Right Off The Bat by Adam Nelson - Short, Comedy, Drama, Sport - In the summer of 1963, Charlie Conway gains friendship with a group of baseball playing suburban kids. He soon learns that this summer is not only filled with fun and games but lessons that must be learned, including friendship, maturity, and dealing with tragic loss. The summer will never be the same for Charlie Conway. 22 pages - doc, format 8)

Ambitious subject matter you’ve tackled here, a period piece, about a group of kids, experiencing tragedy.

SPOILERS

I thought the dialogue rang very true and you did a good job of creating the world of these kids.  Having no adults in the script really helped too.

Given what you were trying to do, I think twenty two pages was probably a bit limiting, because we had Charlie join the group via Pat and then within a day or two, Pat was killed and I don't think it hit as hard as it could have.

I think the relationship between Charlie and Pat needed to be fleshed out a little more by having them go through some more bonding experiences, that way the tragedy of Pat’s death would’ve hit a lot harder.

Perhaps you could place extra emphasis on Charlie’s social isolation at the start, that way Pat’s friendship and the loss of it, would also carry more weight.

I believe this story has potential and if you put a bit more work into the time the kids spend together, leading up to the tragedy, then Pat’s death could play as a big twist, which I guess, is the strong ending you’re looking for. I just think you need to set the story up as a feel good kid’s flick and then slot that killer ending in to give it maximum impact.

I hope you continue to work on this one; it would be nice to see what you come up with.

On Formatting.

You kept forgetting to write in the scene descriptions each time you changed locations. You should have written things like; Ext-Baseball Field-Day. Instead you wrote Scene 1, Scene 2 etc. Writing the scene numbers is not necessary.

I also noticed that the first scene was outside, yet you wrote; INT. a local neighbourhood, a scrawny boy is riding down the neighbourhood street delivering newspapers.

It was outside, so it should have read Ext-Street-Day. So yeah, you really need to fix the format.

There’s a thread here at Simply Scripts dedicated to answering questions about formatting and you could also take a look at a few of the other scripts on this sight, if you want some examples of correct formatting. There’s also a great book called "The Hollywood Standard" by Christopher Riley, which will tell you everything you need to know about formatting scripts.