Of Sound Mind by Kubla Khan - Short, Drama - The wealthy Hogarth clan gathers for a picnic in the woods, to be followed by a reading of the patriarch's will.  The family will never be the same. - pdf, format

I liked this - good job!

Meeting the competition criteria: picnic, family secret, drama with occasional flutters of comedy. Spot on - 10/10
Characters: all distinct enough from each other, a few nice touches to each of them. Miranda and Franklin could have had a shade more about them, though - 7/10
Dialogue: pretty good throughout, although I'd have liked to see a bit more venom from Edgar. His 'ask for the Hogarth table' line was top-notch; Hell as a high-class restaurant! No doubt with very bad service - 8/10
Story: while I saw the outcome of the will coming, you caught me out at the end. And while it's a slightly convenient way to wrap things up, I think it works - 8/10
Writing/format: while the format was fine, there were a couple of moments of slightly clunky writing. The introduction of all the characters straight after each other was slightly dense, and the word 'spastic' jarred with me a little bit - 7/10

TOTAL: 40/50

Ah, the old chestnut the reading of the will.  If you're going to do an old chestnut you really have to do some reinvention to make it fresh and sadly there's no attempt to create anything new or different. I couldn't read it as a straight drama.  The whole thing is verging on parody (which would have probably worked better).
  
I couldn't tell if the writer intended us to care or even be interested in the characters.  He starts off by rolling them off in an a sort of assembly line inventory of physical detail as they get out of the car.  It stops the script cold.  And these characters aren't people.  They're stereotypes plucked from a thousand old movies.  They speak like characters and not people - "A picnic basket. How gloriously droll."

After the business of eating and settling,  we get to the actual intent of the story which is the reading of the will.  And then for five pages it is pretty much us looking at a computer screen as Edgar spills a variety of secrets.  And nothing happens for a good four of those pages until the family dies from the poison.  You want you audience to sit watching a talking head narrating backstory for about five minutes?  

There's a similar kind of visual reading of the will in The Cat and the Canary (1979).  The deceased rattles off wishes and complains about relatives.  The only difference is that it occupies a tiny portion of the feature and we grow to know the characters as the story progresses.  With this short there isn't that luxury.  This kind of backstory is only interesting if we find the characters interesting (either love 'em or hate 'em). As written now the characters aren't even human.  Why should we be interested in anything about them?

Maybe there's hope still for the OWC. This was easily the best so far.  Good story, decent writing, easy to follow, meets all OWC requirements.  Overall, very well done.

Only real complaints would be...

1)  The descriptions of all the characters.  Too much detail for no reason given on everyone about what they're wearing.

2)  The fact that you had 2 remaining pages that you could have used for some more characterization, which would have been nice.

Good work though...I like it!

Oh bitter vengeance.
Dialogue at first seemed to have been written by an Englishman but reading on, it felt like an American going for "money with an air of stuffiness".

I don't like Edgar and completely understood how his offspring could turn into a "monumental dissapointment". With an attitude like his...

Clean. Well formatted.
Can I ask though; why does everyone borrow from already existing films? Can we see some originality?

This one was really good, and reminds of that oh-so-famous quote "Revenge is a dish best served cold" which was what Edgar was: a cold, hard b****.

I really liked this. The characters, though, had nothing really that special to them to make us care for them, really. They were just English folk who spoke as though they were back in the 1940s or something. A kind of unrealistic characteristic, to be honest. Kind of what Lakewood said, it seemed more like a parody by the way they talked and the way they were described.

Which reminds me, that's a lot of character description right there. It's nice to know what they look like though, and I have done that before in some of my scripts, so I don't want to sound like a total hypocrite.

The ending twist was good, but very cliché at the same time. It was funny, and ended in more of a comedic way than dramatic. I thought the video was a nice touch to, and the way he described what was going on between the family. Though, Dreamscale made a good point, you had two pages to work on. What you could have done is let Edgar stop talking for a moment, maybe to let the family argue a bit or something, and then he starts up again, only to reveal that there's poison in the wine.

Sean

Quoted from JamminGirl Can I ask though; why does everyone borrow from already existing films? Can we see some originality?

Because there really is no such thing as originality anymore. Almost everything has been done, and when you think you have an original idea, there's always someone out there who is able to point out a scene that's similar to a movie they've seen. It's really hard to come up with something that's 100% original.

Sean

I liked this one, one of my favorite so far, though I'm hesitant about whether or not to call this one a drama (it's closer to high school "drama" than the traditional melodrama.)

Overall an enjoyable, well-written and formatted read. My only problem, which has been echoed by the other comments, is that we didn't recieve much characterization of the four living characters before they played the tape. Maybe if we had another page or two of them chatting during the picnic, possibly even being brought together and getting along as they thought was his intention, so that Edgar's speech comes as a bit more of a shock.

Still I really enjoyed this one. Well done!

I enjoyed reading this. It was entertaining, well written and well formatted. Someone put some thought and effort into this one. As far as characterization, i felt that Edgar's comments were enough to tell me who the four were. No complaints.

I thought this was a well written and enjoyable read.

People talk about characters and originality.  For me, for what it was.  It was good, and stuck to the theme of the competition.

An argument might spice up the script.  Not sure what else to add.

Good job.

Cool! This is by far my favorite one at the moment...A little stereotypical on the rich bastards, but the crisp and vivid descriptions gave them a little life of thier own (liked the Botox and the permanent sneer)...Suspected something was up with the wine, and liked how nobody got away with anything, except for Edgar, who winds up doing the right thing (donating to charity and what not)...I might have like him to show the distastful photos, particularly the one at the rest stop...twist the knife a little deeper into Hilda...

For the most part, I enjoyed the read.  I think the writing is very crisp and didn't have any problems with the dialogue.  However, I do have a few beefs:

I was immediately put off by the introduction of characters.  It reminded me of those films which freeze frame on characters, while rattling off a little bio sheet.  In this case, I didn't think it worked in your favor.

Yes, there was a certain amount of cliche and I was hoping the ending would not venture in the direction of poison wine/food.

The characters were stock and I thought the story needed a good twist.  Although this suggestion isn't all that original, I would have liked to have seen Edgar use the greed of each family member (including Franklin) against each other.  

Since you have 2 pages left to work with, maybe it could come down to one vile of antidote to the survivor.  Obviously I'm suggesting murder here.

When all is said and done, the victor finds out the antidote is nothing more than water.  Nobody was poisoned to begin with and now, somebody is wanted for murdering the others.  Something like that just to give the script a mean spin.

Of course, then I guess it would be venturing into a different genre.

The story while familiar was nicely written, so I suspect you are a good, seasoned writer.  Despite my loathing of the character intro, I found the read nice and smooth. You handled yourself admirably for a OWC and in the 3 scripts I've read thus far , this is my favorite.  Good work.

Hadn't read this one yet. Taking out the lousy SOBs from beyond the grave.  This my kind of story.  Well told.  Well told.  I wonder at one small thing though.  Perhaps they may have had some small winces of pain before he reaches the actual telling of what he'd done?  The timing is just a 'tad' too perfect.

This is definitely my favorite so far.

This is a very, very strong entry, probably one of the best. My only real problem was the character introductions. While you described them well enough, very well actually, having them all one after the other was hard to take in.

While reading, I didn't like any of the characters. The way they spoke, the way they acted. That all changed when Edgar came into play, and was probably the reason I was so happy with the ending. I was glad they all died.

This is in my top three.

I really enjoyed this. A well thought out plot, competently executed.

You were pitching for a particular strata of society and I think your dialogue achieved this very well. You gave your characters unique voices – their different traits were apparent in their dialogue – well done!

Your descriptions were economical and effective, except for the opening character descriptions, but nothing that a trim wouldn’t fix. Interesting (and effective) that you presented them almost in Dramatis Personae style.

I liked the twist with Franklin and Hilda – I didn’t see that coming.

I liked what you did and thought it was very good. However, I just don’t think it would make for an engaging movie, so I don’t think it works as a screenplay.
A short story, yes. A radio play, yes. But not an effective screenplay. There would be insufficient happening on the screen, I think, to hold the audience.

I know the OWC is a great place to experiment and exercise (and hopefully improve!) our writing skills, and if that was your intent, then I think you succeeded. Yours is a good story, well written.