Other Reviews by harriet nyborg 81

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  Janet, I've got your number! I'm gonna make you mine!
  A review of Janet 5-6-0
  by harriet nyborg on 09/20/2012
  Well Well well, look who finished his script. Anthony! Great job, man. Big ups. That’s no easy thing, and I tip my hat to you. I’m going to do something I don’t usually do. I’ll talk a little bit about the story (I liked it) and the characters (see below). The fact is I think this has a LOT of potential and GOOD ON YOU for getting it all in 120. I bet you can get it... Well Well well, look who finished his script. Anthony! Great job, man. Big ups. That’s no easy thing, and I tip my hat to you.
  
  I’m going to do something I don’t usually do. I’ll talk a little bit about the story (I liked it) and the characters (see below). The fact is I think this has a LOT of potential and GOOD ON YOU for getting it all in 120. I bet you can get it down to 100.
  
  But mostly I want to focus on format. Because, and I’m sure others are telling you this, forget how good your story is: a pro reader would put this down within the first few pages. AND IT’S NOT TO DO WITH YOUR STORY! And as a fellow writer, that really stinks. I know it. We are partial salesman. Check that – we are full time salesmen. You’re not selling yourself the best way you can. In fact, you’re begging people NOT to take your best offer. And it can all be fixed SO EASILY. Format issues are the easiest thing to fix. Pull up a seat, little partner. You’re gonna get a formatting 101 class with some grammar and other stuff coming along for the ride.
  
  OK:
  
  First and foremost is something you are doing technically 100% correct for all I know, but just not for Spec purposes. Everything on tstreet is supposed to be in spec format. You have a shooting script here. This is because you SEE your story SO WELL and WANT it to be a certain way. Totally understand. Now… get rid of that shooting script formatting.
  
  Cut to: Gone. Ax it. Not saying there’s no cut there, just saying there is no need for it in a spec.
  Get rid of anything having to do with the credits.
  Simultaneously: I know what this word means, but not as direction. Is this split screen? Is it just happening at the same time? Then just write it in the action. “Meanwhile, …”
  
  Now I’ll be a jerk. See that comma after meanwhile? Dude, GRAMMAR! Muy importante! I will not proofread your script and send you edits – I doubt anyone will. What I will say is watch your commas. A good start for you is anytime someone says ‘Sir’ Like ‘Yes Sir’, that should be ‘Yes, Sir’. Just o n the punctuation alone, I gotta say you’re either setting new trends or don’t know the old ones. I’m not gonna do everything with you, but just check out where you have a ‘…’ It’s in a lot of places. That’s not the problem. The problem is you have it different in each place. Sometimes it’s ‘…’. Sometimes it is two or four dots. Sometimes you’ll have a whole other punctuation mark, and then right after it you’ll have some variation of the dots, so you’ll get something like ‘Mary!…’ Listen, this is unfair, tic tackey stuff to bring up and don’t even count it towards my hundred words, but I just wanted to mention it because it was.
  
  Don’t talk about the ‘screen’. ‘Walks off the screen’ or I forget how you phrased it, that’s not the way. Make me forget the screen. Tell your story. Stop reminding me I’m watching a movie. It’s the same reason you don’t want to talk about when the credits are running.
  
  A lot of people will tell you dialogue has to be no more than four lines. I ignore that rule with relish and encourage you to as well. Action lines however, they really shouldn’t be in blocks of more than four lines. It puts the reader in a bad psychological place. Like they are reading a book and not a spec. Also, I give a little extra room to action/scifi scripts for action lines, but I still feel yours is a little action-line heavy. Can you trim some of it out? Streamline it somehow so you say the same thing with less? In a way your knowing this story and seeing it so well are working against you. You want to communicate EVERYTHING! You can’t. Not in 120. Bare bones this thing.
  
  One meek sounding, yet exceedingly effective method of shortening those action blocks is going through and making sure you put everything in an active tense. ‘Mary is holding Maggie’ can be tightened up and not lose any of its meaning by saying ‘Mary holds Maggie’. Sounds dumb and small, right? Trust. Go over your script and do this everywhere and watch yourself lose three pages off the bat.
  
  Putting everything into play, ‘John is seen sitting’, when you consider that you want to not remind the ‘viewer’ he is watching a movie, and you want to keep it in the active tense, can be changed to something like ‘John sits’. I know that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it makes for a much cleaner read over the course of the whole script.
  
  Character intros and descriptions: Here you need a little work. It starts right away. The first time we see a character it should be in CAPS, along with a brief description. Even if they are not main characters, if they are there, especially if they are speaking, especially if it is one if the first characters you are going to intro us to (like the Stewardess). And watch those descriptions. Guy and Girl both have the same hair. I assume that means it is long? Or does the girl have a bob? I know you see this. Remember I have a blank page in my head. YOU fill that in for me. Assume nothing.
  
  Even for main characters, especially for main characters, you are missing some descriptions. For Janet, I missed the point where you did it, but you shifted at one point from referring to her as Blonde to referring to her as Janet. It’s very confusing when you do that. Intro her full name and keep the way YOU refer to her consistent. If other people refer to her differently that is fine. YOU keep it consistent. I am a boy sitting on your lap and you are an old man telling me this story. YOU refer to him the same way throughout or I will lose track.
  
  You can get rid of your continued at the bottom of the pages too.
  
  Okay, I want to talk a little about the plot and character aand dialogue. Hey dude, guess what? Aside from the formatting and the typos and the grammar? Take all that stuff away and what did I think of your story? I liked it. I’d even go so far as to say I quite liked it. Conceptually speaking, anyway. Between the time I read this and the time I am writing this I noticed you have been ranked You’re being robbed, but don’t take it personally. Come here for the critiques, not the star rankings. I do want to say I feel your three star concept is being undervalued and you’re getting a full four stars from me there.
  
  That said, I understand why people would have problems with it. This needs another draft. I feel like it took a little while to get going, for sure. The first scenes are an enigma and it’s a slow build from there. Start off with more of a bang. Get us on our toes.
  
  You are at your best (for my sicko mind) when you are just cutting loose and being graphic. The thing with the hair – that’s a really unique and disturbing image. You have some of that peppered in here. It works. You’re good at that.
  
  What holds it back, aside from the formatting and the proofreading and such, is probably the dialogue. It’s very straightforward. There’s not a lot of nuance to it. And especially considering you have all these characters that really dominate for pages at a time that aren’t John or McCarthey, there was never really more to them than telling a cool story. They felt more like devices than real people to me a lot of the time. Clunky at times. At other times, the straightforwardness of it kind of takes away from what should be a very emotional scene, like John confronting his father. It even detracts from the broader ethos the film evokes when John says something like ‘Yeah, maybe I’ll find my purpose in life.’ I think you made a note to say he did it sarcastically, but it’s still telegraphing and I just feel like you could do better. On the other hand It kind of evolved into an interesting kind of storytelling in parts – the testimonial-type angle, I mean. I just read World War Z and in a way it kind of reminded me of that at times, stylistically speaking.
  
  I’ll tell you the truth, Anthony, I just read that back and I have no idea if any of it is going to be any help to you. I CAN tell you this, and I know if you do listen to this, I will have helped you. I’m certain people are saying stuff that you read it and it’s just so discouraging and disheartening and infuriating and this dude is obviously a total idiot and he doesn’t see what you’re trying to do at all and did they even read the thing? Maybe you’re even thinking some of those things about me. That’s completely fine and fair. My best advice – the thing you should listen to – is this. It’s perfectly human to get mad. I think all of those things and more when I read what people think of the stuff I submit. Go off and get mad and tell your friends what an idiot I am. Go on. Just make CERTAIN that at the end of doing whatever you have to do, come back and read it again and consider, even given the fact this person is clearly a complete moron, there may be one or two things he mentioned probably completely by accident that he may sort of have a point on. That’s what I got. That and f-n believe. Good luck and great, great job. read
• 
  Steampunk Vampire Wonderland
  A review of The Graveyard Patrol (Second Draft)
  by harriet nyborg on 09/15/2012
  Graveyard Patrol. OK, it's not REALLY all that steampunky outside of the machine gun. I liked this. I’m a vampire fan, after all. You have lots of neat details that really sell this thing. The flowers, particularly, I really liked. The whole ‘graveyard shift’ bell thing. Neat. I’m not sure how I feel about your bookends. For my money, I’d rather not know where it... Graveyard Patrol. OK, it's not REALLY all that steampunky outside of the machine gun. I liked this. I’m a vampire fan, after all. You have lots of neat details that really sell this thing. The flowers, particularly, I really liked. The whole ‘graveyard shift’ bell thing. Neat.
  
  I’m not sure how I feel about your bookends. For my money, I’d rather not know where it is going than be waiting the whole time for it to get to a particular somewhere.
  
  I like the twists you made on the conventional vampire prototype. The sunlight thing for example. Nice tweak. If anything, the vampires for some reason seemed a little less than intimidating. Not Morgan and Co. obviously but the recently turned. Potentially lethal, but kind of helpless. It makes them more compassionate, which makes them less killable in a way. Especially balanced against a not especially likable guy who’s killing them.
  
  Some things I think you could think about:
  
  Aside from a few throwaway lines, most of the Patrol really doesn’t have much to do. Most of them don’t even have much of a character after you introduce them for the first time outside of whatever one detail you gave. On the one hand I really like the whole calling the old team together aspect of it. It reminded me of The Sting – which I love. On the other, I wonder how much the plot would lose if it was just the essential characters.
  
  I didn’t understand why he didn’t kill him at the end. Why throw him down a well?
  
  I know you said it was slow paced right up front. And fine. But I’m just gonna throw out there: This is a vampire movie. It’s good and gory in places, but there’s a lot of just poking around and following the trail, then cut to a scene of Morgan being sinister. If it were a cop movie, they wouldn’t show every lead. A big chunk of what the protags are doing int the middle is tracking down people who tell them to go see other people. It’s probably not the most compelling thing in Eduardian London.
  
  There’s no tension between the Patrol and the bad guys until the very end. They don’t even know each other. And then they meet. And then it’s over.
  
  Just to mention one more thing I liked that I forgot about – I dug the whole thing with Matthew discovering. I wondered at points if maybe the better story was his as he discovered his father’s past and about his mother.
  
  Some nuts and bolts stuff I jotted down as I read it:
  
  For all the characters you have, some go unintroduced.
  
  I think put at least a line of action after scene changes.
  
  Plural/possessive: Pigeon’s, blasphemer’s, mothers, mans, barbers etc. There are a LOT of these. Unclean! Unclean! J
  
  Is wiping = wipes
  Are walking = walk
  
  I think try to avoid ‘we see’.
  
  Gideon gives up alba pretty fast. Why would she help him if this is the type of guy he is? Aren’t they into preserving their connections? If she is such a valuable resource to them, why does he sell her out at the drop of a hat? If this is the way he always acts (and you set it up as him holding everyone in such contempt – especially whores – that it seems it is) then it doesn’t make sense to me at all that anyone would help him, least of all the people he openly detests. So this Alba/Gideon relationship doesn’t play for me.
  
  By page 68: I’m feeling a little restless. Everything is ‘ask this guy’ then ‘ask this other guy’ then ‘ask this other guy’.
  
  Alba’s death is directly on G’s hands. He didn’t have to sell her out like that. There really was no reason for it.
  
  You think you have so much to lose?
  Sleeping on the job on your fat
  posterior, scrounging whatever you
  can to spend on booze and god knows
  what. You just go through the
  motions day by day; Living in a
  filth ridden world of hate and
  disease and mortality. Trying
  desperately to live just one more
  day- One more day in this pisshole
  you call life. I don’t think you,
  or any of your kind realise every
  day is just another closer to your
  own demise. Do you? – It occurs to me this is exactly in line with G’s presumptive philosophy on life. Only Morgan is saying it. It’s his big ‘villian’ moment and it manifests as him acting like the protagonist. That seems kind of odd to me. Highlights the fact the G is really not an easy guy to pull for. He has no respect for the living either. What would you say the difference between G and M are? Besides one being avampire and one being human? I don’t see very much. Both kill indiscriminately and with a sense of entitlement.
  
  ---
  
  Anyway, great job. I wish I could write a good vamp script. You did very well. Respect. read
• 
  Welcome to 'Merica
  A review of Rednecks Vs Space-Zombies revised
  by harriet nyborg on 09/14/2012
  Wow, what a great idea for a script! I’m jealous I didn’t think of it. Rednecks vs. space zombies – how has that not been done yet? One of the best and worst things you have going for you, in case absolutely everyone hasn’t mentioned it yet, is your title. It’s perfect. Says everything I needed to hear to be interested. I was chomping at the bit to see what you did with... Wow, what a great idea for a script! I’m jealous I didn’t think of it. Rednecks vs. space zombies – how has that not been done yet? One of the best and worst things you have going for you, in case absolutely everyone hasn’t mentioned it yet, is your title. It’s perfect. Says everything I needed to hear to be interested. I was chomping at the bit to see what you did with it. SO EXCITED was I to read your work, just on the title alone. So, kudos on that. I equate the title to ‘Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’. It’s just… perfect.
  
  I say it works against you as well, though, and I mean it. Let me just get this out up front– I thought this was a very enjoyable read and is well beyond ‘first draft’ status. You clearly know what you are doing and have worked on this story a lot. And the love shows and it’s awesome. I tried to not peek too much at its status before I read, but I noticed it was featured and rghtly so. It’s an exciting concept, a full, well-told story with (kind of) a message and above all else it satisfies that B-movie itch with some really great action, especially in the second half.
  
  So, now that I’ve assured you that I really did like this a lot and am wildly jealous of you in certain places, I’m going to devote the rest of this to things I didn’t think worked as well as some other parts and maybe try to offer up some suggestions. But please understand, I liked it. The pages of ‘this didn’t work for me’ comments you are about to read are only there because I really think this has a lot going for it and I want it to get made. I would totally see it.
  
  OKOKOK, so here we go. I want to mostly talk about Tone, theme, and pacing.
  
  Let’s go with tone first: Based on this wonderful title – I was totally ready for something in the vain of the Evil Dead franchise. Very gory, very supernatural, a little corny, kind of winking at itself, and – and I know you are trying this with the narrator – comedic. It’s that comedy aspect I feel is lacking a little bit, and it is HERE that I feel people who would come see this based on the title may be a little let down.
  
  Basically the only attempts you try at overt comedy, satire or any kind of self-reflection of what this film is comes from the narrator. We don’t know who he/she is, they seem to know the whole story already, they’re kind of unphased by the whole thing… none of that is ‘wrong’ so to speak. As it went on though, aside from the very beginning, the narrator served more to take me out of the story than to enhance it in any way. He pops in at random places (rather inconsistently) for one liners and then he is gone. What is the narration adding to this story that wouldn’t be there without it? In the beginning I got a Dukes of hazard vibe from it, which dovetails nicely with the redneck theme, but it didn’t hold up and as it went on I found the narrator rather burdensome as opposed to something I looked forward to. The freeze frame stops the action at the best parts for some commentary I feel is pretty needless.
  
  If you are going to keep he narrator, I would try to focus more on who this dude is and what he is adding. Is he a fellow redneck? Does he look on them with sympathy? With antipathy? In disgust? With praise? I think your dude should def be a redneck and his commentary should be used more in explaining the ‘redneck’ thought process when and where it doesn’t translate into ‘yankee’ for lack of a better term. For example – maybe instead of squirrels, the kids are hunting ‘varmints’ or whatever slang a redneck would use. Then the narrator can pop in and point out that ‘varmint’ is a general redneck term for what you yanks would call ‘house pets’ or whatever. I donlt especially like that example, but it’s just to point you in the direction of what I’m saying.
  
  Aside from the narrator, everyone else takes themselves pretty seriously. Nobody here is specifically laughing at or specifically acting AS a redneck. Aside from the title – and a FEW characters (the kids, the old guy on the farm) – this could basically take place anywhere. Upstate NY, for example. Even Maine. Your rednecks aren’t redneck enough for me and their redneckiness isn’t incorporated enough into the plot for me to fuflfill the promise of your title.
  
  Relating this back to my suggestion your tone should maybe be a bit more comedic – what if the aliens/zombies were defeated specifically by something redneckish. I feel like everything these characters say and do whilst cionfronting the zombies should be balanced against the backdrop of ‘they’re rednecks’. Anyone can have a shotgun. The whole horse thing too was more cowboy than redneck to me. So, to provide an example of what I’m getting at – what if charcatrs are trapped at one point in a taxidermist’s shop or whatever. And they escape by fleing in the hides of the varmints. Alternately, what if one of the characters is a moonshiner and it s his moonshine which is ultimately weaponized against the destroyer and the zombies. OR, what if the monster’s weakness is something like Pabst Blue Ribbon? It should be something specifically redneck though. I feel like you are afraid to make fun of them too much. To dive into th stereotype. But that’s what this needs for me is a send up of the redneck stereotype. You can glorify them, that’s fine. But everything they do every plot point, every chase, every relationship, every escape should be something that I say ‘only a redneck would think of that – and it’s brilliant’.
  
  So that’s tone. Let’s move on to theme. In a B-Movuie send up like this, I wouldn’t normally harp on it. BUT- zombies. You can’t have a movie with zombies and not have the zombies represent anything. Every vampire/werewolf/psycho killer/zombie movie/story you’ve ever encountered had the monster as a stand in for…. Something bigger in concept. A lot of the time, werewolves are used as a commentary on puberty or masculinity or something. Alternately, zombies (and this is ALWAYS the case with zombies – go back and check) usually symbolize the masses in some negative way. In dawn of the dead they represented a country that was entranced by consumerism. In other films they have been used as a symbol of a population brainwashed by either govt or religion. It’s always something. Your zombies are just zombies. There’s no greater commentary here and I feel thee needs to be in any zombie film. Perhaps they can be used to symbolize ‘city’ folk. You know – NON-rednecks. Like me. We rush around all day just to get to the next place, don’t take time to enjoy the simple things, rush by without appreciating anything beautiful or unique, just to make the next deadline, the next dollar, the next meeting. That’s not the redneck way. Maybe you could find a way for your zombies to symbolize that. Then this would have a message.
  
  As it stands the message seems to be ‘appreciate where you are from’ in so far as Jefferson is the main character. This doesn’t play very well for a few reasons. First, by the end it seems like Mary is the main character, not Jefferson. Second - Jeffersons transition is very fast and very easy. He scratches the horse behind the ear, picks up the gun – BANG he appreciates everything again. Nothing was earned. Nothing was overcome. It rang hollow to me. I would humbly suggest the over-riding theme here should be ‘Yeah, us rednecks that you city folk make fun of? The country would go to hell without us.’
  
  Now – pacing. This is probably your biggest and most easily rectified issue for me. I 100% acknowledge this is a scifi action script and you are going to need more action lines to describe and explain things. I am game for that and willing to give you room. Even considering that, this felt very action line-heavy in parts. It slows down the read and very honestly I found myself getting exhausted with each new page that is all action with one or two lines of dialogue. Overall I really feel you can get this down to 96-97 pages. Maybe even less. There is a LOT you don’t need. The alien sequence I enjoyed, but it doesn’t fit with anything, goes on forever…. And is it really needed? Say that whole scene was ‘and from somewhere deep out in space, a meteor streaks towards earth, lands on the farm.' I just saved you 6 pages there. BUT WHAT ABOUT SHORTY? You say. Well, let me ask you something. Does Shorty even belong in this story? Humor me and imagine the story without him. What would change? You would need to tweak the ending and there are a few zombie scenes where you would have to figure different ways to kill them (which should be redneck ways and not alien blades IMHO anyway). But otherwise, what’s shorty’s place in this story about rednecks fighting zombies? I like him, don’t get me wrong. It’s just – and I do this too – sometimes you just envision the story a certain way and you are loxckd into seeing it that way from then on out. For the sake of argument – try thinking about it without shorty. The kids would need sometng mre to do. Hey, what if you were to incorporate that moonshine plot into the kids. Maybe the KIDS are the moonshiners (running Glens operation) and Ft Awesome is their still? Just spitballing. But juvenile moonshiners sounds VERY redneck to me.
  
  I sound like an overly critical jerk, no? I didn’t name one thing I liked outside of the title. But I dd like this a lot. Thanks for posting it and good luck. read