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SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board    Unproduced Screenplay Discussion    Short Scripts  ›  Pecking Order Moderators: bert
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JimiLamp
Posted: August 1st, 2014, 5:34pm Report to Moderator
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* second half ramped up

Look who's talking about grammar over here! Whatta muddah fuggah!
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Athenian
Posted: August 1st, 2014, 5:43pm Report to Moderator
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Hi Col,

I really enjoyed this one. Well-written, solid and interesting. Here are a few thoughts:

- Till the end, I wasn't quite sure why Telly had taken Crispy under his wings. Did he actually like him a little bit or was it all about the hot girlfriend? Maybe you could make it a little clearer.

- Also some background to Telly and Marion might be helpful. Was Telly a Tony Soprano-like womanizer? Was Marion the unfaithful type, in general, or was she attracted particularly to him? Since their affair is central to the story, I'd like to know more about it (a fling? something more serious?) and them.

- The montage scene felt somewhat redundant, since you had already showed what happened to Pete.

- A couple of times, I had to go back and check previous "supers" ("one week earlier" etc.), because I wasn't sure which flashback came first chronologically.

Other than that, good job! I think your script could make a really nice film.

Manolis
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Guest
Posted: August 1st, 2014, 7:09pm Report to Moderator
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I tried to read this but it screams run of the mill.  Everything felt like it was ripped from (bad mob) movies.

There's nothing new or special here.  I've seen it all before...a thousand times.  Really disappointed with this.  

I see such great, insightful reviews of yours all over the board.

I would have thought you would have came up with something better than a cliche mob story.

Sorry, but you can do better than this, Col, I'm sure.
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rendevous
Posted: August 1st, 2014, 7:42pm Report to Moderator
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I think that's somewhat harsh, Deadite. So nothing new there, then.

Are there any actual scripts on SS you do like? If so please PM me, as lately you seem to not like anything at all, not one little bit.


Quoted from Deadite
Sorry, but you can do better than this


I'm sure he can. It's quite a nice thing to say in a way. But I think you could balance up your posts on scripts a little more. There must have been something in there you thought was passable. You can do better too, Deadite. We all can. Well, most of us, hopefully.

Like you say, Col is a good reviewer. Like C M Hall he spots things no one else mentions. I like you, Deadite. But being over harsh on scripts ain't helpful. There's more to it than that.

R


Out Of Character - updated


New Used Car

Green

Right Back

The Deuce - OWC - now on STS

Other scripts here
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Guest
Posted: August 1st, 2014, 9:02pm Report to Moderator
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Quoted from rendevous

I think that's somewhat harsh, Deadite. So nothing new there, then.


Are you insinuating that I only leave negative reviews?  


Quoted from rendevous

Are there any actual scripts on SS you do like? If so please PM me,


Ok, I'm sending you over a PM right now with 13 features and 5 shorts.

I'm sure there's more, but I racked my brain and this is what I came up with off the top of my head.

Give them a read if you haven't already.

I personally like to give someone a read and if they want to return it, I just recommend someone else's work, so check out the list I sent ya!  


Quoted from rendevous

as lately you seem to not like anything at all, not one little bit.


This isn't the first time someone has said this exact same thing to me, but I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell ya.  If I don't like it then I don't like it, and yes, there's been streaks where I haven't liked anything on here at all.  Years ago, I might have been more lenient, but I have changed as a writer and a lot of things just don't fly with me anymore.  



Quoted from rendevous


But I think you could balance up your posts on scripts a little more. There must have been something in there you thought was passable.


I do balance up my reviews - check my recent one for Cold Snap.

I like to balance things, but sometimes it's hard...because there's nothing for me to like - at all.

Sorry but from what I read, I didn't see anything that was passable.

I hate to say it too, because I do like Col a lots.

And col, if I came across as harsh, I apologize, man.



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rendevous
Posted: August 1st, 2014, 9:18pm Report to Moderator
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Quoted from Deadite
Ok, I'm sending you over a PM right now with 13 features and 5 shorts.


He did too.


Quoted from Deadite
And col, if I came across as harsh, I apologize, man.


As I said to Deadite in the PM, I found it impressive that he takes criticism so well. Many don't. Myself being among them, sometimes.

Good thing to remember. You should stick a script up here sometime, Deadite. It'd be interesting to see it. And Lord knows you're owed a bagful of return reads.

R


Out Of Character - updated


New Used Car

Green

Right Back

The Deuce - OWC - now on STS

Other scripts here
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Guest
Posted: August 2nd, 2014, 1:35am Report to Moderator
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Quoted from rendevous


You should stick a script up here sometime, Deadite. It'd be interesting to see it. And Lord knows you're owed a bagful of return reads.


I had a feature posted a couple months back (and years ago), but took it down.  The first time it was posted - glowing reviews and nothing but praise (and I was always proud that Bert liked my script because I always considered him a tough nut to crack).  The second time - not so much, haha.  But I didn't care.  It's all good.  Now that I think about it, I should have saved all of the reviews from the first time my feature was up, but I didn't.  I know I have all of the ones from the second one saved in an e-mail.

I know I read a lot of shit on here, and yeah, I know I should be owed a "bagful of return reads", but I really don't mind.  Personally, I rather recommend the work of others instead.  I do it all the time.  Unfortunately, not a lot of people like my recommendations, but I don't care.  I rather someone else get a read and some good input instead of sending it my way.  Especially when I feel something is bordering on bad but has mad potential, I rather that person get a bunch of reads to help them out and make it work.  That's just me, though!
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Colkurtz8
Posted: August 2nd, 2014, 6:45am Report to Moderator
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Jimi


Quoted from JimiLamp
I thought overall you did a good job with the dialogue on this. I think in a few spots the subtlety of the language changes. On page 7, Telly has his monologue about taking Pete out. Overall I liked it. But think It could be cut a bit. Telly has a very matter a fact way of speaking. I like that.


- Ya, I talked about that in another post, I know its a scriptwriter's knee jerk reaction to want "less is more" and I agree with that to an extent but some characters are talkative, some characters use language to manipulate and persuade and Telly is one of those. His position within the crew and the situation of taking out their boss demands it. That's why I let him ramble on a bit, I thought it fitted him. I take you point though.


Quoted from JimiLamp
But other guys, like Fergus seem to have that Italian Swagger. Mixed with some of the description, using words like boot for trunk. I understood it fine in relation to the scene but rarely hear that term. Overall not a huge deal. But if you pin it down a bit I think it may help. I like that you don't specify location. But I feel like you're going for the Italian/American mob for the most part here?


- Ya, I'm Irish so I use Irish terms (off-Licence, boot, etc) which will jar with a script about gangsters as I (like anybody who watches American films) was brought up that Italian American crime milieu. So yes, its clearly an influence, I'll be the first to admit that.


Quoted from JimiLamp
I really liked the scene with Telly and Marion in the motel. For some reason it stood out to me. I really got a sense of Telly outside of the bar and the guys. Got that cold calculating vibe. Awesome scene.


- Cool yeah, glad you liked it. I wanted to give the impression that Marion is more into him then Telly is into her, which feeds into Telly being this guy that Crispy looks up to, he's everything Crispy wants to be, the ultimate alpha male that women desire.


Quoted from JimiLamp
One thing I spotted on p 8. Pete is killed and lying wide eyed with a clean EXIT WOUND. Do you mean ENTRY WOUND. Exit wounds are not usually clean. And lying wide eyed would imply he is on his back so you wouldn't see the exit wound.


- Ha, nice, I appreciate your acute observation. I did mean it as an exit wound through Pete's forehead as Crispy would've shot him from behind. But you're right, that wound would be messy, well spotted, I'll omit "clean". Also, I imagine Telly has turned him over so he's lying face up. I think its much more visually striking if we see Pete's face as opposed to the back of his head.


Quoted from JimiLamp
Thought you did a nice job with that last few pages bringing this to a close. Writing some of those flashbacks and jump around scenes can get confusing but it read well, made sense. Didn't fully see all that coming so nice job with that. Good ending.


- Thanks but I'll concede that the flashback are rather "placed" and convenient but they serve the story and its kinda the nature of things like that when you want to pull the rug from underneath the audience. Good that it worked for you though and you didn't see it coming.

Cheers for your thoughts, appreciate you taking the time.


Manolis


Quoted from Athenian
- Till the end, I wasn't quite sure why Telly had taken Crispy under his wings. Did he actually like him a little bit or was it all about the hot girlfriend? Maybe you could make it a little clearer.


- I included a line where Telly talks abut how he found Crispy as a petty criminal, took him under his wing. Its a short so I didn't want to get bogged down in back-story. Let the audience fill in the blanks, its the classic mentor/pupil dynamic. I believe Telly does like Crispy and wants to mold him into a version of him, only after the fact would he have met Marion.


Quoted from Athenian
- Also some background to Telly and Marion might be helpful. Was Telly a Tony Soprano-like womanizer? Was Marion the unfaithful type, in general, or was she attracted particularly to him? Since their affair is central to the story, I'd like to know more about it (a fling? something more serious?) and them.


- Good question. Yeah the Telly and Crispy relationship is based on the Tony/Chris relationship in The Sopranos. I wrote this after I binged watched a few years back for the first time and immediately wanted to write something in that vein. Again, I didn't want to go into too much back story, I hoped I could convey all you needed to know about Marion and Telly in the scene they share together. She is clearly more into him then he is into her, he exudes that masculinity which she digs, you'll notice that he's quite aloof with her. Is it guilt? Is he just playing up to the hard man persona? I'll leave that open for interpretation.


Quoted from Athenian
- The montage scene felt somewhat redundant, since you had already showed what happened to Pete.


- Ya, its just a quick series of shot to show the clean up, the guys doing their "dirty" work. I thought some might wonder how would they dispose of the body so I wanted to show the polythene and rocks. I felt we had to see some sort of consequence, the less glamorous side of the profession, since I don't show the actual murder of Pete, which to most wouldn't be considered too glamorous either


Quoted from Athenian
- A couple of times, I had to go back and check previous "supers" ("one week earlier" etc.), because I wasn't sure which flashback came first chronologically.


- Ya, the flashbacks come thick and fast at the end, I can understand if so might have difficulty with them. On screen it wouldn't be such a problem so I tried to make them as concise as possible on the page.

Thanks for taking the time and your comments, appreciate it.

Col.


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Colkurtz8
Posted: August 2nd, 2014, 6:56am Report to Moderator
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Quoted from Guest
I tried to read this but it screams run of the mill.  Everything felt like it was ripped from (bad mob) movies.

There's nothing new or special here.  I've seen it all before...a thousand times.  Really disappointed with this.  

I see such great, insightful reviews of yours all over the board.

I would have thought you would have came up with something better than a cliche mob story.

Sorry, but you can do better than this, Col, I'm sure.


First off, I appreciate you taking the time to look at this, sorry I didn't work for you.

I won't make any argument that this is breaking new ground. It was inspired from smashing The Sopranos in a couple of weeks so I ain't exactly drawing from obscurity here But I dig that show and wanted to to do something drawn from it.

Its a genre script so its going to borrow from the tenets of that genre, the mentor/pupil relationship, the double cross, the rival gangs, its all there. I just hoped to give it a little twist in how the story develops. So while its not anything new at least it has a narrative that might catch you by surprise within the framework of the well worn mob environment.

I am curious to know how far you got in it though?





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Colkurtz8  -  August 2nd, 2014, 8:28am
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Quoted from Colkurtz8



I am curious to know how far you got in it though?




About 10 pages.
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TonyDionisio
Posted: August 2nd, 2014, 12:50pm Report to Moderator
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Col,

Great job. Dialog is very good. Page count flowed through nicely.  A few too many characters to track for my liking but story seemed very precise.

Nice work.

Gl,

Tony
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Quoted from Colkurtz8


It was inspired from smashing The Sopranos in a couple of weeks so I ain't exactly drawing from obscurity here But I dig that show and wanted to to do something drawn from it.



The problem here is that Sopranos is a multi-layered show and there's more to it than rival gangsters, double crosses, and all that jazz.  You have to dig deeper if you're going to create a Sopranos-like world with some real depth.  'Pecking Order' actually reminds me of a feature I tried to attempt with a friend of mine when we were like 14 or 15, called 'Mob Life', and it was very much uninspired.  We made a carbon copy of everything we saw from other mob movies and this is exactly what Pecking Order comes across as.

And I think that's why a lot of people are tired of mob stuff.  I've heard people on here say they're aren't interested in anything mob because it's the same old, same old, and I can see where they're coming from.  It's always the same old shit, like some writer is just taking what they saw from movies that were already made and putting it into their own script.  

If you're ever gonna take a stab at the mob, I'd strongly recommend finding a true story and doing mad research on it, and there are a lot of good ones to choose from.  There are plenty of cats you could write about and, if done right, would make for an awesome, epic fucking movie.  John Gotti, Nicky Scarfo, Jimmy Coonan & Mickey Featherstone (The Westies), The Roy DeMeo crew, etc.  They got Johnny Depp playing Whitey Bulger - and that movie was inevitable once White was finally captured - and if they don't fuck around and they do it right, they're gonna have a classic on their hands.  

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Colkurtz8
Posted: August 3rd, 2014, 6:24am Report to Moderator
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Tony

Thanks for the taking, glad you liked it.


Deadite


Quoted from Guest
The problem here is that Sopranos is a multi-layered show and there's more to it than rival gangsters, double crosses, and all that jazz.  You have to dig deeper if you're going to create a Sopranos-like world with some real depth.  'Pecking Order' actually reminds me of a feature I tried to attempt with a friend of mine when we were like 14 or 15, called 'Mob Life', and it was very much uninspired.  We made a carbon copy of everything we saw from other mob movies and this is exactly what Pecking Order comes across as.

And I think that's why a lot of people are tired of mob stuff.  I've heard people on here say they're aren't interested in anything mob because it's the same old, same old, and I can see where they're coming from.  It's always the same old shit, like some writer is just taking what they saw from movies that were already made and putting it into their own script.  

If you're ever gonna take a stab at the mob, I'd strongly recommend finding a true story and doing mad research on it, and there are a lot of good ones to choose from.  There are plenty of cats you could write about and, if done right, would make for an awesome, epic fucking movie.  John Gotti, Nicky Scarfo, Jimmy Coonan & Mickey Featherstone (The Westies), The Roy DeMeo crew, etc.  They got Johnny Depp playing Whitey Bulger - and that movie was inevitable once White was finally captured - and if they don't fuck around and they do it right, they're gonna have a classic on their hands.


- When I say inspired I'm not claiming to have written something that comes within an a?s's roar of its scope and depth. Obviously not and I know you didn't mean that either. That was an 86 hour TV show, this is a 19 page script and should be judged accordingly.

I love the gangster genre and wholeheartedly agree that's its tired and overdone. Much like zombies and vampires though probably not to the same degree. I hadn't wrote any gangster stuff before and, like I say, this came after binge watching that show over a number of weeks. It was outlined and written in a couple of hours.

Funny you should mention taking a real life mobster and doing a feature, this would probably be something I'd never do due to their ubiquity. My interest would wane because I'd recognize the box ticking of cliches but a short is a different beast, a faster process, something to keep one ticking over.

I can't argue with this being unoriginal but I hope that it might entertain and catch some by surprise.


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JimiLamp
Posted: August 3rd, 2014, 6:27pm Report to Moderator
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Col,

You're right about Telly's dialogue. It was a knee jerk reaction. I don't even really know what cut it a bit even means. I think it works just fine.

That's interesting with the the Pete death scene. Because you didn't show it, I sort of made it up in my head. But the way you explained also makes perfect sense. Do think the exit would would be messy still. But you get my point.

Why I thought this was interesting was the idea of such a young underling taking down his entire gang. Because he was disrespected. Being that young and fresh in the gang and willing to take it that far. I don't really recall seeing that idea. Especially in a short. But I'll admit I'm not a full on Gangster genre expert.

Could be interesting putting an Irish spin on this too. Not necessary but just a thought. Sure one maybe considered already.
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Colkurtz8
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Quoted from JimiLamp
Why I thought this was interesting was the idea of such a young underling taking down his entire gang. Because he was disrespected. Being that young and fresh in the gang and willing to take it that far. I don't really recall seeing that idea. Especially in a short. But I'll admit I'm not a full on Gangster genre expert.


- I'm by no means an expert in this genre either or any for that matter but yeah in terms of Crispy helping to wipe out the crew he's tagged onto wouldn't have entered his mind only for Telly's transgression and the nature in how it was revealed to him along with Philly's proposition.

I imagined Crispy being in awe of Telly, forever in his debt, seeing him as his mentor, etc, especially since the others haven't taken to him so well...but when he finds out that this same guy who's supposed to be looking out for him, who he looks up to, his one real friend within the group, has committed the ultimate betrayal, there's nothing keeping him loyal anymore, that attachment is broken.


Quoted from JimiLamp
Could be interesting putting an Irish spin on this too. Not necessary but just a thought. Sure one maybe considered already.


- Good idea, plenty of Irish gangsters to go choose from too. We're quite fond of rocking into other countries and starting up illegal enterprises.

Thanks for your further comments.

Col.


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