All screenplays on the simplyscripts.com and simplyscripts.net domain are copyrighted to their respective authors. All rights reserved. This screenplaymay not be used or reproduced for any purpose including educational purposes without the expressed written permission of the author.
Right out of the gate, I'm noticing errors, incorrect slugs, extremely bland character descriptions with no flavor - and this is all on the first page. What's a "sad refrigerator"? I've never heard the term before. I Googled it and looked up images - all I got were cartoon pictures of refrigerators that were crying. Is it referred to as a sad refrigerator because there's only "two lone beers" inside it and nothing else? If I were you, I'd keep the writing as simple as possible. My version: the refrigerator door opens and Luke reaches in for a beer. Pretty simple.
I'm not a fan of the "open with something action packed and then flash backward in time", especially here, because it's not like we're flashing back 3 days or whatever, but we're going all the way back as far as 7 years and then we return to the present which is 8 years later. It all reads like a jumbled mess to me and I would do without the flashbacks or at the very least trim them up drastically.
Your characters, in my opinion, felt as cardboard as they could get. There were some occasional lines of dialogue I really liked, a line or two here or there, but other than that, the same old pot smokers with nothing different about them. It appears Vincent's talent is he's very good at lacrosse. That's cool, I suppose, and maybe you'll even find lacrosse fans who will be super pumped to read your script and will end up loving it, because, really, who has ever seen a movie about lacrosse? I suppose you have a fresh spin here. Every sport flick is about baseball or football, and here you're taking a risk with lacrosse - something I don't think that's ever been explored on film. That's good shit, but unfortunately, in my opinion, lacrosse is about as entertaining as watching paint dry.
I suppose I would have read more than I did if your characters were intriguing enough, but they weren't doing it for me. Plus, I got to page 30 and I didn't sense a protagonist that wanted something really bad, so I started to tune out. I can see why this is 114 pages long too. I noticed that your action lines reach as much as 4 lines or more, sometimes 7. I would suggest keeping them at 2 - maybe 3 - 4 is pushing it. I'm glad I gave this a look, though. I gained quite a bit from the read. Definitely took a lot away from it. Wish you the best of luck with this. Lastly, you don't need to listen to anything I say, either, as I'm not a professional writer, I'm just some guy on a message board. This post just contains my general thoughts of the script after taking a look at it. Do what you think works.
@ YaBoy Topher and deadite... Ya know, the fact you guys took the time to read and give notes is in a big way validating and for that I thank you. I take your points with sincere contemplation. I will use what I think is best. I'm sure you guys can relate to some notes and comments being completely contradictory - as in one person likes action at the beginning (or not !) and maybe another person needs to see (or not !) why Smithy's home life sucks so much that along with his feeling that Vincent's life is perhaps worth more than his own are reasons to pull the trigger. Thanks again for the reads; my impression that the read was not a waste of time and I should continue to rewrite [for the 100th time, literally!]. @Dustin..thanks for getting my "sad" refrigerator !
Just submitted a third. More than a few changes and also incorporated some of deadite's notes. Thanks and Cheers ! I will make a quick post when it is up.