Time to stash the bong and the bottle of Sauza.
Screenwriter Barry Schwartz has sold his original script "Parents Weekend" to Arnold Kopelson, Oscar-winning producer of "Platoon," "The Fugitive" and "Se7en," for low-six figures against mid-six figures. Schwartz describes his R-rated comedy as "a life-event milestone movie, like 'Meet the Parents' or 'Knocked Up,' " that takes place during the 48 hours when "the kids and the parents get to see each other as independent people for the first time ever."
Ben, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Pennsylvania (Schwartz's alma mater), nervously hosts his parents while trying to hide the fact that he's already dropped out of their legacy school and enrolled at the Art Institute of Philadelphia. Meanwhile, the sudden empty nesters have their own secret -- they basically split up the moment he left for college. Stirring the mix is Ben's freshman crush, a Choate-Exeter prep school type who's on the fence about whether she likes guys or girls.
"There's really nothing more nakedly revealing when you're 18 than being seen in the presence of your parents," the 28-year-old Schwartz says. "Everything that you have tried to change about yourself in those [first] two or three months of school gets blasted into relief. You have the same dorky laugh that your dad does. You make the same nervous joke that your mom does. And everyone can see that -- it's on display."
Schwartz is repped by Jeff Gorin and Aaron Hart at William Morris and manager Rich Demato at Fuse Entertainment, who went out with the spec last Monday and sold it 24 hours later. Schwartz developed the story idea first with writing partner Raza Syed, an associate producer on the project, and based it on his own concerns for his parents' marriage when his younger brother left for college.
Last year, Schwartz and Syed wrote a script for Ivan Reitman's Montecito Picture Co. and DreamWorks called "Bromance," a "heterosexual romantic comedy" about "the like that dare not speak its name," jokes Schwartz. They are also writing a feature script for DreamWorks Animation.
A Long Island native, Schwartz traveled in China and Tibet post-graduation, then wrote "really pretentious experimental fiction" in Austin for a while. It wasn't until he was working in the Miramax acquisitions department in New York City that he determined he could write screenplays "at least as mediocre as the scripts that we were getting in there."
