Revolver 13 by Bob Meseke - Drama - A gun is purchased by a young man for his pregnant wife's protection as he goes off to join the military.  Things happen along the way as the gun goes from owner to owner and affects many lives in very different ways.  The gun is a chrome plated .38 caliber snub-nose revolver with pearl handles and becomes the focal point of the movie - it is the main character, the star. 116 pages

production: Please keep your comments about the story not about the format, thanks. - pdf, format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Well I had a list of the first 10 pages, but since we have to focus on the story .... well it made it quite a bit short. I will say this though, that 252 word dialogue bit needs to go or be changed.

As for the story .... nothing particularity interesting happens within the 10 pages that I've read, the best would be Billy buying a gun for his wife, which seems to be out of the blue. There's no actual reason provided for Billy thinking his wife needs a gun, he just buys one. Even his wife doesn't have a definite stance on getting the gun. With the gun being "the star" of the story it should have more of a dramatic punch than this.

just my two cents.

Hey Bob,

I’ve read 50 pages over the last day.

To start off, I really like the idea of this story; a lose narrative about a single gun and the lives that are changed by it. You are able to tell many different stories and tackle many different themes. You have a great outline for a really interesting film.

The biggest problem so far is the dialogue. For the most part the dialogue comes across stilted. I’ve never heard anyone speak the way your characters speak and it hurts the flow of the story. Most of the time the characters are just stating facts about what’s happening or their intentions. A rewrite with the intention of creating natural sounding dialogue would really help.

An example would be on page 3 where 18 year old Sam offers Billy the stolen test answers for free because they are best friends. We don’t need Sam to tell us that because we know from the other scenes we’ve seen with them, we already know they are close.

Basically it should just be Sam saying “look what I got, want em’” and Billy saying “no” and within those two sentences we see that Sam is a trouble maker and Billy is honest.

If you ever see a way to explain something visually instead of through dialogue, take it.

All of the dialogue feels the same. There is no change in vernacular that helps separate the characters. I feel like I’m just hearing you talk through the characters and not the characters talking for themselves.

I like the narrator peppered in through the story giving off statistics about guns in America. It reminds me of Noir films form the 1950’s. Movies like The Killing and Network are great examples of good narration.

As for the stories so far; I think they all work and the way they connect works well. Every time the story shifts to another person I’m interested and excited to see what comes next. The priest story feels like it’s been done before and I wish there was more time taken to explore his character.

I looked it up and I don’t think its police procedure to blow up confiscated weapons. From what I’ve researched, weapons and ammunition are either melted down in blast furnace facilities or dumped in the ocean (which is weird but that’s not the point right now) or kept in an evidence locker to be sometimes used at replacement side arms if the gun meets standards but only temporarily until the officer can get a new weapon from the state.

While you only want reviews to focus on the story I do implore you allow people to give you pointers on the formatting of your script. A lot of the people on this discussion board are experts on this type of thing and have helped me immensely on becoming a better writer. If you want any producers to take this story seriously the script needs to go through a thorough rewrite.

I’ll keep reading the script and let you know of what I think of the rest of it.

Best,
Logan

Thanks Logan for taking the time to read part of my script. I will read it over and check out the dialog... maybe in an attempt to make it real I also made the dialog boring. Many script dialogs I've read sound very phony ..... in the award winning movie "Juno" I thought some of the dialog was too witty and premeditated.

Anyway thanks again for the kind and inspiring words.

I did get a chance to read your short piece, "Work Opportunity" and was absorbed into it.  Just wish it didn't stop when it did. I'm reading "Paper Airplane" now.