Spec Script Sale: “Family Getaway”

Spec Script Deal: “Family Getaway”

Thanks to David at The Tiny Protagonist for giving me a heads-up on re this spec sale. Per THR, Warner Bros. buys action spec “Family Getaway from newcomers Jeremiah Friedman and Nick Palmer:

In the story — akin to a Jason Bourne movie crossed with “Little Miss Sunshine” — a man’s Thanksgiving at his parents’ house becomes a lot more dysfunctional when rival assassins crash the dinner, forcing him to take his family on a cross-country adventure in their station wagon.

The story of the duo’s success is pretty sweet. After they met at AFI:

The pair worked various jobs while writing nights and weekend for almost two years to birth “Getaway.” Friedman acted in an administrative capacity in the minimally invasive urology department at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and delivered catering for Joan’s on Third. Even with this week’s deal, Friedman was still at work as an assistant at TV producer Atticus Entertainment.

“We both went into shock and are still shock,” Friedman said. “It’s a dream come true.”

Palmer has been teaching engineering and robotics using Lego Robotics in an after-school program.

“I put in my two weeks, obviously,” he said while conducting an inventory of Lego pieces, adding half-jokingly, “Now I can write about robots.”

Friedman and Palmer said they were amazed at the speed with which the deal was made, especially considering how they spent months working by themselves on the script and working more months with their managers at Mosaic to make the script leaner and clearer.

“When it started to happen, it was happening very fast,” Friedman said. “We went from crawling to sprinting almost overnight. We were bracing ourselves for a much longer process.”

The spec market is extremely competitive, but stories like this happen on average every week.

The duo is repped by Mosaic.

By my count, this is the 33rd spec script sale of 2010 and the third this week.

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