Then there’s that weird moment right at the beginning of the third act. On the beach, when the sea lion has stolen the bride’s veil, and Tracey and Paul are trying to coax it in to shore? The seal somehow gets the veil on its head, and Paul says, “I’ll bet the people who died in that disco hallucinated something like that as they were overcome by fumes.”
I could list at least five other examples—the water park scene with the enema bag, the montage of trying on dresses, the three-legged race, the ex-cons doing yoga— where someone graphically and deliberately brings up the father’s horrific past crime. Did one of the writers have a parent or relative who did something like that—or did exactly that? It’s so specific. I understand wanting to make amends to the public for something someone in your family did, but a comedy like You May Miss the Bride might not be the place.
Here is a list of better crimes for the father to have committed. They’re the sort of fun “movie crimes” that a more roguish character would commit, so that the audience might still like him:
Car theft
Stole receipts from a concert (not from a benefit)
Smuggling a wacky animal
Drove beer across state lines on a bet
Sold moonshine or fun drugs (not coke and not heroin)
Robbed a rich douchebag’s house
Ripped off the mob
Stole a blimp
Another big note is Tracey’s gay best friend.
I don’t want to be insulting, but the character of Sebastian Plush is written as if the writer has never met or seen a gay person. Do we get any laughs from his being a flamingo tamer beyond the first joke, where the flamingo jabs its beak into the minister’s crotch?
Also, I don’t know why the font for all of Sebastian’s lines is suddenly Lucinda Calligraphy, where the rest of the script is just plain old Courier. And all these music cues—is a different Abba song going to play every time Sebastian appears? I’m just thinking that’s going to be very expensive. Maybe just pick one Abba song, and that’s the one that plays? We go through half of Abba Gold and we’re not even out of the first act yet.
So keep that in mind as I go through, pretty much scene by scene. I’ll try to suggest some better lines of dialogue, maybe some tweaking and scene rearranging. Final discretion is with the screenwriters and producers, of course.
Opening scene: When the girls are piling into the limo for the bachelorette party, have one of them try to poke her head through the open sunroof before the sunroof is open. Kinda bump her head, like we know how lame a person yelling through a sunroof is, so we’re going to do this clever, postmodern take on it first. The audience will really appreciate that.
Or could Tracey do that? Foreshadowing?
At the sushi restaurant: First off, change the name of the sushi restaurant from Hong Kong Fish to something like, I don’t know, Tokyo Raw?
When the sushi chefs yell at the girls when they come in, they should be friendly. Sushi chefs are usually saying a greeting, not threatening people.
Some bachelorette gift ideas: I think you should pick just one dildo-related gift. As it stands now, you’ve got a dildo hat, dildo coffee mug (how would that even work?), dildo champagne stems, a dog bed made of dildos, and, finally, just a huge black dildo that the one girl waves around. My comedy instincts tell me to just go with the one huge black dildo.
Also, when she’s waving it around, maybe it can slip out of her hand and fall into someone’s miso soup? (DO NOT have her say “Me so sorry!”) Or it could fall perfectly in the middle of a sushi platter. I would save this gag for the end of the scene—it would be an elegant way to button the scene and lead us out of it. Keep this in mind as I go through the other beats.
Okay, so—bachelorette gifts (big black dildo), the going-around-the-table-and-revealing-one-embarassing-but-funny-thing-about-the-bride (only one “She has crazy periods” joke), and then the bad sushi, then the bride passes out. Oh, and then the big black dildo lands either in the soup or on a platter, and then we’re out. (The Shania Twain “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” music cue should probably begin the scene—I don’t think it will play well over a big black dildo.)
Note: I would strongly suggest not having Sebastian Plush in this scene. He flirts with the one sushi chef, whom we never see again, and his line “Eda-mama like!” is too sweaty.
The hospital room: Tracey wakes up; doesn’t recognize Paul; diagnosis.
So we establish that Tracey doesn’t recognize Paul, her groom. And that she doesn’t remember she’s getting married.
Would she be sharing a room with someone at this point? I mean, she just collapsed and is under observation. I understand why the other patient is there—an old man yelling for a bedpan and farting is a nice counterpoint to the tenderness and concern that Paul is showing Tracey—but, given what’s coming (the vomit-and-shit chain at the bridal shower, and all the groin trauma, and the hamster flying up the dog’s butt), I think we can allow ourselves a little breathing room. I really wish Fart School hadn’t made so much money last summer.
The doctor’s explanation is good (remember—light box!), so here’s my suggestion as to why Tracey decides to go ahead with this marriage to a guy who, ostensibly, is a stranger:
I know how I wrote, at the beginning of these notes, how she sees what an amazing guy Paul is.
But what if there’s something more fundamental, and internal, about her that makes her decide to go along with the wedding? About how now, with a more or less clean slate in her head, she grasps how miraculous even the smallest incidents in life can be, and that something as silly and pedestrian as a marriage can be as bold and startling an adventure as wandering the globe or creating a great piece of art, and that it only matters how curious and committed each marriage partner is in themselves?
Also, when the doctor walks out, only have one of his feet inside a poop-smeared bedpan.
Page 11 The grandmother, and not the niece, should say, “That monkey’s an asshole.”
Page 16 When the car backs over the wedding planner’s foot, she should throw her notebook in the air instead of dropping it.
Page 17 Only one photo of the groom’s bare scrotum should make it into the slide show.
Page 21 Change the line “We’ve got more guests than a Serbian gang bang” to “Our guest list is longer than Grandma’s boobs.”
Page 24 You should be able to hear Paul’s friend grunting through the Starbucks bathroom door, but not pooping.
Page 31 Foreshadow that the seal likes frilly things by having it try to take a bite of Sebastian’s assless lace shorts.
Page 34 When Paul is serenading Tracey below her window, have the bird shit on him when he tries to sustain that long note in “Unchained Melody” (in the mouth?).
Page 38 A ghost is too far-fetched at this point. Make it a crazy homeless dude.
Page 41 If the mom’s going to queef during the parade, make the queefs in time to the marching band’s song.
Page 44 Fat triplets is funnier than fat twins.
Page 48 Lee Majors cameo instead of Tony Danza?
Page 55 When the best man falls off the roof, have him land in a truck hauling liposuctioned fat instead of mattresses.
Page 60 Put roller skates on the dad, a sombrero on the mom, and add an incontinent pug.
Page 61–108 This is all perfect, except for when the bride says, “You wanna get out of here? You talk to me . . . ,” which is from The Road Warrior.
Final scene: After the jerry-rigged wedding in the parking lot, when Tracey and Paul kiss, and his kiss restores her memory? I like that. Then he says that sweet line, “Let’s make new memories,” and then she laughs, but then she says, still laughing: “As long as I can someday forget the horrific image of my dad’s strained, joyous face as he reached orgasm outside that burning disco full of shrieks and death.” Not only is it a weird line to end a romantic comedy on, but then having the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” start playing is, I think, the absolutely wrong
last idea for the audience to walk out of the theater with.
Please see my attached list of alternate last lines and appropriate songs to follow them with. I met Kid Rock at an MTV gifting suite last week, and he’s excited about getting a song in the movie.
I couldn’t be farther away from all of the snow in my life, geographically or mentally, than I am right now, as I write this.
I’m in Burbank, California—in the hot, yellow yolk of summer. July bakes the town like a corpse on desert asphalt. But it’s Burbank asphalt, which means there’s a Baskin-Robbins nearby.
The first memory I can remember as a memory is of snow. Looking out through the balcony window of my family’s tiny Norfolk, Virginia, apartment in 1970 and seeing snow falling from the sky.
Except that’s not how I saw it.
My fresh-from-the-oven toddler’s eyes were fixed on the frame of the glass balcony door. And they must’ve thought the snow was stationary and the building was rising through the morning air into the sky.
My first coherent thought about life was that apartment houses could levitate in the snow. Decades later, when I took LSD in a tiny apartment in San Francisco, I had a realization. Most narcotics are designed to approximate the nonjudgmental, magically incorrect way we see the world before we can speak. Thus, the whorls in the wood on the cheap kitchen table swirled like tiny maelstroms. Of course—each of them was a twirly doorway into Tableland.
A row of action figures on a shelf subtly nodded their heads in time to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop.” They never got around to actually dancing—and how could they? The Fleetwood Mac song was playing from the television, where Bill Clinton and Al Gore and their wives danced woodenly, having just won the ’92 election. Those poor action figures were embarrassed by the cut-string puppets on television. They could be posed to appear like they were fighting, riding motorcycles, firing fearsome weapons. And there, within plain sight—four humans with ten times the range of motion and strength, and they couldn’t even dance to a Fleetwood Mac song.
Finally, I sat staring a row of books on a shelf while the dawn turned the room gray/gray-blue/blue/harsh/dry/ tired. I saw the books as books, and then as distant vats of pulp waiting for pressing and ink, and farther back as a forest and then as scattered atoms, and the universe was a cold forest of cooling fire, waiting to become wood and pulp and books.
But I never even got close to thinking, during those twelve melty hours of hallucinating, that my apartment building could levitate. Only babies hallucinate at that level.
We’re Playing Snow Fort
I’m eleven years old and my two friends are ten years old except for one other friend I have who is also eleven years old but is only twenty-two days older than me. And this is how cool our snow fort is:
First off, the back wall we didn’t even have to build. The snowplows scraped their way through the streets early early early this morning and piled up big, packed walls of snow. So that became the back wall of the fort. It’s probably fifty feet high, maybe. I can’t jump over it, so that’s probably fifty feet. Numbers are how you understand the world. Like, a dad makes a million dollars a year. Gum stays in your stomach for seven years. Only grandparents are allowed to buy special shirts that always have five pieces of candy in the pocket. And anything I can’t jump over is fifty feet.
The snowfall, starting early in the evening the night before, stayed strong and did not weaken. The clock radio with the red glowing numbers (red numbers tell parents to go out and make money) next to our parents’ bed emitted the Chuckling Voices and Fart Sounds. The Chuckling Voices said the schools of Loudoun County bowed in fear when faced with the strength and steadfastness of the snowfall. The schools would close, out of respect for the icy onslaught from the sky. When they said our school’s name, two fart sounds. Because we always close. Because the Mighty Snow must be respected.
We must be like the snowfall.
The Mighty Snow, which made our parents, so sure of our schedules and destinies, shake their heads and mutter, “Just great,” when faced with the reality that the sky and snow and cold can decide a new path for our day. Somewhere, our teachers are crying and kicking things because they don’t get to make us learn numbers and books full of dead people. And the principal is going, “Boo hoo hoo.” Mighty Snow—you are more real a god than Jesus and the Hercules gods from school and whatever the Bergs, Steinbergs, and Axelrods say thanks to during their holidays. Those gods never show up. But the temperature gets cold and that’s Mighty Snow’s way of saying, “Soon, my minions. Soon, I will show you real strength and also you’ll get a day off ’cause I’m so strong.”
So we’ll be strong like the snow. We’ll be stronger than Trey and Paul from the far end of Crescent Court. We’ll be stronger than Mike’s older brother, who plays soccer but is fat and mean. And we will definitely be stronger than Mrs. Jeskyne, who yells and yells from her screen door. In the sunlight reflected off this new snow, wearing a nightshirt that says BORN TO SHOP and holding one of those weensy barbells she stomp-walks with, it is clear how slim and weak she is. Blond hair and tan skin like hers may have power on a beach somewhere. But here in the Northern Virginia snow? She is like if an aerobics lady tried to fight the big metal walkers on the planet Hoth, which Mike says are called AT-ATs, and then he’ll tell you what each letter means like he’s going to win a prize. Today, if Mrs. Jeskyne wants to yell at us, it will have to be over the fifty-foot front wall of the snow fort.
Around this we built the three other walls of the fort, growing out of the big, packed ice wall. So the fort faces my house, which is across from Mrs. Jeskyne’s. If Trey and Paul and Mike’s older brother and anyone else want to attack, they’re going to have to come around the sides of my house. All they’d have to hide behind would be the hedges, which are so unleafy now because of the winter that we can throw the bigger snowballs right through them and boom! snow all over their faces, which is a total skeeze-mo.
The two side walls are high enough to climb over but not jump. Mike built a slide against the one wall, the one facing the driveway. Mike thinks everything should have an “escape hatch” or “escape pod” or something ever since seeing Star Wars, and that’s how he broke his finger, trying to say that skateboard taped to his bike was an “escape pod” when we were racing down Tyler Street, which is steep. Thistle isn’t something to escape into.
We’ve piled up enough snowballs to probably totally destroy anyone who comes our way. Like, if Mike’s older brother took his sled and outfitted it with some cool kind of snow engine, and also some sort of robot cannon that could whirl around and fire like a million snowballs like a laser gun, we’d still take him out. It’d be totally cool if he were to come zooming along the street, banking on the piled-up snow like a James Bond car, and then suddenly jumped the wall with the sled, but we’d dodge him in slow motion and karate-throw snowballs at him while jumping and flipping to the side, still in slow motion like Steve Austin, and he’d be blown off the sled and we’d stand there, victorious, and then a snow yeti would attack and we’d save the neighborhood with our snowball skills and the cool rocket sled, which we’d now have through beating Mike’s older brother, which is a rule of snowball fights. Mike says that probably won’t happen but that we can definitely build a smaller version of the snow sled out of Legos and have it fight his action figures of the dudes in the bar in Star Wars. At least, the ones we didn’t blow up with firecrackers out by the public pool last summer.
Trey and Paul are suddenly in the distance, shin-deep in the snow and looping toward us. They’ve got a paper bag and I’m sure it’s full of some super ice ball and I tell Mike, “We’ve got company,” like I saw Han Solo do once, and we get ready with a snowball in each hand and our stash of extra ammo on these cool shelves we cut out of the walls of the snow fort.
Now they’re closer, and what looked like them coming toward us in the snow was really them walking right by us, looking over at the fort and our heads peeping over the side
. They look confused and happy and tired. Trey gives Paul the paper bag and now I can see that they spray-painted their mouths silver, like they have only robot mouths. It’s a cyborg attack!
“Halt, cyborg!” I yell.
They laugh but then they look scared and look down, as if to see if they’re really cyborgs, for a second. Then they laugh again and all the laughing makes them have to stop and catch their breath. They each take a breath from the bag, which, maybe, since they’re pretending to be cyborgs, holds special cyborg air.
“No cyborgs in our fort!” yells Mike.
Trey and Paul stare at us and don’t say anything, and then Paul goes, “Boop beep beep,” and they totally crack up. They each take another breath of cyborg air and start walking away.
That’s when I see it—Mike’s dad, creeping along the breezeway of Mrs. Jeskyne’s house.
Mike’s dad is really really cool. He’s like a much bigger kid and not like a dad at all. He showed us how you can type numbers onto a calculator and then turn it upside down to form words. What would Dolly Parton be like if she were flat-chested? And he typed in 55378008 and turned it upside down and everyone was cracking up. Mike explained it to me later and I got it and when I tried to do it in music class I typed in 2s instead of 5s and it didn’t work.
And Mike’s dad is always helping us build with Legos and sometimes comes out and plays hide-and-seek and man he’s the best hider. So I figure, he’s taking the day off of work, and he’s planning a cool frontal attack. I have to remember, after we totally blast him with snowballs, to have him show me the calculator trick again.
I look over and Mike isn’t even holding a snowball. He’s staring at his dad.
“Arm yourself!” I say. “This could be a trick.”
Then Mrs. Jeskyne opens her front door, and Mike’s dad shoves his way in, before she can look over his shoulder, looking back at us nervously before shutting the door behind him.
Zombie Spaceship Wasteland Page 4