Bad Neighbors by Ron Houghton - Short, Comedy - In modern suburbia you never know who your neighbors are... and maybe you don't want to.  9 pages - pdf, format

Ron,

A slickly written and nicely handled bit of social commentary -- not what I expected from the logline.  The kind of script you appreciate more the second time around -- never a bad thing.  Budget for the all the police activity would be an issue, but something that could be worked around to be implied rather than necessarily seen.  

Best of luck with it.

Steve

Hey Ron,

There’s a few red flags in the script which may put some people off. There’s camera angles and shots (including an establishing shot!) which are not normally part of a spec script. Also, there’s excessive use of parentheticals which can annoy some actors. Basically, if you write your action and dialogue in the correct way it should be easy to work out how to shoot this and the actors can work out for themselves how to act it.

You shouldn’t have to spell it out so much.

There’s a few unfilmable statements. ‘The detectives probably haven’t slept yet’ for example. How will the audience know this when they watch it? Will the officers have a dishevelled look? Bags under their eyes? Will they be slurping coffee? You need to show us, not tell us what is going on.

Another slightly different example – “The family back from a night at the cinema.” Normally we wouldn’t know this but the very next line of dialogue says, “Did you kids like the movie?” so the previous line is superfluous.

I do appreciate you adding a certain sense of style to jazz up the script but I think you could cut back a lot, be leaner and lose nothing from the actual story itself.

As to the story, it is a good bit of social commentary. An exaggerated and slightly humorous (my own personal opinion, I didn’t find it very funny but I could see the funny side) look at how we humans ignore what is happening right in front of us as some sort of defence mechanism. However for me the ending spoils it when the officer tells the audience what this story is about. It’s very obvious what your story is trying to say, the dialogue feels forced and expositional.

A nice idea and quite easy to read despite my criticisms. It feels more like a scene out of a larger story. Best of luck with it.

-Mark

Nice effort for the most part - the police dialogue was way too OTN/unnatural for me.

I liked some of your descriptions, particularly of the voluptuous woman's piercings. Aside from the camera cues it was an easy read. Fun stuff. Don't really have any new suggestions other than maybe have him find the bullet casing on the grass earlier on... so it escalates smoother from small stuff to the fight in the street to the big stuff with cops charging in.

Ron,

Some notes.

This one labors to portray the uninterested neighbor, the person who hunkers down and ignores what's going on around him.  In our age, it's completely doable.  It just strikes me that these neighbors are are not so terrible as neighbors.  Yes, they are a criminal enterprise, but they don't let the dogs do their business in the neighbor's yard.  They don't have loud parties every night.  They don't let litter drift into the next yard.  They don't do the things that really bad neighbors do--like paint their house purple with yellow polka-dots or add pink flamingos to the lawn.

I though the police scene at the end was far too direct.  If they have so much on the crew, why bother with the neighbors?  So, while I think this one is competently written, it isn't quite funny enough.

Best
Richard

Thanks for the feedback fellow scribes.

Don't you just hate it when everybody else is right?

I agree with the majority of notes here, including ditching all camera work, eliminating some parentheticals, and another pass with the Detective's dialog.

Great notes. Cheers!