adventures in Babysitting, which is a sub-genre I see pop up in script form a couple of times a year. Let’s see if it’s able to differentiate itself enough to justify a Black List placement.
15 year old Clancy and 10 year old Kevin live in a tiny Northeastern town called Cape Vincent that is SOOOOOO boring. Not only is their town sooooo boring, their parents are soooooo boring too. There’s their dorky dad, Glen, who might as well be called #DadJokeDadBod, and there’s Margot, a mother who’s so lame she actually works as a lunch lady at Kevin’s school.
When Clancy and Kevin invite their friends Mim (cool Asian girl) and Lewis (allergic to everything bedwetter) over for a sleepover, everything seems to be going well until two scary people in masks BREAK INTO THEIR HOUSE AND KIDNAP THE PARENTS.
After a little research, the group finds out that their mom is in the Witness Relocation Program, something not even their dad knew. The people who kidnapped her are her old criminal buddies who she ratted on, and there’s a good chance they’re going to kill her.
Meanwhile, Glen and Margot are brought to Leo, Margot’s sexy former partner in crime and lover, who needs Margot’s expertise to help him with a job right this moment! While heading up to Canada, where the job is, Glen’s entire life comes crumbling down as he realizes his marriage was built on a lie.
Not far behind them, the Super Kids put some clues together that allow them to follow their mom, who ends up at a royal ball in a Canadian mansion. Each kid will have to use their unique set of skills to con their way past those cunning Canadians and rescue their mom before Leo the Sexy Loser gets what he wants and tosses poor Margot and Glen into Lake Ontario for a permanent swim.
You know that guy or girl in your life who you think is kinnnnnda cute but you’re not quite sure if you would ever actually date them? That’s this script.
I was lured in by The Sleepover’s cuteness. Lewis the human allergy was a personal favorite. I liked how he was scared and allergic to everything. And every once in awhile, there was a laugh out loud line of dialogue, such as when Mim was trying to explain to a dejected Clancy that it was perfectly normal to have lame parents: “Look, the world is a scary place for our parents. They grew up in the old days, when there were only two genders and no streaming.”
With that said, I kept waiting for the script to find its footing amongst all the stumbling. It wanted to be so many things at once. For example, at first it’s this fun reality-based adventure, where they’re using real-life solutions to find their parents, like calling Uber. But then later they’re in a Toronto library where they find a secret Da Vinci Code like passage that takes them to a sacred underground home base for their mom’s former agent life.
But the real problem with the script was its reliance on plot convenience. It just so happens that on the very day the bad guys find out where Margot has been hiding for the last 15 years, they need her help to steal a crown at a Ball that’s happening THAT NIGHT. That’s got to be the coincidence of all coincidences.
And the problem with sloppiness is it begets more sloppiness. The audience starts asking questions like: “Don’t multi-million dollar theft jobs take months of planning?” How are they able to know what to do in the two hours it takes them to get to the Ball?
A lot of new screenwriters don’t think this stuff is important. But these can be deal-breakers with a reader. Once a reader thinks you’re not even trying to fill in your plot holes, their all important suspension of disbelief goes the way of the Vine video. That’s what happened with me. I liked these characters and wanted to root for them badly. But nothing about Leo’s plan made sense.
With that said, if you’re going to make a family film, I’d rather studios made films like this again (Adventures in Babysitting, Goonies, The Parent Trap) than the live-action family films they’re signing off on these days, which mostly consist of dogs that are dying and kids with facial deformities. I mean would it kill them to give us some live-action fun every once in awhile? If I’d grown up watching movies where deformed dogs were always dying, I’m not sure I’d have ever moved to Hollywood.
The Sleepover needs a good old-fashioned simplifying. Simplify the characters (probably make Margot a struggling single mother – the dad storyline was a mess), simplify the tone (is this Goonies logic or is it real world logic?), and simplify the plot (the whole Canadian Ball thing needs to be totally rethought). The focus should be on the four kids solving real-world problems with their unique strengths. That’s when the script was at its best.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A simple way to add depth to a character is to write in something they really want. In Clancy’s case, she’s desperate to get into Julliard. It’s her entire focus in life right now. The reason this is so effective is because a) we admire characters who passionately want something. And b) it helps us place a label on the character that we can use to identify them. It’s like if you meet someone at a party and they tell you they play tennis. You now remember them as “the tennis player.” It’s a quick and dirty way to solidify a character in the reader’s mind, not to mention surprisingly effective.
