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Fifteen Minutes by Lenny Mancusi (lenman) and Anthony Russo (ajrscreenworks) - Short, Drama - Two men discuss life's little annoyances on the way to meet a friend. 6 pages - pdf, format
Needless to say, I had to read this piece. And I thought it was a good one. The characterization was realistic and very believable. Dialog was too; I've often had the paintball gun conversation in my car.
If anything, this seems like part of a feature. Maybe it's because you don't explain Frank at all. Maybe it's because I wanted to read more.
Actually the title comes from the fact that Kenny thinks everything takes 15 minutes to do. And yeah, we thought about going with "Mr." there, but it seemed overly deferential. In our minds, these were low level guys reporting to a mid-level guy...
And yeah, we were going for a "Pulp" vibe while trying not to stray too close as to draw comparisons.
Phil - awesome that you dug it that much. Thanks for checking it out.
AJ... Mancusi, huh! don't recognize your name... sorry
Your logline was great, because you didn't give nothing away, and if you had, wouldn't have been the same effect. Well, atleast for me. But this worked, so good on the both of you.
Not much to add, well written, quick read and a very good story. Could definitely be expanded.
I enjoyed this one, too -- though I am at a loss as to who your collaborator might be. Is that somebody we know?
Funny about the paintball thing. Like Phil, I have also had similar discussions. Weird. In my version, if a cop spots somebody with 3, the driver gets a ticket on principle alone.
This does indeed feel like something plucked from a larger work -- given the Madigan character who is only mentioned and never seen on-screen -- and the lack of any apparent motive for what Tom ends up doing. There is clearly more story surrounding this little episode.
We can fill in any necessary blanks in the story ourselves, of course -- it is not hard to conceive a scenario on our own -- and any further discussion of Frank might very well give away what you are doing with the end.
Given that, I would advise against adding too much. I mean, it does stand alone just fine. But some subtle foreshadowing might add a little extra edge to this, if you can come up with something appropriate.
Thanks for the read - it always makes me feel good when you chime in.
As for my co-writer, he's a friend of mine who was bitten by the bug, and who told me he had this idea for a story a while back. So we knocked it around a while and got it on paper. Hopefully you'll hear from him soon with his own stuff, though we plan to write two features together...
As for the story, yeah, this is just a snapshot in the lives, so to speak, and we wanted the audience to fill in their own blanks, which as you said is not very hard to do...
KENNY What, Tom? I know you saw that. He changed lanes without signaling. TOM So do a lot of people. Gonna give yourself a stroke one day, Kenny.
Again with the names in the dialogue. You could just cast them as driver and passenger. Especially in a short. Do you talk to people you've known for years like this??? feels off to me. Just sounds more pro to me if you leave them out. Rarely do we use each other's names when talking. Especially back to back like that.
Used to keep eggs in my car. Somebody cut me off, I'd pull in front of em and lob one backwards on their windshield. Became a pretty good shot over the years.
Darn good. realistic characters and dialogue. Feels like the start of a feature. Or an outake of one. Like the rant about gelatin ball guns.
As for the names, yeah, I would agree that it's not something that would happen in real life; but in a short, I think you have to force-feed it a bit in order to make your characters seem real. The feedback we're getting on Circalit is that people can "identify" with these guys (don't know if that's a good thing) and I think that's probably because they know them as Kenny and Tom...