Assassin by Jonathan Peterson - Short, Thriller, Drama - A day in the life of an assassin. 7 pages - pdf, format 8)

I actually quite liked this one. Zero dialogue. Ten pages of action, you held my attention. Not because I admire your writing, I don't. I think more than several lines could read better.

It was an interesting story. Not gonna put too much effort into this unless the writer is around...

James

First of all, I enjoyed it. So you must have done something right. I liked the atmosphere, the suspense and the tension. But of course, I can see some improvements can be made as well.

Please give us some visual info about the characters when they first appear, at least their age. It'll leave us something to imagine with when we are reading the script.

I liked the internal struggle of the assasin, but somehow I think it's a little cliche as well. We've seen many assassins feeling guilty of killing people. I was groaning a bit when he was trying to kill himself AND it's on the first page of the script!

Page 4 - I can see a potential plot hole here. How did the assassin know how the masked man looked like? So I don't get why the Assassin seem to know who to follow outside the hotel.

The major problem for me is "why"? All of these actions are good, and I can definitely feel for the assassin, but why are these all happening? Is there a rival organization that tried to rid of our assassin? Was it a trap that the assassin was lured to the hotel room?

If you can reveal the reason behind all these action, this will become a very nice script.

Good luck.


Herman

It's a bold choice, even in a 7-page short, to avoid any direct use of dialogue, although there are some places where a scream, or the kids playing, could have been given specific lines of dialogue.

Given that you are trying to avoid dialogue, it makes the page a bit intimidating (dialogue adds white space to the page).  To help with that, you might want to go through and trim the action lines further:

1) eliminating "to be" verbs like "Assassin is sitting" becomes "Assassin sits", or

2) fixing novelistic language like "apparently because" - e.g. on page 1: "He hasn’t gotten any sleep apparently because his eyes are bloodshot. He is also a little drunk." could become "His exhausted, bloodshot eyes look around for the next bottle of gin."

3) In general, just try to avoid explaining someone's motivation without showing it.  Like when he parks a few blocks from the hotel to avoid suspicion.  It doesn't really need to be explained, but it's also not something the director can visually convey just in the way he parks the car.

But I think the biggest challenges here are two-fold - having us connect with the assassin in such a short story without hearing him talk even once.  The alcoholism, presumably because he hates himself and his line of work, is one thing.  But I'm not entirely sure I can believe any assassin worth his money would get as upset as he does about killing a masked, armed, twenty-something, home invader who had just unloaded his ammo clip on the assassin's couch.

Still, the general premise and some of your choices are sound.  I liked the detailed beats of following the assassin as he went about his day.  And you did a good job of repetition (specifically with the children's innocent playing acting like a torture on the conscience of the assassin).

Thank you guys for your constructive criticism! I have really been looking for these kinds of responses! You guys do make a good point. Why is this happening? I didn't take that into account when I wrote this screenplay. I mostly wrote this as a character study of the assassin, but I guess it ended up as a rushed draft 1 (considering the fact that I wrote this in one day lol). I will definitely take all of your criticism in consideration. Thank you very much for reading!