It All Ends In Rage by Rick Cook - Short, Drama - When a son approaches his father about buying a gift with his own money, it leads to an argument.  5 pages - pdf, format

Congrats on getting your first script done and dusted.

It really needs a lot of work though.

Not really much of a story here, well no story really. Not sure what you think the drama is.

Straight up you can lose the fancy title page, it might look flash but it comes off very amateur.

For a first go the formatting isn’t terrible but it’s not great either.

You give us no information about the father or son’s age and no character description.

What is an average living room?

Your writing tends to be very passive.

You forget to change the slug line when you move between the boy in his room, and the father on his couch.

There is no need to say "he says", we know he says it because it is in the dialogue.

Some people might disagree, but I don’t think there is ever a good reason to capitalise dialogue.

The dialogue is on the nose and the writing, in general, doesn’t read overly well, for example "His fathers face already grows red to his already red face".

I think you have some of the basics down; just need to read a few more scripts and articles on formatting and you will be on your way.

Hi Rick,
You should fix the title page. Just keep it in traditional format; you're not going to impress anyone with a glamorous title page.

"He's doing Lord knows what." You should be a little more specific than that.

How old is the son supposed to be? It would seem a bit odd for a teenager to ask his father for permission to go to Wal-Mart.

The story itself was too overdramatic for my tastes. I guess the father was in a foul mood because of the divorce, but he was so cartoonish and angry that I found it hard to believe. The script might be improved if you include a moment where the father softens a bit and shows that he cares about his son.

Rick,

Some notes.

Congrats on finishing a script.  It's never easy.

This isn't much of a story.  It's a one trick pony that rehashes the same points over and over.  I'm sure it sounds dramatic in your mind, but there is very little action besides some argument.  When you think of story, try thinking in meaningful action, and dialogue can be action.  For me, it would be better if the son came home with the gift, and then they have the argument.  Yeah, dad's angry with his former wife, and he's not going to mellow, but show that.  Maybe he smashes the gift.  Maybe the gift was actually for dad.  Maybe after he smashes the gift he goes out and buys another for his son to give to the girlfriend.  There are a lot of ifs, but you don't explore them.  In any case, read as many scripts as you can and go back to the computer.  Keep writing.

Best
Richard