Angels In The Sky by Sebastian Zawadzki - Drama - A raw look at a couple of days in a family's troubled and tumultuous life. - pdf, format


Script removed

*SPOILERS AHEAD*      *UNREVISED TEXT BELOW*

I just finished reading your screenplay (in one sitting!) and I think you have a lot of re-writing to do before it is fit for recommendation to other readers. A good place to start is the formatting: Your dialogue margins are all wrong; you didn't capitalize a character's name when you introduced him for the first time in the narrative; you had narrative text   in the dialogue text. I suggest that you fix these problems straight away and resubmit your screenplay because many people will be put off by these mistakes and therefore choose to read something else instead, thus jeopardizing your chances of getting a fair amount of feedback. Other issues I have with your formatting are less clear cut in that I'm not sure what the standard is. I don't like you putting things like CONTINUOUS and LATER all over the place -- they are not really necessary in your screenplay's case. If there are continuos scenes in one main location like a house, you can have a complete slugline for the first scence (e.g. INT. CONNELLY HOUSE - LIVING ROOM - DAY), then sluglines that do not specify the time of day for the other scences. (e.g. INT. BEDROOM) This achieves the same result as CONTINUOUS while keeping the pages tidier. I, personally, write complete sluglines for every scene (which is definitely OK) but only because I haven't come across a formatting instruction that explicitly states how we should handle such situations. And oh, I also think it is sufficient for you to just say GREG'S OFFICE, and not PSYCHIATRIST'S OFFICE - GREG'S OFFICE all the time.

**Since the screenplay was in PDF format, you won't find any inserts from the screenplay in my review. Another disclaimer is that I am not really in a position to break down everything and give you specific examples. So pardon any unfathomable generalizations.**

Man, you gotta give an *illusion* of originality. Your flagrant borrowing from American Beauty is anything but subtle, making some dramatic moments in your screenplay laughable and not shocking or engaging. Two examples: The gun barrel coming up against the back of Greg's head and the voiceover after his death in which he tells us about his last moment in which he saw images of the beautiful moments in his life. Oh dear, oh dear. I hope I am wrong and that you and Alan Ball (academy award winning writer of American Beauty (2000?), in a strange coincidence, thought of the same things, or, ah-hem, that Alan Ball caught a glimpse of your screenplay and copied some of your ideas into his own screenplay. It turns out that your whole story is a recycled version of American Beauty -- the pathetic father, the domineering mother, the distant daughter, the distant daughter's slutty friend, the affair between the mother and her boss, the fact that a misunderstanding leads to the father's death and the manner in which the father dies -- the similarities are countless! See, I would forgive this if your screenplay weren't such an inferior piece of writing. My advice is for you to take out all this hackneyed stuff and refresh your story -- I actually felt embarrassed for you.

Somewhere in the screenplay, the mother and daughter (maybe the father too, but I don't remember) mention that the father is pathetic, but nothing in your screenplay confirms or even suggests that he is pathetic. If anything, he is a pretty normal guy who just happens to be tired of his life. He has a great job (which he keeps until the end, never once hinting that he wanted to go and, umm, flip burgers for a living instead) You should not have one of your characters tell us that so and so is pathetic and expect us to register this without any proof. That would only be appropriate if indeed we were expected to *see* for ourselves that so and so was actually not pathetic. In your screenplay, the "patheticness" of the father is supposed to be a crucial plot element... in short, he is supposed to be pathetic, but you simply didn't do anything to *show* this. Unfortunately, this is a problem throughout your entire screenplay. Characters tell us everything about each other, and it so happens that half of that everything is something you are supposed to show. Try this: list what the characters think about each other, then pick what you want confirmed or disconfirmed for us, then write scenes that accomplish this.

The dialog itself is not taut enough and oftentimes it is unrealistic. Consider the scene in which Eric and his friend are watching basketball and Eric says something like "are you mother or something" and his friend walks out in rage. Man, these men are in their late thirties and should realistically be over such juvenile behavior both in method of provocation ("are you my mother?") and response to juvenile provocation (walking out angry). Then you have lame touchy-touchy exchanges between mother and daughter, daughter and father, and mother and father that are completely unfounded given the circumstances these people are in. If you feel that these are inevitable, please, please, lead us into the inevitable. Don't just stop and say to yourself "oh, I want mother and daughter to have a great heart to heart in which they restore their love" and immediately pen this. No! The daughter, we understand from early on, hates her parents, and has actually just told her mother she hates her. But then in the next scence involving the two they decide to just put their ill-past behind them and start loving each other again! And they do this without even agonising over what they went through -- they just go straight to the point: We are now best pals, screw everything that has happened over the past, say, four years. Same goes for the other relationships in the story. You could partially solve this problem of implausible dialog by including more narrative text, something that I think is crucial for Drama. Real life drama involves ordinary people who talk in an ordinary way, which means that their dialog is not flashy and would make for a dull read in a transcript. What makes the dialog pleasant as a read is when we read what emotional investment the characters have infused into their words. In a screenplay, you write this in the narrative. Show us the reactions, tell us how they speak their words, what expressions they have when they speak or listen. If you do not, you are in trouble for the dialog will seem dull and feel unrealistic. I thought that the mother-daughter dialog didn't feel like the logical thing that would happen especially when they told each other they loved each other. You have something like this:

MOTHER: I love you.
DAUGHTER: I love you too.

This is after the daughter has told the mother she hates her. Reading that I would wonder if I missed something because that seems a little too abrupt and easy given what has been happening. But if there was narrative that told me that the daughter paused for a long moment looking at her mother with tears rolling out before saying I love you too then I would not have been surprised that she said it. In Drama, never transcribe your scenes and offer that as the screenplay, give us the works! A parting word about the dialog -- it is too juvenile for the adults. In every scene that adults were talking, I found myself thinking that that is not how people over thirty talk.

My main problem with your screenplay is very much related to the above. As it is, your screenplay is simply a bunch of people changing their minds constantly. There is no hint of what is motivating them to change their minds. In your story your forgot to include the story. You may say that what you tell us is what happened to these people in the two days you cover. This would mean that the motivations for the characters are buried in a back story we know nothing about and that the final two days depict the resolution of all the issues. That's all good, but if you are going to withhold crucial information, then don't tell the story, don't write the screenplay.

I'm tired now and won't exhaust everything I think is wrong your screenplay. There are other issues, like you telling what can't be shown. At some point you talk about father and mother holding hands for the first time in years. How is this to be shown? If there was something to specify about the way they were holding hands, find a way to describe it. Hell, even mentioning that "they hold hands like people who haven't held hands in a long time" is better, though it essentially isn't any different. If you are stuck with description, just phrase stuff like it can be shown on camera because, subconsciously, our brains will create an image for us and we will think you have described something well when you have actually gotten away with murder.

Do I have any positive things to say? No, not really. I probably would have been impressed by the final scenes in which father and daughter die (the way the scenes are presented) and your other dramatic moments if I hadn't made the connection to American Beauty. As it is, I'm just disappointed at your lack of subtlety. To me, that ruined you.

OVERALL PRIVATE THOUGHT: He should change the entire story until it is sufficiently original, otherwise he needs new material.

I too saw connections between "Angels in the Sky" and "American Beauty" but that wasn't my main problem with this.  Actually, half the time I was confused with what was going on because your formatting was way off.  

Example:
                      GREG
An example is bright lights that take place of objects.
They get so big that the whole screen begins turning into a very big and bright light.

I'm ASSUMING that the second line was description of the scene, which really threw me off because I thought maybe Greg was still explaining something using poor English.  Once again, formatting was my main issue because it just took away from the story by trying to guess what you were setting the scene up to be.  Sebastian, I'm guessing that you haven't been writing long which is okay.  I'll give you some positive feedback here, this is a good step forward in screenwriting, but you have to learn the formatting.
Now, if you've been writing in this format for years then you won't go anywhere with it and that's the blunt truth.

Also, if you want people to read your script you need to give a better synopsis.  "A few days in the lives of a crazy family" or whatever it was doesn't draw any interest.  Explain the story, the characters, what's happening.  Make it draw somebody's attention!   So why did I read this?  I read the above review and decided to check your work out for myself.  So you see, getting reviews DOES influence others to read, but if they're all bad reviews then you could have a heck of a problem.

Some of the dialogue was didn't do it for me either.  
GREG: Sorry, I'm just having a really bad day.
JAMIE: Does it have something to do with Elizabeth?
GREG: Gee, how did you know?
Sorry, this just doesn't work unless these are 13 year olds on the jungle gym.  I won't totally discourage you, some of the dialogue did work such as the instances with the planes and the comparisons to angels.

There's always room for improvement.

Just to straighten a few thnigns out...I was only 15 when I wrote it and it was my first try at writing a screenplay. The formatting was orrect when I wrote it usng Final Draft but I had to transfer it to a word dcument to put it on adobe reader. That was when it mus have screwed up. But I did the formatting correctly when I wrote it. And yeah I know it's similar to American Beauty but I was only 15 then so give me a break.

*smiles* No, I for one will not give you a break. If you post a screenplay, people review it, period. Should a reviewer find fault with the screenplay, it's not his/her responsibility to try to find out the reason behind those faults. If you have extenuating circumstances, then please be upfront about it before anyone chooses to read your work. I am a little annoyed by the fact that I spent a lot of time and energy reading and reviewing your work only to have "I was only 15" thrown at me. I mean, what am I? The accused in a statutory rape case? It would have been nice if you had, beforehand, said something like "I am looking to rewrite something I wrote when I was fifteen, any comments on this screenplay?" 'Cause then we'd all know what your deal was before choosing to read.

And FYI, plagiarism is a very serious crime. If I were a producer and I hadn't seen American Beauty, and I decided to produce your script with, amongst other things, the father's death scence intact, then you would have set me (and you!) up for some nightmarish legal wrangles. "I was only 15" would not cut it as an excuse, I'm afraid. This I'm not sure about, but I believe that right now Alan Ball (American Beauty's writer) can sue you and ask the courts to order Don to take down "Angels in the Sky," arguing that you are posing his ideas as your own. Whether he'd win is a completely different matter. Ah well, whatever, I'm just speculating. But you get the point.

PS: i forgot to mention that I didn't think "Angels in the Sky" was an appropriate title for your screenplay. It could be that I missed a certain theme, but I certainly don't see the connection. An explanation, maybe? And oh, I wrote my first screenplay when I was 20 (I still am 20, actually) and it was awful, so I know about first-time blues... as does every other writer, i reckon.

Get a life. You are taking this way too seriously. Calm down. You're 20 years old and so am I now, and you should be going out and having a good time and not reading people's screenplays and then writing a whole essay on them.

Then why are you on this website?  When you're looking for a career in this field, you WANT people to write essays on your work, and frankly it is annoying to read a screenplay that wasn't kept up to par then getting the 15 year old thing.  I mean you're on this website to READ screenplays.  Why on earth did you post your work on here if you didn't want people to read it?  Just calm down, accept the criticism of the screenplay.

Hmm, my first impulse was to call you ungrateful, but then I realized that I mostly read other people's work so that I can have my own work read in future... you know, karma and such. And since you started with the insults, do you mind telling me what exactly ticked you off about my review? I gather that if the "whole essay" was in praise of your Angels script, we wouldn't have this problem. If I was unnecessarily harsh and discouraging, do say so, and I will try to improve my next review should I choose to write one. I don't think I was particularly cruel, after all, somebody once called somebody else a "talentless hack." But it's ultimately your call.

Anyway, apologies for whatever. And I'm sorry I read your script. I'm sorry I mistakenly thought that you were like most people on this board who are desperate to receive detailed comments on their work from others. I guarantee that I will not read anything else of yours. I hope that makes everything cool now.

I've removed the script from the site.  I am very disappointed at the reaction to the constructive criticism of the script by the author.  There are so many writers out there that pay money to have a review of this nature and to have the author react in this way is disappointing.  

Don

that was a good review iradiscence i could do with that with some of my works

yeah iradiscence that was good. mayb u can review my work. haha. that really was good.

Quoted Text Just to straighten a few thnigns out...I was only 15 when I wrote it and it was my first try at writing a screenplay. The formatting was orrect when I wrote it usng Final Draft but I had to transfer it to a word dcument to put it on adobe reader. That was when it mus have screwed up. But I did the formatting correctly when I wrote it. And yeah I know it's similar to American Beauty but I was only 15 then so give me a break.

Quoted Text Get a life. You are taking this way too seriously. Calm down. You're 20 years old and so am I now, and you should be going out and having a good time and not reading people's screenplays and then writing a whole essay on them.

I might be wrong but was american beauty out 5 years ago?

Came out in 1999, so 20-6=14, but he probably saw it in 2000....it all cancels out I think.  Good review gone to waste, it's a shame it turned out this way.