Last Couple to Prom (2025 version)
In a way, this was 35 years in the making.
Back in 1989, a local screenwriters’ group sponsored a public reading of a movie script I had written called The Last Couple to Prom. It was an ‘80s screwball comedy wannabe, in which the protagonist, Ben, moved next door to his high school crush, Tracy, and spun an escalating series of lies and deceptions in order to get close to her. Instead, he becomes friends with her husband and learns a secret that could end their marriage and give him the chance with Tracy he was hoping for.
At the end of the night, I received a cassette tape recording of the production … which I never revisited for the next three decades.
Back then, I was weirdly averse to outlining, or even just thinking through, script ideas I had. I would just start writing, hoping my momentum would carry me through the next 90 to 110 pages. Spoiler: More than once, it didn’t. This time it did, but it also baked in some storytelling problems than I would spend several years and four or five more drafts trying to resolve. And though an agent I briefly worked with had gotten the script optioned for an even briefer six months, I never thought I had truly cracked the story. So going back to listen to an earlier version, even one with professional actors and lots of laughter by the audience, was an experience I just didn’t want to have.
Jump cut to 2025. I had already written two ten-minute plays built on excerpts of old film scripts I had written. I liked the idea of salvaging what I could from my unsold screenplays. Now I was looking through my script file for whatever else I could build on, and I came across Last Couple to Prom. The story as it was, was too complicated to cram into 10 minutes, and I didn’t see much potential in reshaping it on the very-remote chance that some theatre would want to produce it.
But then I remembered that cassette tape (which I had transferred to an MP3 a few years earlier and had still avoided listening to). A strange idea formed. I had a recorded production of Last Couple as a 100-minute screenplay. What if I could turn it into a 10-minute stage play? If I could make it work, I’d have a recording of a performance that never actually happened – but might be a way to lay the ghost of Last Couple to rest at last.
To fit the traditional format of one-act plays, I’d have to radically simplify the story, and confine it to one location and just four characters. But the truly hard part would be finding and editing together the right dialogue to tell same basic story but in 1/10th the time.
But I was energized by the challenge, so I used AI to create a new transcript of the recording, and spent several weeks poring over it in search of all the dialogue I needed while figuring out the new arc of the story. This is where I got really creative. Along with the three sequences I could use in large part as is, I isolated lines from other scenes and recontextualized them into new conversations. I also combined two characters to yield more dialogue possibilities, deciding their voices were similar enough that it would likely slip past listeners.
After I had roughed out a new ten-minute version of the story that seemed to hang together, it was several more weeks of editing together all the dialogue. For the most part, it cut together fairly well. It took a lot of effort to clean up and smooth the audio (It was not a professional-quality recording) and there are a few odd inflections that couldn’t be avoided, but overall, it feels pretty organic.
Next, I found a royalty-free piece of music that felt right (reminiscent of a 1980s John Hughes movie), sound effects, used AI to help create a title card and visualize the characters ... and I had a new production of an old production.
And I like it better than the full-length version. Reducing the story to ten minutes boiled it down to its essentials, and avoided some of the more problematic parts of the story. And surprisingly, it kind of fixed the biggest problem with the original script, that the Tracy character had no real personality or motivation; she was always just reacting to whatever was going on around her. Now she’s mercurial, impulsive, and even a touch vindictive – a more interesting and flawed person and a greater challenge to Ben.
In later drafts, the movie script was renamed My Girlfriend’s Husband – but the 2025 play version retains its original title, Last Couple to Prom.
August 2025
Comments