...And a Hard Place by Courtney Love (courhaw) - Drama - A small time thief gets into big trouble when a diamond and a bag of money are stolen. 97 pages - pdf, format

Courtney,

Gave this a read as promised. I liked the title, so it drew me in. You've a very screenplay type writing style, almost 'hard-boiled'. It's very different from my own. reminded of pro scripts, maybe this is where I'm going wrong...

Quoted from AAHP He’s the manager. He’s also a thief.

This type of line is pretty good if you can show it. Otherwise it's an unfilmable. You're telling the reader something that would be nigh impossible to film.

I don't know you, so maybe you can get this read by the powers that be, those green light type folks. If not, and this is a spec script, there's a lot of camera direction that'll put a lot of folks off. Unless they are vital directions to plot it'd be improved of the directions were kept to a bare minimum.

There's a phone conversation intercut with images, but you didn't say what these images were until after the conversation. These would be better inbetween the dialogue.
Who's Evan? Is this a 3 way chat? This section needs some clarity. I can keep up, but most would be very confused and lost by now. New characters, unless they are supposed to mysteries, should be clearly introduced.

Your dialogue is pretty good, smacks of US movie type talk, that's a good thing by the way.

Few typos here and there, some of the dialogue needs a bit more punctuation and quote marks, e.g.

Quoted from AAHP True. But at some point I expected those risks to change from does she have herpes to how mad will she be if I put it in...

if you added - 'does she have herpes' to 'how mad will

this would have made it a bit easier to read. Good bit of banter that too.

p.13 - There's an error to which I'm also prone, When you start a new scene under a new slug you need to write who's in that scene. I realised the three men are there as we're now outside the restaurant. Nevertheless, you do need to name them, for clarity's sake.

The scenes mentioned in the dialogue on p13 need an insert before them, otherwise it feels as if the characters have suddenly whizzed away to a new locale.

Quoted from AAHP Suki opens the door. Her father, Aiko,

This is telling rather than showing. How do we know it's her father. You can get away with 'he looks like he might be her father' or something better, but it's nearly always better to show rather than to tell. I know this, but I often have difficulty doing it. If only I could practice what I preach.

You need to lose all the continueds at the start and end of the pages.

There's an awful lot of expositionary dialogue going on before p17. I undertand this is important to your plot but it'd work better if it was more hidden, with some distractions. Pages and pages of dialogue need some action lines, people rarely sit and just talk. They are always doing something else.

By the way, I don't mean to come across as harsh, I know I'm mainly pointing out what I consider errors or points for imporvement so far, but I am quite enjoying the script.

t.b.c....

I'm back. Finished it.

I wrote a script a while ago on a similar theme, and I encountered some of the problems I think you have here. While it can be interesting for a while to have two or more characters talk about doing a heist / job it quickly gets boring. Most of the people who read it said 'there's too much talk, not enough action'. One git sang the Elvis song 'A Little Less Conversation' to me. To my face. The git.

I feel the same here. When you watch a movie like The Killing or Reservoir Dogs the characters spend very little talking about the actual job. They talk alright, but it's about other stuff,

Don't get me wrong here. A lot of the dialogue is very good. But it'd be a whole lot better if some of the superflous stuff was trimmed back.

For example p. 40 works a lot better than a lot of the previous scenes. The characters are doing something interesting that's well described and there's some underlying tension there. For some of the earlier scenes there felt like there was little for anyone to lose.

I did like your brief but powerful descriptions of characters

Quoted from AAHP The old guy and his hot-piece-of-A** girlfriend

This brings up a perfect mental image in as few words as possible. It's gold in a script.

P. 41 - The old guy begins to walk away.
It's better to not say 'begins to', or 'starts to', I think it was LC who pointed out that someone could possibly 'begin to cry', otherwise don't use that phrasing.

I noticed you've a habit of stating 'wait' as an action line. While this worked in part, overuse became a bugbear for me later on. Show us something we can see.

Overall I found most of the action writing pretty good. You get to the point quick and with some style. My only real problem is the dialogue. There's too much, particularly midway, and a lot of it could go. There's also a lot of characters. I'd have a think about if they are all necessary to your story. I found it often difficult to keep up with them.

The camera directions become few and far between later in the script. I'd suggest losing the others as they don't really add anything and take away, rather than improve the story.

I'd recommend naming all characters with dialogue. It helps the reader get a handle on who's speaking, even if they are just a minor character.  My latest rule is if they speak they need a name. If not they need a job i.e. Policeman, Porter etc.

I quite enjoyed it on the whole. Not a bad story. I particularly liked a few of the characters and some of the scenes were great.

So I've gotten to page 16 and I've yet to really figure what the script is about. the first 3 pages were extremely confusing. There was alot of background action that made almost no sense to me. I think you're modeling this after Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. Which could good. I'm just thinking the plot should move along a little faster.

p.s thanks for the read.