Zombie Spaceship Wasteland (5 page)

^*
I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. But maybe he was saying, “You pry that princess faggot grin off of your head.” or maybe he was a secret film scholar and was saying, “Dwight Frye was a nexus for wilder cinema.” if the third is correct, then I had a hand in tormenting a quiet genius.

^*
Fill it halfway, two squirts of butter-flavored oil, fill it the rest of the way, three more squirts.

^*
I’d purchase my music two doors down from the Towncenter 3 at a record store called Waxie Maxie’s, at which I used to work; they justifiably fired me after I mouthed off to a customer who berated me for not finding the energizer battery refund coupons fast enough for his liking. By that point, I was cool with it—i couldn’t take listening to another spin of Jean Beauvoir’s
Drums Along the Mohawk
or Tears for Fears’s
Songs from the Big Chair,
abiding staff favorites.

My books I’d purchase at a hobby store where I used to get my D&D books and lead figurines. I stopped going when, my senior year of high school, I casually mentioned to the kindly proprietor that I was going to college. His eyes went stony and he said, “You going to go learn how to wipe your ass without getting shit on your pants?” “What?” I asked, and then he bent down over his painted orcs and umberhulks and muttered, “Don’t
ever
come back here again.” And I never did.

^†
Yeah, I know, music snob. That’s what I call it, so there.

^*
The guys in R.E.M. don’t have a lot of good things to say about
Fables
. Too bad, guys—it changed my life. And I know I misinterpreted a lot of these lyrics to suit my purposes at the time, but it ceased being your album the minute I “bought” it. empires have been built on
Electric Youth,
I bet.

^*
All real names, all real places.

^*
oh man, but did Melinda ever break poor Bryan’s heart. He proposed a few years later, after washing out of the army, and she called it off a week before the nuptials. I ran into her, years later, at college, at an R.E.M. concert. They were touring on the
Document
album. I guess she took a lyric from “Auctioneer,” off of
Fables of the Reconstruction,
to heart—“she didn’t want to get pinned down by her prior town.”

Fourth draft notes

First off, I think the character of
Tracey,
the bride, is wildly inconsistent. It almost seems like her condition changes to fit the joke needed for each scene.

Once we establish that she gets amnesia from eating the bad sushi at the bachelorette party in the opening scene, we need to stick to that. She wouldn’t remember that her mom queefs whenever she hears a saxophone playing, so there’s no reason for her to get nervous when the jazz combo gets ready to play at the bridal shower. I know there’s a series of laughs that follow from her kicking the sax player in the scrotum to stop him coming in on that jazzy version of “The Lady in Red”—the band mistaking his screams as a signal to play “It’s Raining Men,” and then his vomiting in the trumpet, and then Tracey’s dog shitting all over itself when the trumpet player plays his first note and sprays vomit all over the dog. it’s a funny, quirky, captivating sequence, but we need to find a less sweaty way for Tracey to suddenly and without warning attack a musician’s nutsack. Also, “The Lady in Red” might be expensive.

But that’s just one example of how we need consistency in her amnesia. I like how the neurosurgeon explains how even though she doesn’t remember that she’s
getting
married, or who’s she’s getting married to, the fact that she
wants
to be married, in a general sense, still holds up. Make sure to indicate in the script that the neurosurgeon should be sitting in front of one of those light-box displays of Tracey’s brain, so it looks more authentic to the audience.

But let’s make sure there are enough reasons for her to shrug those adorable shoulders and soldier ahead with the big day. The fact that the groom is good-looking and is sweet and smart and truly cares for her certainly helps. And when he shows her that he’s running that halfway house for rehabilitated criminals, and she can see from the picture in her locket that her dad was once in prison, because there she is visiting him as a little girl.

Which brings me to the father character. I don’t think he should have been sent to prison for burning all those people alive and then masturbating when the cops showed up. Yes, it was the late seventies, and it was a disco, but I think the whole “disco sucks” thing is completely played out at this point—does anyone even care and, what’s more, does today’s audience even remember when disco was? It puts such a pall over the proceedings. You’ve got this series of funny scenes, and then each one gets spoiled by the mention of the father’s crime. For instance:

The karaoke scene,
where the CD gets stuck, and Tracey and Paul, the groom, have to sing “Knock Three Times” like twenty times. The smash cut, when we realize they’ve been singing for so long, is funny. But then when the CD is finally fixed, and they walk offstage, the mom (who’s now drunk; it’s always funny when an old lady gets drunk) says, “That sounded worse than the screams of all those people being burned slowly alive while your dad masturbated in the moonlight of that parking lot.”

The scene where
Paul’s friend bumps up against the wedding cake,
and instead of collapsing it gets smooshed to the side and ends up looking like a gigantic penis. I like the Aerosmith “Big Ten Inch Record” music cue, but then Tracey says that weird line, “I wonder if my father’s penis looked like that while he tugged on it maniacally while all of those people died in agony.”

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:

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.