Brilliantly Conceived and Executed Work
I don't know why this script hasn't either been optioned or gotten you some assignment work. It's very good; I suspect it just hasn't been read by the right people. I do understand why it did well -- but didn't win -- in the competitions you entered. I suspect when a contest gets down to the last couple of scripts, they're looking for reasons to exclude rather than reasons to award. Your script has a couple of those reasons.
First let's state the obvious: it's hilarious. It's a brilliant concept, maybe a bit of a tweener -- not enough originality for the "Shrek" folks, and too good for the "I Know What Princess Bride the Monsters Inc.'s Happy Feet Swept Away Last Summer Did" crowd. It's engaging, well-structured, and has enough to appeal to both adults and kids. (The princess counter was particularly inspired.)
There are some nits I can pick: I thought the dialogue on pages 5-6 with Tru and the serfs was a little clunky. I think you need to lose the "wash your hands" gag at page 88. It's funny, but when you're that close to the finish line, there's a loss of momentum there that I don't think you can afford. I think the last realistic opportunity to get away with a stop-start might be p. 71 with the old attendant, "do you want to hear my story?" You could start to show about three seconds of it, then have it freeze with the narrator giving the same line. At page 90, Albert's dialogue doesn't really work. I think he needs to be a little stupider, and she needs to more obviously realize that. Maybe the traditional approach with this is enough -- he recites all the things she went through, and she sees each of them, and how Cecil was there at every point, and that wakes her up to her real desires.
Here are the two serious problems I had with the script. The first was the Three's Company moment at p. 68, where Tru overhears Cecil in the bar, and that leads to the misunderstanding. Here's where I digress. Movies are about forgiveness. To tell any kind of story, the moviemaker has to take some kind of shortcut at some point. He only gets away with it if he's built up enough goodwill by then. That goodwill sometimes comes with an "A" list star, but here on the Street, it has to come from the script. When I got to this part, I groaned. I know you basically had to do what you did: you need your "boy loses girl" moment. But as much as I was enjoying the script, this part for me was a setback.
The second serious problem was the ending. Pulling the Pied Piper out of nowhere that late in the story, well, that was fine: you'd built your goodwill bank way up by that point. But the Giant was just too much. I think you need a cleaner way to save Oscar and Cecil while dispatching with Jack and his mother. (Maybe Oscar and Cecil have climbed down far enough that when the stalk crashes, they fall into the Prince's wedding cake?) I suspect that's the fatal flaw that cost you in the competitions.
I have one suggestion for you to consider: two narrators. The narrator you've written really sounds like John Cleese, but I think you need to think Rowan Atkinson -- Blackadder and his idiot sidekick Baldrick -- as the model for a double narrator setup. Or, maybe they can both be stupid -- like a couple of the Spinal Tap guys.
Anyway, it's a job very well done, and like I said, I think as it is it's close to being sale-worthy.
Other Reviews by clovenhoof
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This is very well-written in terms of form and structure, but I think there are some aspects of the story that need to be worked on. Overall it was a quick read, but some things remained confusing to me. I read it again, found a bunch of things that, having read it once, didn't really fit or make sense, and still, at the end, I'm not really sure exactly what happened in terms...
This is very well-written in terms of form and structure, but I think there are some aspects of the story that need to be worked on. Overall it was a quick read, but some things remained confusing to me. I read it again, found a bunch of things that, having read it once, didn't really fit or make sense, and still, at the end, I'm not really sure exactly what happened in terms of the art gallery heist.
There are a lot of small things that you need to fix; most of them are addressed in my notes. But one fairly big one is the setting: why did you set this is 1992? It creates a bunch of problems for you in terms of your content. First, the world wide web didn't exist yet; the internet consisted of Usenet groups and FTP sites, all text-based, and I think other than AOL, the only access to the internet was through a university mainframe, the government, and (of course) the military. So the bit in the Sioux Falls library is not possible. Second, cell phones were still of the "brick" variety, and cost more than a thousand dollars. Characters randomly having access to them isn't realistic. Third, it may have been twenty years ago, but there were still money laundering laws in place that would make a cash purchase of real estate just not possible.
Another significant small problem is the whole witness protection angle. It seems like the only reason it's there is as a mechanism to provide her with a bundle of cash (which doesn't happen) so she can fund her revenge trip. There's nothing else about the whole witness protection angle which really advances the story, and in terms of realism, there is a whole lot missing. (Number one, she's not actually a witness. Number two, they don't just dump the person in a hotel room, unsupervised, before they've actually given evidence. Number three, I've been to Sioux Falls. It was 95 in the day, and above 80 at night. I grew up on the Great Plains and don't remember too many "chilly" nights in the summer.)
Okay, now for what I consider to be the big big problem. I'm a parent of a small child. You have a script that has a child getting murdered, and then you beat us over the head with it in the nightmare scenes. Well, for me, if you're going to do all that, the movie really has to be worth it. There has to be some degree of gravitas to the material, some kind of emotional lift that makes it worth going through that process. A by-the-numbers revenge flick really doesn't cut it, and I don't think this is anything more than that, yet.
I realize that this is a first draft, and I think you have the bones in place, but you need to find some meat. As it is, the characters aren't really developed at all. Lilly's arc is obviously stunted by the loss of her son; you (quite properly) don't get much of a chance to show who she is because of her emotional state. (By the way, lots of the details that convey her grief were done really well, with very nice economy.) Beyond Lilly, the difficulty is that right now, pretty much all the dialogue in the script is purely functional, people are saying what they need to say to advance the plot. Nobody actually talks about anything, which doesn't give us more than a bare sketch of who they are as people.
But you're off to a very good start. You just need to find something that rises above "revenge" as a raison d'etre.
Notes: {in squiggly brackets were added during the second pass.}
3 - it's obvious that the news is "you're pregnant". don't know if that's going to be a big reveal down the road.
4 - so is he giving her a bunch of passes for July, or is he giving her a bunch of sequential passes? If so, how did he swing that? I shouldn't be thinking about this at page 4. {not sure what the point of the bus passes thing is, other than to give her someone to not recognize her later on.}
{Okay, so page 8 we meet Walczak, and page 9 we meet Nick. So let's go back to page 1: What's the point of the opening scene? Is the audience supposed to recognize those voices from the opening scene ten minutes later? Are the voices that distinctive?}
{Frankie seems only to exist as a plot device to link Nick to the shooting via the photo seen on the aforementioned non-existent internet.}
10 - should be "he pulls out his Motorola from its shoebox-sized case. It's one of the new models -- only 9 inches long, two pounds, with a battery that stays charged for up to an hour. And a bargain at only $1499!"
13-14 the bit with the Lorazepam is a really good snapshot of her state of mind.
16 - I like the attempt to have Lilly convey what she's feeling, though I doubt in reality that any cop would need to hear it, or that any parent would be in a position to articulate it so soon after her child's death.
21 - Chilly nights in Sioux Falls in the summer? Uhhh... NO! {pretty much everything about the whole witness protection thing is wrong from a factual point of view. You can get away with that stuff in a strong story, but I think when you start off by killing a kid, you're in the unenviable position of having used up all your goodwill with the audience. You have to win it back, and if you don't, they're gonna nitpick and you just end up digging a bigger hole for yourself.}
23 - Huge believability problems here. There is no internet. Frankie's fate isn't news, unless he's tied to either the heist or the shooting of the boy, and if he did get space in the paper, there'd be a photograph of his face. The only photo they'd get from the cops is a booking shot, certainly not a surveillance shot of an ongoing investigation.
26 - Oh, you cheater. You can't tell us that Marty's there to take her to the shrink. You have to just write it, and let the reader draw the obvious conclusion. {There are actually a lot of these descriptive things in the script that can't be filmed. This one isn't a problem, but others really are.}
30 - Lilly is a nickname, wouldn't the name on the license be "Lillian"?
40 - This isn't how real estate transactions are done. {Same problem with the completion of the sale down the road. No way they take a big chunk of cash. And you need a contract between the vendor and purchaser, the agent has no authority to make a deal.}
41 - How do you film "illegally modified crossbow"? You might get some mileage out of actually filming her modify it....
43 - I'm not wild about this sequence. She's hitting a moving target while perched on a moving (bobbing up and down in the water) platform? As a rookie shooter?
58 - {Second time through and I still don't get it. "Walczak hears a familiar male voice on Russo's end." WTF?!? That's novel-prose, not screenplay description. If the viewers are expected to recognize the voice, and realistically speaking I don't think they can since it's been 50 pages since we saw Agent Brooks, you certainly need to tell the reader.}
{Gonna stop with the notes, because I don't want to seem like I'm beating up on you, when really I thought the script was pretty good, and most of these things are quibbled that are easily fixed. But in the end, I remain confused about what happened and why within the whole Nick-Callum-Walczak group. It starts with Nick trying to kill Callum, then Nick is super surprised when he "learns" that Callum tried to kill him with the crossbow? And Lilly ends up with the artwork?}
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This was a highly imaginative, and really quite beautiful story. I only have a couple of quibbles with it.
The first is with the formatting. You've put in some camera directions, and extended the length of the script somewhat artificially by breaking up some of your descriptions into one-line paragraphs (with a line space following) where you should just have a two-line,...
This was a highly imaginative, and really quite beautiful story. I only have a couple of quibbles with it.
The first is with the formatting. You've put in some camera directions, and extended the length of the script somewhat artificially by breaking up some of your descriptions into one-line paragraphs (with a line space following) where you should just have a two-line, two sentence paragraph. The formatting of the songs I think also increases the page-count. I don't really care about the whole over/under 90 pages thing. The concern is more that you have a 98 page script where there really isn't that much happening; it would probably shoot in 75 minutes or less.
The second main issue is I think you're in audience limbo. While it's clearly intended to be a "kid's" movie, the content is too mature for a child to really understand. The basic storyline is very, very strong, in my view, and I wonder if the same story couldn't be told in a more conventional setting (ie with people), which would more closely bring the material to the audience. The other alternative would be to make the material even less accessible to a younger audience (ditch the songs, for a start). I'm thinking that you'll end up with something close to, say, Watership Down.
There are some things I would have done differently -- I wouldn't have killed the man, for example. I think if he's just injured, then it adds a lesson that attempts at revenge are often futile. But there is so much that's good about this piece (the dialogue was generally outstanding, with one exception in the notes below) that it's easy to overlook something like that.
Extremely well done, and I'm afraid, destined to languish on a site where most people think Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with "Save the Cat" enscribed on the two stone tablets.
Notes:
42 - "Death is sad" - this is really the first wrong note, and I think the discussion about it should be a little more intelligent.
59 - Isn't it a little too early for this? {Nope -- I thought Bliss was gone for good.}
80 - Enough with the songs already.
92 - I wouldn't have killed the man.
I can't ever remember reading a script and having so few notes. Very, very well done.
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I don't normally comment on formatting issues that much in my reviews (there are lots of users who are much better at it than me), but really there are a lot of problems here.
What you've essentially done is taken about 60 pages of material and stretched it out to 96 by the constant "CUT TOs". There are sequences, such as the part from page 63 through 65, that really should...
I don't normally comment on formatting issues that much in my reviews (there are lots of users who are much better at it than me), but really there are a lot of problems here.
What you've essentially done is taken about 60 pages of material and stretched it out to 96 by the constant "CUT TOs". There are sequences, such as the part from page 63 through 65, that really should take about a half-page, but you drag out to over 3 pages. Also, there are multiple pages that are almost entirely blank -- 45, 46, 47.
In addition, the script is full of exposition that is really meant for a novel, not a script. Right on page one, "It was much cheaper if they got (the flight) at this time." How do you film that? You don't. You can't. Nor do you need to -- it's not important. The screenplay is full of these kinds of descriptions (p. 16 - "We can feel the tension...". Really? I can? Actually, no, I can't.)
I'll also mention that there are tons of mistakes having to do with when to use an apostrophe (we're vs. were) and when not. Not a huge deal, but you'll need to clean those up.
You really need to find a guide to proper formatting for a non-shooting script, and stick to it.
Another weakness of the script is a serious lack of focus as to what your story is, and what you should be spending your time showing the audience. Supposedly it's a zombie movie, but the first sign of zombies doesn't come until page 30 or so. In addition, you spend an inordinate amount of time on stuff that really is of no interest to the audience -- 7 pages of them talking about how to smoke a joint, another 7 of them all at a bar. Then you get to your first money scene -- the fight with the zombies at the bar -- and the whole thing lasts about a page and a half. Then it's off to the hostel, where they spend another 20 or so pages doing absolutely nothing about talking about taking drugs.
This kind of movie needs to be about characters finding out they have a problem, attempting to deal with the problem unsuccessfully, then ultimately finding a solution (or not). You need to take some time with each of those stages. But the key is, they have to be taking an active role or it gets really boring for the reader/audience.
Anyway, good luck with future drafts!
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