The 28-year-old comedian has carved out a niche playing characters from our collective childhoods: “Kid whose sleepover you immediately want to leave,” “Kid trying to make conversation after being left alone with his friend’s parent,” “Kid telling a story from camp to his friends from home.” The culmination of that work is “Tiny Fugitives,” an raunchy summer camp comedy starring a bunch of 12-year-olds and Johnny Knoxville. (Kaplan makes a cameo as a guitar-strumming counselor.) The film follows Jacob Udell (Benjamin Pajak), who believes he and his friends can stay at camp forever, if only they can evade the relentless 50-year-old counselor hunting them down. Kaplan started writing a TV pilot about summer camp in 2021, when he was a writers’ assistant at “Saturday Night Live.” That script landed in the lap of filmmaker Michael Lewen, and the two collaborated on writing a feature for Lewen to direct. They brought it to Point Grey, the production house from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg that made “Good Boys,” a proof of concept for R-rated comedies starring pre-teens — the middle-school “Superbad” genre.
After a long filmmaking process challenged by strike delays, the movie is finally being released on Sept. 18 via indie distributor Inaugural Entertainment. If I knew then how difficult it would be to make this movie, I would have thought it would never get made. That naivete helped me.” Oh yeah.
Either you have to believe that no matter what, this movie is going to get made, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else says, or you need to not understand how movies get made. We really wanted to see every kid we possibly could. With a movie like this, you want kids who are real kids — you don’t want the Disney style of acting.
And it’s tough at this age, because a lot of kids just don’t have that experience. We had an amazing casting director, Jess Kelly. For the chemistry reads, we brought all the kids out to a park in L.A. and did a day of camp activities with them — an egg toss and face painting and whatever — because the chemistry between all the kids is super important.
A lot of parents could get a gut check upon reading the initial sides, because it’s tough to find a scene where the kids aren’t saying “fuck” or “shit.” So that maybe weeded a few people out. It wasn’t so difficult to get the parents on board because we created a very intentional and strong relationship with all of them, where the idea is: This movie does have cursing, it does have adult themes, but it is very much a movie about being the age that your kid is, and about the taking the struggles and emotions very seriously. The parents and the kids connected with that.
Before screenwriting, a lot of my online videos had characters that were 13 or 14 years old. I find that age really funny to write because the stakes of your life are objectively very low, but everything feels so intense. The core of comedy is mismatched stakes.
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