Credible by Steve Meredith - Short, Drama - In the wake of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, John Thompson, the Director of the National Security Agency confronts Eric Ingram, the Director of National Intelligence, about Eric's continued reluctance to take John's intelligence reports seriously. 10 pages - pdf, format 8)

First, if you have a newscaster reading us the news, you don't need to put it in the description. That is a redundancy.

It's frowned upon to write numbers in dialogue. Not against the rules, but frowned upon.

Unless the details you give your characters are crucial, I'd recommend leaving them out, ie salt and pepper hair. Try to give insight into who your character is.

A smaller quibble, you use "John" too many times in your actions. On the top of page two,  you have three action/description paragraphs where you say John a total of 7 times.

Using ":" after the characters' names is improper formatting.

You have a cliched and looked-down-upon opening dialogue exchange between your two main characters. Once again, try to have your dialogue, like character descriptions, tell us about who these characters are.

I would try to trim the dislogue if possible. Some of the text blocks get a little heavy. I'm not sure if you wrote this with intentions of filming, but I would recommend cutting from the talking heads style scene and intercut with visuals of something else. More exciting or visually stimulating.
Possibly just show the things they are talking about. It will help to alleviate the dislogue'so bogged down feel.

On page 8, you have a messed section. I would leave out SUPERIMPOSE, and just describe DC itself. THEN go to the interior of the car.

The ending newscast needs to be broken up. It's too long to be impactful.

The ending is anticlimactic. I was hoping for at least a small twist. 8 pages is a lot of time to invest with out having a real payoff.


Overall, it's not bad. It feels like a part of a larger story. I could definitely see it as a rough draft scene from a movie like Body of Lies. Some of the dialogue is too on the nose, such as when he describes his job title and how many years he's been doing it. And there are a lot of cliche lines. The good thing is, they are so cliched, they pop up in real movies all the time.

You have a decent start here, I would just try to tighten it, punch up the dialogue, and find a more satisfying climax.

Hope this helped.