DESPERATE HOURS may be "technically" genius to some, but it's slow and miserable.
I'm not one to endure forty bites of bread, lovely as it is, in a sandwich before I get to the meat and cheese.

If I was watching this on DVD I'd punch it before the 20min mark.

This was a solid read, but when you see that Genius rating attached to it, you expect more.  Genius to me would be a script like Network.  Something transcendent.  This was more of a well-written yarn that grafted elements of classic Westerns, Gangster and War movies onto its narrative.

The first half had a glacial pace to it, but this writer does have a great economy with his words.  You almost never see an action paragraph more than two lines.  Almost.  There is a tendency to over-explain images and situations.  Such as this:

"This is a line in the sand moment for Frank Sullivan-- He was powerless to save his wife and daughter. He had no control over what happened to his son. But Frank can save this girl...even if it means risking his life."

Frank's loss of his family as well as his lost romance with Sue somehow never solidified with me.  Probably because it was pretty much all expressed through dialogue.  Same with the plight of Leonard Duschene.  His subplot in particular felt like unexplored territory.

But, I liked the action at the end, which is basically gangsters versus cowboys in a wild free for all.

I'd give it a [x] worth the read

Is it a new draft from AKW or something or are you talking about the really old draft of it, Pia?

I will read at some point Pia. I read part of 2 others today, but not that one.

I'm going to see if I can read it for today. Liked Walker's Seven and 8mm. Might as well give this a shot.

I take back 8mm since I checked on imdb that he denounced it as his. But he did some uncredited rewrites for the Game which for some odd reason I thought he wrote. lol.

The Game basically was his, Gabe. Yeah, Ferris and his partner were credited but it's just like The Rock which was Jonathan Hensleigh's but the credit isn't there.

Quoted from Mr. Blonde Is it a new draft from AKW or something or are you talking about the really old draft of it, Pia?

The draft I have is from 2008.

E.D.

That's the one I have, too. I didn't have it E-mailed to me but I've had it for a bit. Personally, if that's what he's reviewing, I was kind of disappointed in it...

I dug into Black Box today, which apparently sold for over a mil. It's a replotting of Three Days of the Condor it seems, though I have not seen that film in many years.

Starts slow, takes a while to get going. But then things crank up and stay cranked.

Worth the read.

Mr. Blonde, I always had an inkling it was his eventhough they credited the movie to someone else.

Going to see if I can read Walker's work today. It was a bit confusing in the beginning. lol.  

Next Wednesday Carson will review Outside the Wire, a Nicholl's finalist from 2011. I think this could be a good one for us to read and discuss because being a finalist, we can assume it did a lot of things right, and yet it's also an amateur script.

Since most of us here are amateurs, a script like this could be cool because it gives a sense of the next level we're trying to reach.

I have not read it yet.

If anyone wants the script, message me. Also, I recommend getting on Carson's email list.

How exactly do I get on that list? You told me about, it but I didn't see any instructions on the site. Also, I'm blind, so forgive me if it's right under my nose.

Quoted from Felipe How exactly do I get on that list? You told me about, it but I didn't see any instructions on the site. Also, I'm blind, so forgive me if it's right under my nose.

E-mail Carson and tell him why he should add you to the list.
That did the trick for me!

http://scriptshadow.blogspot.com/

Regards,
E.D.

Just Finished Outside the Wire... It's well-written, but I'm surprised a story that doesn't involve starving kids in Sudan didn't win Nicholl's.

When I compare it to Tony Gilroy or Black Box, one can still see a world of a difference between working pros and someone who's still rather new. Gilroy's Bourne Ultimatum just pounds you in the face with non-stop action, especially the third act which I found to be one of the best examples of rising tension in Act 3.

Maybe the author of Outside the Wire didn't intend to have a full action script and wanted to play the drama more. But there are times where it just slows down and I skipped a few pages to get to the good stuff.

He also uses "We see/are" several times, even on the first pages. It's usually a no-no to use "we", but this shows that a good story trumps basic screenwriting rules/taboos.

Overall, it's worth a read for any amateur because winning Nicholl is still quite a feat.

Just finished it. I might have time later to give some more specific notes.

I can see why the script did well, and it does succeed in a lot of areas. It reads well, and the story is always clear. There's never any reason to double back and reread something.

It consistently succeeds in building a reasonable amount of tension, no easy task in a script.

It manages to make us care enough about the 2 main characters, and for an action script, these characters have sufficient depth.

I have to admit the plot formula is so played in Hollywood that it's hard to avoid thinking "here we go again".

We have the standard evil American company employing former American special forces types. We have the ending where the good guys testify before Congress. It's the Michael Moore vision of the world, one held by people who have absolutely no experience of the US military, so cling to these stereotypes of the evil, ignorant American soldier as being typical.

And the plot is simplistic to the point of it being impossible to buy into. An American woman, who hates computers, joins the Army for the perks and benefits, and becomes an expert in software; she discovers that friendly fire incidents in Iraq are due to a faulty program sold to the military by a private security company; the company doesn't want this information leaked out, so they have to have her killed.

It's just so hard to buy into any of this, so the players all become caricatures that make those in the A Team look serious by comparison.

Writing is hard, though, and I respect overall what the writer has achieved. Great work for an up and coming amateur. And with the cold war long gone, maybe it really is too hard now to come up with interesting and plausible plots of international intrigue, so we are just going to keep seeing more of this stuff.