Making their new teen-party comedy Incoming, Dave and John Chernin set out to circumvent not just teen movie cliches, but also one of the biggest tropes of comedies in general: the big emotional final speech that arrives, unconvincingly, after the previous 90 minutes of crazy bad behavior.
The Chernin brothers spoke to us during a break from the writers room of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the modern-day classic that trained them in the art of unsentimental comedy. Netflix’s Incoming is their feature writing-directing debut after TV careers that also included creating The Mick, the Fox series that starred Always Sunny crackerjack Kaitlin Olson.
Always Sunny, like The Mick, is a show where, famously, no one learns anything, They tried to bring that same spirit to Incoming.
“Particularly at the time we wrote this, there’s so much stuff out there with with messages, or with lessons, and sometimes it feels a little finger wagging to us. And we just didn’t want to do that with this movie. We wanted to really put laughter first,” says Dave Chernin, the slightly younger of the Chernin brothers.
Adds John: “It was something that we worked really hard to do on The Mick. We would always say, ‘We’re not going to get to the 20-minute mark and have a character say, I guess I’ve been acting this way because of X, Y and Z. What you try to do is look for real, grounded moments, to let emotion shine through.
“And when you can do that, they feel so much bigger, and the payoff is so much more satisfying than if you say, ‘OK, we’re in the last 10 minutes of the movie,” John adds. “Let’s have everyone vocalize their feelings and their regrets and their desires. That’s just not how people talk like people generally try to hide their true feelings.”
Not spelling things out means there’s no assurance for the audience that the characters are growing and changing. The Chernins say audiences can be trusted to sort those things out.
“There does have to be this agreement between the audience and the creators that their heart is in the right place,” says Dave. “Despite the terrible things that the characters will do, we’re laughing at them because they’re ignorant, not because we think what they’re doing is cool.”
Incoming is a relative rarity in modern comedy: an R-rated comedy involving teenagers. The film’s rating advises that it is “Rated R for drug use and drinking, sexual content, pervasive language, some violence and brief nudity – all involving teens.”
But the movie avoids both leering exploitation as well as insincere lecturing. The cast includes Mason Thames, Raphael Alejandro, Bardia Seiri and Ramon Reed as a band of freshman trying to break in with the cool kids during a wild party when parents are out of town. Ali Gallo plays a skeptical older sister and Isabella Ferreira a dream girl with agency. Bobby Cannavale plays a teacher in crisis, and Olson a mom doing her damn best.
The teenage characters in Incoming are more hopeful people than the battered, cynical adults of Always Sunny and The Mick. Even when they make mistakes, you can chalk them up to inexperience more than the greed and pettiness that motivate the Always Sunny proprietors of Paddy’s Pub.
We talked with the Chernins about high school parties, when it’s OK to say “no cap,” and not being creeps.
MovieMaker: You guys are the son of Hollywood producer and executive Peter Chernin, so I feel like you must have gone to some very good Hollywood parties growing up.
John Chernin: They weren’t glamorous. It was like somebody’s parents would go out of town, and you would cram hundreds of teenagers into their backyard —
Dave Chernin: And just destroy.
John Chernin: And destroy. And eventually people would beat the shit out of each other and go flying into the pool or through a fence or something like that. They could not have been less glamorous — except the houses were sometimes quite nice and little appreciation was shown for them.
MovieMaker: You’re both in your early forties, and there’a always a joke that teenage slang is kind of indecipherable to non-teenagers. What decisions did you make about how your characters were going to speak to each other? Did you try to use like the latest, “no-cap”-type lingo? It’s probably already super dated to say “no cap.”
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Dave Chernin: I think we just wrote it how we talk. We tried to watch younger stuff and get the vernacular down, but we really just kind of wrote it with the characters in mind. And we encouraged the actors: If there’s anything here that feels inauthentic, please raise your hand or change it on the fly.
With anything we write, I think it’s ours until the actor gets involved, and then we share that character. So they really took ownership over all their characters and made it their own.
John Chernin: Bobby Cannavale did throw in a “no cap” ad lib because his teacher character wants to be cool. And he was like, “I want to say no cap on this one,” because he has a younger son. He’s like, “This is what kids say.” And we were like, “Great, throw it in there.”
When we started to write it we outlined the movie, and we finally knew how we wanted it to go. And when we sat down to start pounding the keys on the script, we found ourselves paralyzed for days: “How do kids talk?” or “How big of a thing is social media? Does this whole movie take place on Instagram and Snapchat?”
And then finally we just decided, “Let’s just write the version that we see, and we can always go back plug in some lingo.” Or, like Dave said, ask the actors to juice up the words a little bit.
Dave Chernin: I think the bigger struggle was figuring out what kids are doing nowadays, rather than how they’re talking.
MovieMaker: I don’t think this movie is gross at all, except when you want it to be gross. But there’s always a risk when you’re writing for teenagers that if you sexualize them or have them do anything overly dramatic that it’s taken as exploitive or just gross. So how did you figure out how to walk the line and not be gross?
John Chernin: I think you just try to be authentic. We were teenagers a long time ago, but not that long ago. And all these teenagers are just years away from being able to vote. They’re years away from being legal adults. So I think to treat them with kid gloves or try to protect them in any way just comes off as false.
We never go out of our way to gross people out or be provocative. More than anything, we want to be true to reality. A lot of these things reflect things we saw or participated in in high school or heard about. So I don’t think there’s anything in here that is invented out of whole cloth just for the sake of a joke.
MovieMaker: Were there teen movies that you wanted to upend or subvert?
Dave Chernin: All of them, more or less. This is a genre with a real history, some of which has held up great under the lens of today, and some of it not so much. So it was about striking a balance of staying true to the genre of the high school party movie, but also updating it for for today’s age and and some of that was subverting the cliches and the tropes that we’ve seen in previous movies.
John Chernin: In 10 Things I Hate About You, Heath Ledger serenades Julia Stiles and it’s a big hit. And when we think about that movie, we’re just like, “She would be mortified. She would be furious.” And so we wanted to send up that. Or you look at American Pie, where they’re filming that girl undressing in the bedroom. … 16 Candles, there’s some dicey stuff.
So it was about figuring out what our version of that was. What if the hot girl finds herself in the least hot position you could imagine, and instead of exploiting her, these guys actually have to help her?
Dave Chernin: We hope some of the the trickier behavior in this movie is not rewarded. The kids who do “bad things” kind of get their proper comeuppance, and the kids who act like gentlemen and are rewarded for it.
MovieMaker: But it’s also not like, “We’re going to teach everyone a lesson now.”
John Chernin: I don’t think we’re in a position to teach anyone a lesson. Nor do I think kids need a lesson from adults. Teenagers should be given the space and grace to make mistakes and to try to learn from them, and you hope their hearts are in the right place.
Incoming begins streaming Friday on Netflix.
Main image: Incoming. (L-R) Raphael Alejandro as Connor, Mason Thames as Benji Nielsen, Ramon Reed as Eddie, and Bardia Seiri as Koosh in Incoming. Netflix.