Genre
Seth Rogan comedy
Pixar Screenwriter: “Silly impossibility with emotional authenticity”
Setting
1919 Eastern Europe (Made up country of Schulpsk)
Camera vignetting to distinguish the past
Narration in English, characters speak in “Schulpsk”
Setup
Struggling ditch-digger Seth meets a girl Sarah Snook, marries her, then buys a plot of cemetery
Conflict: pushed out by Russian Cossaks, Jewish couple (Greenbaums) immigrate to America
Starts at a pickle factory killing rats
Omnipresence of Hashem
Premise
Struggle with rats makes him fall into a vat of pickle brine just as the factory shuts down
Fast forward - Brooklyn 100 years later (2019)
Two boys playing with a drone stumbles into the factory and opens the vat
Establishing the Tone
Scientists explain the logic but Sarah has been dead for 80 years
Great-grandson found. Is same age and lives in Brooklyn. (all this in 12min)
Exposition
Modern freelance app developer Seth becomes the guide: fish out of water
Woody’s Upper East Side
Gatsby “a farrago of wasp plutocrats”
Ashleigh “shouldn’t imbibe so copiously”
Gatsby “a life of pretentious appropriateness”