Midnight in Venice by Hugh Kelly (jcurl) - Drama, Romance - Two New York couples and their single friend jet off to Paris, France and Venice, Italy for what they think is going to be a relaxing, fun experience. However, each of the them begin to find themselves in romantic entanglements with exciting, conflicting, and sometimes deadly consequences. 101 pages - doc, format

Kelly...

So many things wrong with this and I don't know where to begin.  First, get rid of the opening credits -- camera directions and the dates on your so called title page.  Your font is "10," and it's suppose to be, "12."
Your formatting is way off.  Nothing wrong with using word pad but you need to know the schematics and clearly you don't.  "celtix website have free software for download.  I recommend you get it.  Look at a few other scripts then compare them to yours and you'll see the difference.  "Huge."

You have this passage...

EXT.  UPPER EAST SIDE APARTMENT BUILDING-DAY
CUT TO:  An exterior shot which pans up to the penthouse on the ground.
Can you explain this?  Yea, I know what your trying to do but it's wrong.  All wrong, PERIOD.

Your slugline tells us it's an outside shot (EXT.).  We can see that on the screen as well.  Again leave stuff like this to the experts.  If your going to leave that slugline in here then may I suggest do it this way...

EXT.  UPPER EAST SIDE APARTMENT BUILDING - DAY and personally, I'd lose the upper eastside and get this across in a brief line of action.  But this is just Ghost.

This is just the tip of the iceberg here and I don't recognize your name and for those reasons, my review of this is complete.

You may have a story here but no one's going to read this, really.  Read screenwriting books, learn all you can.

Good Luck,

Ghostwriter22

jcurl,

Actually I was intrigued by ghost's review, so I took a quick look at the first few pages to see if was as bad as he says it was.

Ghost is unfortunately correct about the formatting.  I feel as though I have to do you one more favor and point out your liberal use of a narrator; that's the least effective (and least professional) way to get exposition into the hands of the audience.

Assuming you can nail the formatting thing, try in your re-write to give us facts about the back-story through dialogue and narrative - i.e., a character looks at a photograph, or flashes back to something, or hears a voice, or reveals something in the normal course of conversation, etc.

This is what makes screenwriting different - and far more difficult, IMO - than novel writing.

Good luck - AJR