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SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board  /  Drama Scripts  /  Shillelagh
Posted by: Don, December 1st, 2011, 5:53am
Shillelagh by Emmett O. Saunders III - Drama - A magical Irish walking stick, delivered by St. Patrick, grants one wish to each recipient in desperate life-changing moments, according to God's plan. 105 pages - pdf, format 8)
Posted by: Lon, December 3rd, 2011, 11:49pm; Reply: 1
First things first:  your logline isn't a logline.  It's a definition.  It tells us nothing about your story; who it's about, what they're trying to accomplish, or what's at stake.

That said, a few observations:

Title page: Just FYI.  If you registered this bad boy with the WGA in 1985, your reg expired twenty one years ago.  WGA reg only lasts five years.  My suggestion: register it again.

Page 2:  I don't know what the deal is with the episode listing, but working from the first paragraph:  

"When two students find a shillelagh and wish for a million dollars, they unwittingly incur the wrath of a gangster the shillelagh took the money from."  

That's a logline.  Just saying.

As for the script itself, I notice you've included a few solo sluglines -- which is to say, you don't follow it with anything.  At one point you write:

EXT. APARTMENT BUILDING � (STOCK)- EARLY MORNING

And then go directly to:

INT. DARKENED APARTMENT
A siren�t WAIL is intermixed with GUNSHOTS.
A police car�s headlights SHINE briefly through the window.


Now, I'm assuming you meant the first slug to be an establishing shot, in which case you'd want to include "EST." at the end.  Lose the (STOCK) in the slug, and follow the slug up with a brief description.  And, lose the "EARLY MORNING."  Slugs should be NIGHT or DAY.  A specific time of night or day can be made clear in the description.  For instance:

EXT. APARTMENT BUILDING - DAY - EST.

The morning sun peeks above the rooftop of a pleasant brownstone in an upscale neighborhood.


Or however you want to put it.  Now, I'm going to stop there because, sadly, your script is littered with improper grammar, misspells and other mishandlings of proper screenplay rules and format.  Brass tacks: you've got to clean this puppy up.  Lose 99% of your parentheticals (they should be used sparingly, and only to imply subtext to spoken dialogue, not to direct the character's actions).  Lose the camera directions.  Lose the FX cues.  Your job as the writer is to tell a story, not dictate the manner in which it will be filmed.  

Now, not to overstep my boundaries or make this personal, but twenty six years is a long time for a script to sit around.  It is at least a long enough time for you to have drastically improved as a writer.  The thought of which makes me hope you uploaded this blindly, without having worked on it again beforehand -- because the errors in this script are not the errors of someone with almost thirty years of experience.  I don't intend that to be an insult -- honestly, I don't -- but merely an observation.

Now I'm sure you put a lot of work into this script, but now is the time to be cruel to it.  Look at it with with a clinical eye and get rid of everything that gets in the way of the story you're telling.

Sorry if all this comes off as presumptuous or asshole-ish.  Not my intention.  

Best of luck.  Keep writing.

- Lon
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