Kristallnacht by Spencer G - Short, Drama - About the events that occurred on November 9th, 1938 and into the early morning hours of the 10th in Germany. The film follows a Jewish man, David, and his wife, Deborah, on this night and what they do to stay out of danger. 11 pages - doc, format

Hey everyone I wrote this and I would like to thank simplyscripts for hosting it for me. Please give me any and all honest feedback on this as I am looking to improve greatly.

Is my script really that bad?

Spencer G., you need to read other peoples screenplays and post reviews for them. That will increase your chances of having your own scripts read. If you read my newest short Because I Can, and post a review, I'll check this out.

This is like the grade seven school pageant version of Kristallnacht.  A short and shrill dramatization of history is not going to impress anyone if all you offer is the schoolbook version of events with a big dollop of melodrama thrown in ('Why are the Nazis doing this to us poor helpless Jews?'... etc...)  Strive for insight, not sentimentality.

Ditto with Bryan on this one.

You would definately benefit a lot by reading some other scripts on this thread, not only to fix formatting, but to greatly improve story telling.

You don't actually introduce your characters.  Who are MAN and WOMAN?  How old are they?  What do they look like?  It's okay to leave some names anonymous, but since I later find out these are David and Deborah, how are we supposed to know when reading?

The main problem I had with this is you have far too much going on that I have no idea what's happening.  The first five pages are just plain confusing.

Next up is your dialogue.  This was very unnatural and unrealistic sounding and bland.  It was somewhat painful to go through it and it didn't reveal anything about characters or plot really.  Just there...

A bunch of your action sequences uses passive voice, something you need to watch out for.  Avoid "are being" and for the most part, verbs ending in "-ing" in general.  There's a thread in the formatting board that you should find about this, it's where I learned about it.

Ingrid's house is in the country, but the country is only a mile away from the city?  This didn't really make sense to me.

Don't include camera movements like the crane raising at the end.

Try reading some of the scripts on this site that have a lot of replies because there's a reason so many people read them.  You can learn a lot that way.  Also in the way of formatting, I know you're using word, but there's spacing issues with your dialogue.

-Pat

As a side note, you're going to piss a lot of people off by complaining about no one reading your script when you haven't reviewed other people's.

I have reviewed some scripts and I'm reading a few now. I'm taking everything you guys have said into consideration and I'm going to fix the script soon.