Good Guy, Bad Guy :: SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board

I read this carefully. It was a little hard to follow at times. I liked the premise of the story. I could see that you were trying to combine romance and suspence in a detective story. The story has a few issues that need to be ironed out.

I know that having a character tell the story through a continuous , voiceover monolog is often done in film but when it’s overdone, it can detract from the story. “Whore” is an example of this. While it is a good movie, I sometimes wonder if the story would have been better without Theresa Russell telling me what was going on in her mind. She is talented. She could have done it with acting.

Another story issue I had was that she kept a log of her thoughts in an undercover case. This is a huge plot problem. I understand why you did this but it causes a huge credibility problem. Nobody trained to do undercover work would ever do that. If the wrong persons were to find it, she would be dead or worse. You need to find another way to get Karin involved in the investigation. For instance Karin could have overheard a conversation or perhaps she could have found the gun and needed an explanation.

The romance angle needed work. I’m not sure why it wasn’t clicking. I guess I was too wrapped up in her job. I was really pulling for her to succeed with her case. I found myself telling her not to get emotionally involved. The story didn’t end the way I thought it would. That was a delightful surprise and twist.

You follow the standard format but there are a few things mechanically that need to be fixed.

Using “We see…” doesn’t work as a slug line. In fact, it’s a bad habit. The trick is to describe what we see as action lines without actually using the words, “We see…”. Camera direction in general is something that should be avoided. Save them for critical moments such as to create a surprise reveal.

On page 18, Julio speaks with an accent on his second dialog. Either he first speaks without an accent or you meant to place the accent on the previous dialog. Also, you don’t mention what kind of accent he has. I assume it was a Latin accent.

On Page 22 and in some other places, you introduce a character in the middle of a character’s dialog. You can have a character talk about somebody without describing them as a new character. You would only capitalize them and describe their age (and other characteristics) when the character makes an appearance. Also, you can only introduce them in an action line.

On page 51 you have an example of a parenthetical without parentheses. It occurs during Julio’s first line on the page. It should read:

JULIO
Andrea.
(takes her hand)
Me and my family, Martha and her three daughters…

You can also place the “He takes her hand” as an action line but then you need to call out Julio again and add (cont’d) with it. The (Cont'd) may be optional, I don't know, but you can't just jump to an action line and jump back into a dialog without another character heading.

JULIO
Andrea.

He takes her hand.

JULIO (cont’d)
Me and my family, Martha and her three daughters…

At times the dialog seemed a little stiff. A suggestion I would make would be to read the dialog out loud and ask yourself if you could see yourself or anybody you know talking like that. Sometime characters have some oddball speaking mannerisms. It didn’t seem like this was that kind of story.

In summation I would like to say that I liked the story you were trying to tell but the telling of the story needs work. There are other problems but these are the ones that stood out for me.