When writer Laura Hankin was a junior in high school, she got cast as the lead in her school’s production Moby Dick! The Musical. At the same time, she got the news that her mother’s terminal cancer had returned.
“Is it okay to be going to rehearsal?” Hankin recalled thinking at the time, in a recent interview with Decider. “To care about crushes on cute boys, and if I’m doing a good job with my solo number? Or should I give up everything so I can just spend all the rest of my time sitting with my mom on the couch watching Gilmore Girls?”
Years later, Hankin—an accomplished novelist known for her romance books—processed that experience by writing the script for Don’t Say Good Luck, a new coming-of-age drama starring Sunny Sandler, which began streaming on Netflix today. The youngest Sandler stars as Sophie, who, like Hankin, lands the lead in her school musical (in this case, Waitress), and goes home every day to see her cancer-ridden mom (played by Emmy-nominated Melanie Lynskey) getting sicker and sicker.
The movie—directed by Julia Hart, who also took a pass at the script with her husband and producing partner Jordan Horowitz—was always meant to be fictional, Hankin told Decider. But even though the characters and story were changed from real life, the emotion remained true to life.
“I wanted to find that balance of honoring my mom, honoring the theater community that was so wonderful to be a part of, while also making the best movie that we could,” Hankin explained. The writer spoke to Decider about the Don’t Say Good Luck true story, including her real experience with her mom and what was changed for the movie.
DECIDER: Tell me about your real experience of getting the lead in your high school’s musical when your mom’s cancer came back.
LAURA HANKIN: I grew up in Washington DC. When I was a junior in high school, I unexpectedly got the lead in our school show, which was Moby Dick The Musical: A Whale of a Tale. [I got] Ishmael. The concept of this musical is that it’s an all girls’ Catholic school putting on a production of Moby Dick. It’s just very silly, light, and spoof-y.
But at the same time that I was going to school and doing this silly, ridiculous, fun thing and having the best time with all my friends, I would go home and my mom was just getting sicker and sicker. It was so hard to know how to deal with it—so hard to find the balance of like, “Is it okay to be going to rehearsal and be happy there, to care about crushes on cute boys and if I’m doing a good job with my solo number? Or should I give up everything so I can just spend all the rest of my time sitting with my mom on the couch watching Gilmore Girls?” I didn’t really know how to process it all until years later, when I started thinking about this as a screenplay.
Did your mom get a chance to watch you in the musical?
Yes, she did. She came to our dress rehearsal, I believe. Although memory is a tricky thing—I was like, “She was at the dress rehearsal,” and my dad was like, “No she came to the real performance.” So we’ll never know. But she did see it, and then she passed away a few weeks later.
What are the differences between Sophie’s story that we see in the movie and your story?
From the beginning, I wanted it to be fictional. I threw in an extra brother, I don’t have two brothers. I set it in a different place. The family does something different. The movie is just much more structured like a movie than real life. I will say the first draft of the screenplay was a little bit more like, impressions and emotions. Then I had to take a step back and think, “Okay, now how do I shape this so that there’s a real story here?” I wanted to find that balance of honoring my mom, honoring the theater community that was so wonderful to be a part of, while also making the best movie that we could.
I know that you’re a novelist, so I’m curious why you choose to adapt your story as a movie, and what was that drafting process like?
Well, actually, one of the big pushes was I saw the movie Eighth Grade by Bo Burnham.
Love that movie.
Incredible film. I walked out of it, my mind blown, feeling so much emotion, and thinking, “Oh, wow, okay, we’re taking the inner lives of teenage girls seriously now in a way I hadn’t necessarily seen before.” It really made me think, “Wait a minute, my own experience as a teen girl was pretty intense and interesting to other people, potentially.” So because it came from watching a movie, I started thinking about it as a movie.
On top of that, the fact that she’s doing a musical felt like, well, you want to see that. You want to be able to watch them dance. You want to be able to hear those songs. I feel like I have almost a cheat code to more emotion by getting to use this beautiful music from Sara Bareilles. I just felt like, yeah, I’m a good novelist, but there’s no way that I can capture the power just in words that you’re going get from watching an actress sing this song.
Tell me a little more about how those early drafts differ from the final product that we see.
Everything just got sharper, tighter, and heightened in certain ways, while still always maintaining those roots in reality and feeling like real people. That was the most important thing to me. I wanted this story to feel like it was about real people—even though they are not my family—for people to be able to recognize themselves in it, and recognize the people that they know. I’ll say that even, though there have been many changes over the course of all the revisions.
Then Jordan Horowitz and Julia Hart came on board, and were wonderful, and worked on the script as well. Even through all of that, I think that the heart of the story never changed. The tone of the story never really changed. Even though I got notes from other people who were like, make it lighter or make it darker. At one point, somebody was like, “Maybe Elizabeth is a single mom so when she dies Sophie’s an orphan.” It was like, what? I always knew what I wanted the tone of it to be.
Did you get a chance to have conversations with Sunny Sandler and Melanie Lynskey about their characters, about you, and about your own mother?
I was able to be on set for a lot of the time, which was really nice. Julia was so welcoming to me, which I know is not the norm for screenwriters. She was working very closely with Sunny and with Melanie, but I was totally able to talk to them. But, I also didn’t want to get in the way, never make them feel like you need to do a better job of playing me, or playing my mom. I wanted them to be able to build the characters in the way that made sense to them.
At one point, I remember Sunny even said to me, “Is there anything else that I should be doing? Should I play you more?” I was very much like, “I think you’re doing an incredible job with what you’re doing right now. This character shouldn’t try to be a carbon copy of me.” I think she built something that is going to just blow people away. She’s so good in it in every way, with the comedy, and the drama, and the music.
Did you get to meet Adam Sandler and the rest of the Sandler family, who produced via Happy Madison? I know that they were also filming Sadie Sandler’s movie Roommates around the same time.
Yes, so it was wild. They were filming these two movies simultaneously, going back and forth to different parts of New Jersey, sometimes even in the same day, sometimes alternating days on sets. I am very impressed with their energy! I was definitely on set a lot with Adam and with Jackie, his wife and Sunny’s mother. The whole family was great. Jackie is one of the kindest people you’ll ever meet. Adam would DJ dance parties whenever we were doing a night shoot that was going late into the night.
He was so involved, but not in a way that you might expect, if you’re just thinking about like, “Oh, Adam Sandler, comedy.” He actually was always pushing for it to be more natural, more deeply felt, more real. He contributed some of the funniest jokes in the script, but he also contributed some of the most beautiful, saddest lines in the script.
I have to ask if you have specifics on either of those things, jokes or lines.
I believe that the driving gloves were his idea—you know, how Steve Buscemi’s character has driving gloves. But I remember at one point he was like, “Cut that fart joke.” I never thought that Adam Sandler would be telling me to cut a fart joke! He was like, “This, right now, is getting a little too broad. It needs to be dialed back.” He was involved in the editing, and really every level. It was really cool. There’s a reason he’s had such a good, long career. He knows what he’s doing.
I did see in the credits that you have a cameo in the film as an English teacher. I went back and looked for the scene, it’s all off screen right? Can you tell me about filming that?
You see my shoulder, my beautiful shoulder right here, and my voice. It was so fun. I had been on set as a writer a lot during the process, but it was fun to have a day as an actor, too and be like eating my little snacks and talking to all the other actors. It was just nice to do a little bit of acting, especially given that this came from a place of, I loved acting so much when I was growing up. It really was important to me and gave me a place to work through a lot of emotions.