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I can see some overwriting, the odd misplaced comma. Also bad sentence structure in places.
I'll give some examples.
Code
"Pinkerton has brown hair swimming with grease, slicked back
from his forehead. He has a thick mustache and a God Bless
America T-shirt that covers his beer gut. He is wearing
sunglasses even though it is night time out.
"
No need to mention about it being night time out. Also the wording is off in this paragraph. Reword it to make it roll off the tongue. At the moment it's very... staccato.
Code
"Dale sits up after snorting his line of coke.
"
We already know he's snorting coke. No need to mention coke again in this particular sentence.
Code
"He starts eating the chips
noisily and Dale stares at him.
"
Whenever you go to write 'starts' in a screenplay, ask yourself if it is really necessary. Guess what the right answer is here?
Code
"A group of TEENS dressed up in Halloween costumes come out
from the woods, cheerfully talking.
"
No need for the word 'up'... nor 'from the' (replace with 'of'). I'd also replace 'cheerfully talking' with laughing and joking or something as cheerfully talking just sounds proper shit.
I find the constant beats annoying and often unnecessary.
I feel that I've given you enough information on overwriting, bad sentence structure and poor word choices now, so I will not point out any more. I'll look at your story now.
Oh yeah, no need for Cut To's. It's taken as a given once you switch to a new scene heading.
Page 6 - what happened to not letting him know they are cops?
Code
"We hear chanting:
"
Why include the above sentence? It isn't necessary.
page 7 - the teens are still chanting? You didn't mention that it was them chanting in the first place.
Well... it seems hastily written and not a lot happens. There's no real story. Two cops break into a warlocks house and get killed, end of story. Nobody learns or discovers anything new about themselves. There's not much more to say. If I were to mark this out of 10, I would give it a three. But it also depends on how old you are. If you're under 13 then it's a 6.
I can see a few peeps readying pitchforks regarding your writing. A few orphans and and 'we', not a problem for some but you might get a few comments about it.
Er, you can't put action like 'he shrugs' into dialogue. And beats are put in separate lines with their own margins. Most software calls them parenthesis.
Reading further, I think you could eliminate every single beat and the sentence would still make sense.
Oh lord, these beats are literally killing me. I rarely stop reading a script but this may be too much.
Well, I just finished. And I'm really sorry but this was... Terrible, I can't say it any other way. It seems to be a pisser but it wasn't funny in any way at all, maybe except when they push the teens down the stairs. And oh man, those beats nearly gave me a heart attack. This needs a lot of work, and I mean a lot. Apologies if I was harsh.
I'm out after 2 pages of nothing but ridiculous banter that doesn't go anywhere, doesn't mean anything, and makes these 2 cops out to be complete buffoons.
Writing is poor, extremely stiff, and full of mistakes.
Title - a play on a known film. It can work, not my preferred thing but that's me
Logline - like that, rather good actually. Hope the script is likewise
Try to avoid CUT To etc I don't normal comment on orphans - sentences of just one word - but the one with lap is so easy to remove. By doing this the read is quicker and cleaner. Later the word bag is the same. Why do I need to know pinkertons hair colour? Don't put beat in the dialogue or action descriptions Why are you using beat so often in dialogue? Eg sarcasm should be in brackets below the characters name as a separate line "Whatever saucy pants' - best line I've read so far, not sure it fits but it was funny Look we are at p5 they are entering the house and on reflection there has been a load of stuff that isn't needed They walk upstairs In an empty, creaky house , sounds like Scooby Doo Avoid we see. Everything you describe is us seeing so no need First time I have ever seen a note thanking and apolgizing after the script. Actually I thought that was quite polite.
Finished
Ok, not the best, needs a Lot of work and you need to understand scripts.
The teens didn't do much for me, In fact they TAKE AWAY from the bad guy, we see so little of him.
BUT... Dirty cops, buying their drugs, or trying to steal them, from a Dodgy warlock. Good idea. Work at it.
The Elevator Most Belonging To Alice - Semi Final Bluecat, Runner Up Nashville Inner Journey - Page Awards Finalist - Bluecat semi final Grieving Spell - winner - London Film Awards. Third - Honolulu Ultimate Weapon - Fresh Voices - second place IMDb link... http://www.imdb.com/name/nm7062725/?ref_=tt_ov_wr
As mentioned above, you will probably get some negative feedback regarding the script, so please receive them with an open mind, as a lot of them is just readers trying to get a grasp of the story and try to offer suggestions.
"Mumbo Jumbo", as indicated at the end of your script, may truly be what this script is. The dialogue is in need of some serious work, as it does read like a conversation between teenagers than grown-up adults...and what is up with all the beats? Descriptions can also be parred down a bit. I don't usually comment on formatting, as story is all that matters, but still, work on proper formatting as well.
Nevertheless, I read all the way through, and was mildly accepting of the story. Could turn into a potential short film if the story is more structured. Good luck
Some good bits of dialogue. Asshole characters. Dirty cops, aggressive language. So some promise in that dark crime underbelly kinda way. One way to punch up some scares would be to describe the "creepy hallway" better. Set the mood. Chanting in a different language was a cool element. I liked the sacrificial altar. This would've been a good excuse to show some horror. Maybe have an actual demon or devil there next to altar. I liked the different take on magic powders as street drugs. And witches as druglords. That is a good premise.
Light on horror. Some gore. More suspenseful action.
Not totally incoherent but def not the way a script should read. You had beats all over your dialogue. The two cops seemed like fat slobs, certainly not my image of most cops.
Well, you tried. Brush up on some other screenplays around here, check out the formatting and such. This is a really helpful place to be!
Pg.1 Where did the Call of Duty game come from? Unless it plays in later it’s just a bizarre addition to the scene.
“pulls out a bag of chips miraculously from the glove compartment” How is that miraculous?
Pg. 2 Parentheticals (beats) need their own line and this “*he shrugs*” is wrong. Ideally you should just cut all these out though. You don’t want to clutter your dialogue with ‘beats’ and the actors can figure it out for themselves. If you do need to indicate some sort of pause or trailing off “…” is the way to go, I think.
I get the impression that this is from someone newer to screenwriting. So my main advice is to read a lot of scripts and brush up on the format.
Story-wise this never caught on for me. I think it would’ve worked a little better had they been just addicts, not cops. Then their fate would’ve been the cost of their desperation. That does appear to be what’s going on, but in the beginning it sounds as if they are in the middle of a stakeout and I think that just confuses the theme. The ending also lacked punch for me. It wrapped up too quickly.
If you were to go forward with this, I’d strip it all the way back to the basic theme presented in the title, and figure out ways to emphasize the realities of addiction through witch craft imagery or practice.
Good luck and congrats on completing the challenge.
I liked the title but unfortunately that was all I liked about this one.
The writing isn't good at all, so many problems but the main one was those (beat's) which was like a speed bump when reading and really disturbed the read.
I want to try and find something good in the story but again I'm struggling - two cops, idle chatter and whole lot of nothing. Why were they hiding from the kids at the beginning? Why did they try to kill the warlock? What's with the Egyptian statue? What just happened?
I'm sorry but this one needs lots of work - instead of wasting the first 5 pages on idle chatter, try to set up character and establish the story.
By the first three lines I can tell this is a new writer. I hope you entered this challenge to get some help. There are many issues here, most can be fixed by reading a lot of well written and properly formatted screenplays.
No more CUT TO's No more "we sees" No more (beat)--like ever No more *shrugs* No more CONTINUED No more camera directions
Your writing in general needs work. Lots of overwriting, lots of repetition, telling instead of showing and also some made up stuff. Here is an example of everything I just mentioned:
EXT.BACKYARD-NEAR MIDNIGHT(Near midnight? No)
Dale surveys the backyard(repetitive- you told us in your slug where we were).
We see: (What the heck is this?)
The backyard(repetitive-you could just say yard since we know its the backyard) has a large concrete wall enclosing it. In the middle of it,(This is a bad sentence and needs to be reworded) is a HUGE (no caps) eEgyptian-like statue. It has (of) a man’s body with an animal like head. Below it, a pedestal The pedestal(repetitive) is covered in blood.
Back to a terrified Dale(This sounds terrible). Behind him, we can seethe teens inside the house, silent, watching him out the open door. (this is all jumbled up, doesn't read smooth at all) He senses this(you're telling us. you need to show us). He slowly pulls out his service pistol and turns around, aiming his gun(repetitive) at the teens. (Slowly, he pulls out his pistol, turns and aims it at the teens.)
As for the story, well...my biggest issue was, I didn't like the main characters so honestly, I didn't care what happened to them. They didn't come across like cops at all. They came across as cartoonish. Some of the things they said made me hate them, like when Pinkerton channels Juno and calls the Warlock "homeslice". They were total jerks. I wanted them to die. I had no one to root for. You have to want someone to win. If it's the Warlock who wins, then make us like him even though he's evil. There are villains we root for like: Darth Vader, every member of the Corleone family, Scarface, Lestat... OR...just make us feel bad when the cops are killed. Give them some kind of endearing qualities. They can be flawed but not to the point that we don't care about them at all.
Just keep writing...and read A LOT of screenplays. Hey, congrats finishing something for this challenge!
A pisser, no doubt. I won't spend too much time on this one due to the author's note at the end. Clearly, nobody was supposed to take this seriously.
Anyway, all the "horror" business at the end went over my head but I don't think that matters. First and foremost, this was supposed to be funny. It wasn't. Dale and Pinkerton came off as blatantly stock characters right off the bat and their dialogue was mostly inane rambling. There were times where I almost enjoyed it given just how inane and ridiculous it was but it never quite happened.
So yeah. Not for me. For a pisser though, it could've been much worse.
Not bad, I enjoyed reading this. There's clearly some issues, the dialogue between the cops at the beginning is unnecessary. I would have had their conversation set the tone a bit more, maybe talk about the rumours more around the warlock.
The chanting teenagers were a nice touch, the whole eyes of the warlock, I liked that. The descriptions are a little long and the beats are really distracting. Other than that, it read easily enough for me.
No comments read before. Non-native speaker – take it or leave it.
The Addicts of Eastwick
Hello!
There are many implausible thing I want to mention first:
1. Taking real cocaine has an immediate effect even on high addictives, who take it all day. You nearly start to get high while taking it. Here it's like eating snickers.
2. The very latest moment here, when the cops finally must had to take their guns for protection is the "jars filled with eyeballs"-thing.
3. Why don't they shoot at the teens? Since meeting the warlock, the cops must know it's not a place of innocent, without any doubt. Why, one cop does suicide in that moment?
4. Even corrupt cops, drug addictive cops, don't speak in scatology all time. The mood gets completely into satire. I don't know if you wanted so, but I would prefer making it in another way:
The pictures are cool and the drug-cops watching their dealer is a creative effort with much potential. I think you can get it real dark and creepy, if you cut the first 4 min. into 1. Let him get a cocaine-kick, introduce the fact that they want to buy new stuff, and rest them at the end of the page in front of the closed door. Just show. No satire elements.
It seems to me you followed the wrong way with that entire cool cop talking. Only their manner makes them cool, talk, talk, talk, does the opposite here. You sell yourself at less value IMO. There would be more, if you take it serious, and be funny in a way I don't see coming.