The Tucker Max Movie: Idiot’s Delight (spoilers below)

I am planning to answer some questions people have been asking about my job in the next week or two, but today I’m forced to lower the bar of quality for this blog due to the fact that I feel like I have mono, so I have selected an equally low subject matter about which to write briefly and poorly: Tucker Max

If you don’t know who Tucker Max is, then congratulations on having finally managed to shake the most lunkheaded and dimwitted of your old ZBT fraternity brothers, who, if you were still talking to them, would be emailing you about how hilarious his blog and books are.

Why? Because he’s a dude who meets and sleeps with some fairly attractive women and then tells stories about it that are often unflattering to one or both parties. Since I do coverage, I am professionally equipped to summarize the majority of these stories thusly: Tucker Max is an asshole but the kind of asshole that all of his asshole friends love because his antics distract them from the thinning hair and gentle mediocrity that characterize their post-college years. Most Tucker Max stories involve him doing or saying crazy/offensive things, getting into trouble for them, and then going home with one of those girls who, when a guy says something sort of awful to her, hits him on the shoulder and says “you asshole” but also smiles and sticks to him like glue for the rest of the night. My dad was nice to me, so I don’t have this reaction, but I guess it takes all kinds. Invariably in Tucker’s stories, someone gets pissed off and says his jokes aren’t funny, and if that someone is a woman, she’s dismissed as ugly and/or fat and therefore too bitter and angry to get the joke, while if that someone is a man, he’s dismissed as being a meathead and therefore not cool or smart enough to get the joke. If you are confused by this last, let me clear it up for you: Tucker Max is unaware that he is the definition of a hazey, rapey, fratty meathead. He thinks he’s a witty humorist, which almost makes me believe that he’s fake and that Miguel de Cervantes is alive and writing.

Why this diatribe? Because a friend at an agency slipped me a copy of the script for the currently-in-production Tucker Max movie, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, written by Tucker Max and some dude named Nils Parker. I am very excited to talk about this script, especially since I didn’t read it for my job so I feel I can get into a bit more detail than usual. My primary goal won’t be to expose how sexist or otherwise offensive the script is because that’s obvious and easy and not the most interesting thing to talk about here. Here’s what is:

Holy crap, It’s terrible. I’m talking Godawful. Even with the offensive factor set aside, it’s in my top 10 worst comedy scripts ever read (out of probably over a thousand). This thing is poorly structured, obvious and predictable at every turn, with flat, one-dimensional characters who ALL sound exactly the same and an ending that falls flatter than humorless girl in a Tucker Max story. And even if I liked the central joke of the script –that Tucker is an offensive asshole, but if you don’t love him for it you are probably ugly and a woman— it would be still be a clunker because the way that Max and Parker make that joke (over and over and over again) is stupid and uncreative. I love broad, juvenile comedies done well. I also love real, juvenile people who make juvenile jokes and know many comedy writers do this for a living in a way that is funny and smart. But funny and smart are operative words here. And the Tucker Max jokes aren’t. Often, they aren’t even jokes, just clichés recited at the expense of some bystander in a way that just makes you feel embarrassed for everyone involved..

But this is all too vague. Let me give you an idea of what we’re dealing with. Opening scene: police are called for a domestic disturbance only to find that the ruckus is coming from a woman whom Tucker Max is pleasuring so well that she’s been screaming. Ok, fine, right off the bat the writer is proclaiming himself to be the best ever at sex. This writing technique, which I will call the “it’s more important to me that you think I’m cool than that you think my script is good” maneuver, is always laughable and assumed (at least by this reader) to be untrue/compensation for some physical or mental deficit. But that’s not why I call your attention to the scene. I call your attention to it because the address that Tucker lives at in his script about himself is 742 Evergreen Terrace. OMG, Tucker Max and Nils Parker, you guys watch The Simpsons??? I watch The Simpsons!!! This script must be funny because I’m already laughing my ass off at the fact that you were able to make meaningless reference to a fictional address!

One other highlight before I go down for my mono nap: A major comic set piece in the script is when Tucker makes his big sexual conquest over a midget. And that’s the joke. Not that that she has a big, tall or tiny, little boyfriend who comes after Tucker, or that she looks at his junk and says “I’ve had bigger” (I am not saying that’s very funny…but it is at least a joke) or, for that matter, anything anyone says throughout is humorous. Just that she’s a midget. Because midgets are inherently funny, not to mention cutting edge for comedy. Especially when the writers emphasize how grotesque it is simply to be a little person and to have short, “sausage fingers” that barely wrap around a guy’s…well you get the picture. Isn’t that hilarious? She’s small and therefore a freak. Comedy paydirt. I only wish I could get more! Wait, I’ve got it: Someone should get a bunch of midgets and like travel around the country with them so people can laugh at their comedy (i.e. that they exist) …maybe get some other inherently funny people like ladies with facial hair to join in, and draw attention to the comedy show with like a big, bright tent or something. I am on fire with ideas today. My point isn’t that the above is offensive, but that it’s not even slightly funny. Ever. Ditto the rest of the script.

But, you know, even though I felt soiled by this script, and even more soiled for spreading the mess around to some of my legitimately funny friends who in turn felt equally soiled, I also had kind of a spring in my step afterwards. Because, while the butt of Tucker Max’s jokes is always people who don’t get his humor because they’re defective in his eyes, in his own script he unknowingly turns himself into that same butt. Within the larger story of movie writing, he’s just like one of the fat, humorless, bitter women that he’s written as foils for himself in his screenplay, because no matter how much you or I tried to explain the joke to him (that he’s such a bad, unfunny screenwriter that he’s unintentionally hilarious) he wouldn’t get it, just as his foils don’t get his jokes. Only while they’re fictions he’s created to make himself seem funnier than he is, Tucker Max is a real person. And there’s nothing funnier that a real, live, foil who walks around oblivious to what he is. Even if that foil character is making money off of books and movie deals, they’re still fun to laugh at. And that makes me so happy that I almost hope his movie does well so that he’ll never gain the kind of self-awareness that humanized David Brent.

I hope that’s script reader-related enough for you. It’s definitely about industry, since I definitely have to read stuff like this all the time. It’s also the reason why people come to L.A. to write…seeing movies like this one and saying “I could do better than that.” Screenwriter bait. That’s what Tucker Max and his script are. Maybe he’ll give an actual writer the confidence to take the first step, which is one silver lining. Another is that now I get to delete this screenplay from my computer’s hard drive.

Aliens, Predators, Snails? oh my! Or: How I got a bad feelin’ about this drop.

I have a little advice for those aspiring screenwriters out there. Interested? Here goes: Pay careful attention to your script’s title page and cover letter before you send it out. If you don’t know what you’re doing –and it’s fine if you don’t at first—, try not to make that too obvious to me. For example, don’t pretend your apartment is a film company called Beercan Films and then list your obviously residential address as the company address, because that will telegraph to me not only that your film company has a silly name, but also that you selected that silly name yourself, because there is no company, really, and you’re trying unsuccessfully to pull off the old, Spielberg, name on the janitor closet trick.

Also, don’t put a lot of crazy fonts, graphics and subheadings on the title page. That sort of thing is cute, but we’re running a business here. You’re supposed to be sending me the blueprint for a film, not an English comp notebook with doodles of dragons around the name of your garage band. We all have high, dreamy hopes for what we write, but your hopes should in fact be so high that you imagine what you’re writing as a real screenplay that will really get made. As such, your script, merely a means to that lofty end, should have a utilitarian title page. Casablanca did. Chinatown did. And the next sensational feature from Beercan Films should, too.

Less common yet even more of an indication to me that it’s amateur hour is to write in your cover letter that your script (or your client’s script) is a new and/or better version of Alien(s) and/or Predator. Not in the vein of. Not an homage to. The new Alien. The successor to Predator.

Listen, fellows, I am not religious. I never went to church as a girl or repeated prayers or hymns over and over again. My sacred texts are Alien, Aliens, Predator, The Terminator, and Total Recall. Yes, films like Lawrence of Arabia and the wonderful-if-mundanely-title-paged Chinatown became beloved later in adolescence. But I have a brother who dressed up as a colonial marine smartgun operator for Halloween, using a wooden replica of the movie weapon which he made in our garage. I’m mentioning this to embarrass him and to give you some indication of how much he and I watched Aliens and our other sacred texts between ages 10-14, when our brains were at their most absorptive. In other words, I know that shit by heart, yo.

But even if I’d only seen them once I’d recognize a “new version” of Alien(s) and/or Predator without having to be told what it was in a cover letter. Why? Because every sci-fi action script since those movies has been attempting to be the “new version” of those movies. And each time I hope they will be, because that would be awesome. But usually within ten or twenty pages my hopes are dashed, because all they’ve done is take the concept, plot, characters and major action sequences of Alien(s) and/or Predator and dropped in some new nouns, adjectives and character names, reducing my Nicene Creed to little more than a Madlib that reads a lot like this one (NOTE: choose from or supply the words described inside the brackets below):

Deep in the [name an uninhabited jungle or galaxy] in an abandoned [name an additionally isolated location such as an oil rig or a logging station], a crack team of [name a division of the U.S. army] special ops is sent to rescue a missing detachment of [name a group of innocent civilians (ie nuns, orphans, the blind, blind orphan nuns, etc)], only to come up against a force that is [sub/super] human. After brutally murdering [Brick Wall/Slate/2×4], the tough [black/latino] member of the team, and maiming [Hard Drive/Motherboard/microChip], the group’s geeky operations strategist, the entity shows itself to be a terrifying [alien/science experiment] shaped like a huge, grotesque version of a [name a species of reptile, crustacean or mollusk] with a [name a sharp and/or slimy noun]-like mouth. The team’s fearless leader, [Wolf/Bear/Panther], quickly realizes that if he doesn’t stop the creature, no one will, and that perhaps this battle, in addition to saving the human race, will help him [atone for/work through some of lingering emotional issues from] his recent [divorce/wife’s death/brother’s drug overdose].

Clearly, a few elements have been added to this Madlib over years and years of rehashing, but basically, whether it’s on a space station, in the arctic north, in a nuclear silo in Russia, at a sciencey lab at the bottom of the ocean, on a submarine, deep in the Bin Laden-filled caves of Afghanistan, in a mythical, Atlantis-like city, in a cabin way out in the woods, in a prison cell-block that’s been taken over during a riot, or in your grocer’s freezer, I have read this Madlib over and over again and it has always sounded almost EXACTLY like Predator or Alien(s) to me, only not as good. Kind of like when bugs bunny puts on a dress but doesn’t disguise his voice and it makes you uncomfortable.

Before you say it, I know this isn’t anything new or even unacceptable in the world of moviemaking, especially genre moviemaking. Sci-fi is old and action is even older. Everything about the group dynamics in Aliens or Predator is descended from The Dirty Dozen. Everything in The Dirty Dozen is descended from World War II combat films like Bataan and They Were Expendable, and on and on back to Homer. As Claude Levi-Strauss and his fellow development executives like to say, there are no new stories.

Here’s the difference: with the movies I just mentioned, the later versions updated and innovated on the earlier ones. Maybe there are no new stories, but, as you know if you saw The Dark Knight over the weekend, there are new ways of telling stories. And so I read these Alien(s) and/or Predator Madlibs all the way through, hoping they’ll do something amazing by the end. But mostly they’re just a lazy, formulaic attempts to hustle me into thinking they’re new…the Three Card Monty of screenwriting, in which I can always spot the ace because the hustler is staring right at it, and, what’s more, has told me he would be staring at it in his cover letter.

This blog is kind of long when all I’m really saying is that while they may not seem like Citizen Kane, commercial genres and their canonical films deserve a little respect, too. And that it never hurt anyone to underpromise (modest title page and cover letter) and overdeliver (a little innovation, even if in a variation on an old theme). And that huge, alien-snails are not that scary. Stop putting them in scripts, please.

Other People’s Screenplays and Me: An Introduction.

When I arrived in Los Angeles in 2001, I lucked into a freelance script coverage gig almost immediately.  Since then, though I’ve moved companies and houses and made friends and influenced people, other people’s screenplays have been a constant in my life in this city.  Like any long-term relationship, it isn’t perfect.  Scripts and I don’t always see eye to eye.  In the years when I was covering 15-20 scripts a week –usually with 4-5 pages of single-spaced synopsis and comments— we got sick of one another and almost called it quits.  However, now that I only cover a handful of scripts each week, we are able to cohabitate a little more harmoniously.  Of course, there are still times when I want to punch other people’s screenplays in the face, like the month The Passion came out and I had to read about eight biblical action-thrillers in a row.  But on the upside, I do like money, and reading other people’s screenplays allows me to have some, so we try to work through the hard times.

There’s more to it than that, of course.  I have come to realize over time that being a reader has allowed me to experience this industry largely from the perspective of the written word –specifically those words written in courier font.  Sure, I hear things and see things and (occasionally) read the trades, but I can often tell which way the wind is blowing –impending strikes, trends in subject matter, socio-political shifts, the changing fortunes of companies, actors, etc.— just from the type and number of scripts I’m getting.  In this way, though they arrive on my desk as individual stories, as a group, other people’s screenplays tell me a larger story, too.

But wait…I got ahead of myself.  Let’s go back to those individual stories, since they’re what I imagine I will be writing about most frequently.  Individually, other people’s screenplays have pissed me off, made me laugh and cry (often unintentionally, but still…), taught me that even great writers crank out a clunker once in a while, and showed me that there is still originality and authenticity out there, if only I can wade through all the crap.  And let’s be honest, it’s mostly crap.  Truly, it’s a cesspool down here, filled with formulaic plotting, bad jokes and characters who don’t want something badly enough and aren’t having a sufficiently difficult time getting it.  This is a fact I can’t and shouldn’t ignore if I want to give you a taste of what it is like to be a reader, so, fair warning, you might occasionally be served a heaping plate of bile when you belly up to my blog. Apologies in advance, but them’s the breaks. In the words of Jack Nicholson to Greg Kinnear’s dog in that movie about how racism can be adorable, around here you eat what we eat.  And as any reader will tell you, mostly we eat crap.

If all of that frankness and mixing of metaphors hasn’t scared you off, I will qualify the above remarks by saying that I promise to make it entertaining.  I also promise to recognize Casablanca if someone disguises it and submits it to my company, unlike the readers in the urban legend.  I like and have seen lots of films, plus I’m about two thirds of a dissertation away from a PhD in movies, so recognizing old ones shouldn’t be a problem.  Nor should putting screenwriting’s trends and evolution in perspective, come to think of it.  After all, it’s hard to complain too bitterly about a script like, say, Step Up being unworthy of the silver screen when you know about all the silly dance movies from which it is descended.  They weren’t all Singin’ in the Rain, that’s for sure.

I will end there so as to keep my claims about a blog that’s still largely hypothetical a little modest.  I guess I could write more, be a little more specific about what I do, but there’s an overnight submission winking at me from my inbox and overnights pay extra, so I’ll give you the short version: I read, I summarize, I say if it’s good or bad, I get a check, and, starting this week, I blog about it to you.  So far that last bit seems like fun.

THE SCRIPT READER

Cecelia has worked as a story analyst in the film industry since practically the day she arrived in Los Angeles almost eight years ago, and in that time has worked for a number of LA-based companies and read an estimated 4-5000 scripts, books and plays.  So she’s not sweating it, either.