We read and review the first ten pages of screenplays sent in by our customers and visitors, and report on what’s working about the pages and what’s not. Character, pacing, conflict, presentation – you name it and we’ll pick it apart so you’ll have an idea of what to fix on the next rewrite.
Regarding all your exposition, see if you can let your exposition “walk and chew gum at the same time,” so to speak. That is, if a scene is only designed to provide exposition on X, see if you can make the scene do double duty, or triple duty, and provide exposition on Y and Z as well.
Make sure each element you’re conveying is absolutely mandatory. Favor readability, entertainment, brevity, and audience clarity over making sure the reader and audience fully grasp the historical accuracy and detail you’ve obviously taken great effort to present.
The script has texture and realism. Now it just needs presentability. There’s a good conflict being set up. I’m aboard. Honestly, I like the story so far. Now I want to trust the writer more though. The pages can’t be such a chore do digest. Fix the typos which means less typos, more professional presentation. Don’t give them an excuse to put it down.
OS is for OFF SCREEN. That’s what you have here. But even OS might be a bit confusing for us readers diving into your script and trying to orient ourselves. Strategically speaking, you may want to just write it all as one scene without starting on the panties/basement thing with the OS, just to get past readers.
Pare down where you can, fix all the punctuation/spelling/usage errors, and then really go back and make your action/descriptive text more elegant, and less amateur. (Stuff like camera directions, talking to the reader about how you’re going to show the passage of time, music, etc.)
By page 10, I’m not feeling what’s at stake yet. We’ve got an angry, corrupt lawman and some thugs, and a white newly-minted Mayor in church with his family, a little kid who accidentally sees the lawman’s corruption, and his dad who fled the scene.
Jimmy should know something’s wrong with his parents before the movie begins. Getting the information that they haven’t been around, and that the house is torn down comes way too late. The film can start off more tense if we see him anxious about getting home as fast as possible, but don’t quite know why until he reveals it to the old lady perhaps.
If I’m a producer looking to churn out an AFM style straight-to-DVD picture, I love the talking because it’s cheap to do, but I’m not gonna be able to sell this finished film to anybody unless I can get some gunplay, fucking, fights, or explosions in there before page 10.
Nietzsche deserves the opportunity to rattle our cages, here, a century later. Harness the spirit of his life and intentions and his words to tell a good story; don’t get bogged down in the historical accuracy of his life.
I’m in good hands I can tell, because the writer uses the term “micro beer.” A minor thing for me to say, perhaps, but when I know the writer cares enough to use details like that, it tells me a lot about the character in one phrase: “He takes a pull of his micro beer.”
Keep your chaos and your craziness. That’s what makes the story interesting and the writer’s voice shine. But speak the language of the idiot script reader, or idiot producer’s assistant. Try to make it make sense to them. Ease us into it, or this is a dead project.
“Jingoist” is a sci-fi concept that suffers from a lack of clarity and tends to raise a lot of questions. Because of the opening voice-over, which sometimes doesn’t match what is being shown, the audience is likely to get lost rather than hooked.