The Making of a Protege by Garfield Whyte - Drama - A sexy summer saga of growing up and falling in love. 130 - pdf, format 8)

I see a lot of ink on the page, show don't tell. When a character uses the phone, and we hear both sides of the conversation. Add (V.O) so the reader knows this too.130 pages is a lot for a spec, you will need to look at cutting away a lot of fat, to make it flow and read better. Try not to give your characters long speaches, about 1-2 sentences 3 max.

Garfield - the first two pages are filled with problems:

You start with an unfilmable:

Quoted Text It’s the beginning of summer 2014 and high school basketball star TAJ JAMES aka TJ will be going off to college at the end of summer to take up his basketball scholarship.

Your first action block is about 5 lines too long.

Quoted Text TJ disappears in the night heading to his home about 5 minutes away.

Five minutes away is another unfilmable and should actually be a different scene heading. e.g.,

EXT. SIDEWALK - NIGHT

Quoted Text TJ (V/O) Maggie you are so sweet, what a summer this will be for me. You are no Susan, nor Keisha, nor Melissa... so different from all the other girls. I can’t believe I was in you room so late, kissing you yet not getting inside of you. TJ boy that’s so unlike you. Oh boy! This is going to be a summer unusual yet a summer to look forward to... I am actually dating a virgin. Hmm! What am I going to tell Uncle Peter why I am not going to sped the summer with him. You know uncle the last 3 summers with you were so much fun, I think we both can say that, but this summer will be different, I wanna be close to home... my heart is right here this summer. If you only knew what’s happening at home this year you would understand and wish me well.

This is way too long and far too on the nose - as if you are trying to cram all your background into a single voice over.

Quoted Text TJ Hey sweetie, wish I didnt have to leave. MAGGIE I wish you could but you know you couldnt stay. You wouldnt understand how nervous I was while you were here.

These are formatted incorrectly - MAGGIE is not physically in the scene and you need to format that correctly and TJ is on the phone - also formatted wrong.

Check out these phone conversation tips here:

http://www.whatascript.com/screenplay-format-10.html

You need to do a lot of homework on script formatting - read some scripts - do some research and you'll get there. Right now - as is - it is hard to get past the errors. Best of luck.

Quoted from Patrick I see a lot of ink on the page, show don't tell. When a character uses the phone, and we hear both sides of the conversation. Add (V.O) so the reader knows this too.130 pages is a lot for a spec, you will need to look at cutting away a lot of fat, to make it flow and read better. Try not to give your characters long speaches, about 1-2 sentences 3 max.

I just read the script from the movie Dogma by Kevin Smith. I've always liked that movie, so I wanted to check out the script. Well, it was over 160 pages long! And it's full of people talking. There is a ton of ink on the page. Yet, it flows, reads great, even though characters go into long speeches every 10 seconds.

There is no formula to write a great movie.

'Nobody knows anything.'

Goldman said that in the very fine Adventures in the Screen Trade. William that is, not the banker with Sachs.

Nobody thought Deadpool would do as well as it is. And how many times have they rebooted the Fantastic Four? Etc.

R

Quoted from Demento There is no formula to write a great movie.

Quoted from rendevous 'Nobody knows anything.

I think you both hit the nail on the head. However, I’m still in the dark about ‘BLACK’ or ‘WHITE’ on the page (as some readers will state). I remember Pia stating (in an OWC comment I believe), that there was a lot of ‘White’ on the page. Which I thought was more akin to ‘Dialog’, meaning the ink was contained in a column (leaving more white space), whereas ‘Black’ or a lot of ink would donate more action blocks? I’m still confused about that…

Usually, if I want to get into something new, I try not to reinvent the wheel and just follow the crowd. I stumbled upon a quick fix for big chunks of text or dialog that can be remedied using similar techniques as big hitters like Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio.

For eg: The Lorax: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ina22/splaylib/Screenplay-Lorax.pdf

It opens with some voice over and a song, and everyone on screen is singing but, they broke up the entire sequence with action. Then on pg 17 to the end of pg. 18, Ted is just realizing what the real world looks like and there’s really no place for dialog, however, they broke up that action sequence with something simple like Ted vocalizing his confusion. Otherwise, that would have been about 2 full pages of action. For these guys it probably wouldn’t matter, but they still adhere to some type of formatting rule to ensure they don’t annoy the wrong person.

I guessing the right balance between action and dialog would ensure you won’t lose the reader too quickly?

Sorry I hijacked your thread, amigo.