Do You Swear To Tell The Truth by Nick Le - Thriller, Drama, Psychological Thriller - A presidential candidate's assassination, the mayor's brutal murder unveils a series of corruption within the law enforcement system, The Detective and The Lawyer tries to uncover a plot while they face the decaying justice system. 256 pages - pdf format

New writer interested in feedback on this work, please be nice

Hey everyone, I'm the writer of this screenplay, I hope that I would receive honest and productive comments from this wonderful community, this screenplay took me a whopping 4 weeks to finish, so I would love your comments, and again, your comments will be my harpoon to a great career, hoping to learn more from professionals, that's all.

Nick Le

Hi Nick, just a few observations to start with:

Remove: Based on an old draft by Nick Le on your title page.
Add:  An email address to your title page so if someone's interested they can contact you.

Remove the IMAX instruction (that's very optimistic of you) and go minimal on camera directions in general.

Take out all your random CAPS in description.
Use SUPERIMPOSE

Examine your scenes where you write CONTINUOUS, if one shot is the stage but then we have a sniper at a window that's a different shot, different scene setup, not a continuous shot.

You have no CONT'D or MORE directions at the bottom of your page to instruct overleaf. Check your software settings for these.

You FADE IN midway on page two which is odd?

Punctuation and grammar fixes are needed throughout:
Example:

TROY (V.O.)
Sometimes I always thought about
something, true force of law
enforcement, something that is
expensive, no one can ever have.

LARRY AND TROY ARRIVES IN A DODGE CHARGER.
Should be arrive. No need for CAPS either as you've already introduced these characters.

I'm going to guess English might not be a first language.?

Your opening mystified me. You set this in 2023, however the events of 911 are relayed:

We live in challenging times, marked by guilt,
by tragedy, by uncertainty. Our
nation, last year, we faced the
horror of our lives, Al Qaeda
crashed the into the World Trade
Center.

So we come to page length of which yours is a whopping 257 pages. Based on the formula of a page roughly equating to 1 min, you have a four and a half hour movie here. Even Nolan and Scorcese won't get the greenlight with this.

You're writing a Spec script so you want 120 pages maximum, preferably shorter. Unless that is you are writing this as a series in which case you should rethink as a Pilot and post Episode 1.

I say all this to help btw. It's very unlikely someone will have the time to read all this and it's more unlikely it would be produced. Unless they bring Interval back and you have a powerful concept.

Start with editing your script in a big way first

Your logline also needs a revamp.
Post it here for revision:

https://www.simplyscripts.net/cgi-bin/Blah/Blah.pl?b-logline/

Welcome to SS, there's lots of helpful advice to be found here.
.

Thank you, Administrator, that's good enough for me, as you're aware, I'm a newbie, I'm still learning,  anyways,.comments are good, I appreciate your comments, and I did recognize my wrong spellings and errors I'm still working on it, besides, I'm still learning, so thanks again for your honesty, I'll make adjustments, and I'll make sure upcoming unproduced screenplays brings more quality and sound. Thanks again Administrator, have a good one, I'll see you in the upcomings.

Nick, don't let my words of advice put you off.

The things I mention are Industry Standard for spec scripts, and things we've all had to learn.

You wrote a huge screenplay so I should have added my congrats to you! You should be proud. You've done the hard work, it just needs editing.

I'm Libby btw.

Libby,  I knew that, like I said, I appreciate your comments and advices, it's not gonna put me off, I'll keep pushing, one time I did think that the screenplay was like a novel or a TV show, but yeah, my mind was not on the right track, I overthought too much, anyway, thank you for your advices, I'm gonna use them well. Thanks again.

Nick Le