Wasted by Jason Benoit - Comedy, Post Apocalyptic, Stoner, Monster, Action, Romantic Comedy - Three best friends awaken from a drug-induced bender to discover that they are the only three survivors left on Earth... or are they? 104 pages  - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

I read this all the way through. I liked it. It seemed to follow a predictable formula for stoner, party guys comedy but broke off at the end in a new direction. The ending was happy and was delightfully, not formula. The characters were well defined. You didn’t jump in with a boatload of exposition.

I could see places where the comedy was witty and with the right cast, could be rather funny. Your bad guy fit the mould of a true antagonist.

I am unable to provide any helpful suggestions. It’s not because there is nothing wrong with the writing, it’s that your style is so radically different from mine and full of things I would not do.

For instance:

You have a lot of scene transformations like “cut to” and “fade in on”. I rarely do that. I count on the director to do that. Most of the scripts I have read that do that are either really bad or the producer or director is writing the script for themselves. The same goes for camera angles like “Tight on:” and “Reveal:”.

At times you seem to break the rule of ‘Show, don’t tell’.  Character descriptions like “quiet” and “Emotional” are examples. If you can’t point to it, you have to show it some other way. “Quiet” works in a book. Having someone who rarely speaks and acts shy is how most people do it in scripts.

You have a rather colorful style with a lot of commentary in your action. I almost never do this. My style is rather dry, probably too dry so I can’t give any advice on this. An example is after L.Ron laughs, you have in italics, “What the fuck is wrong with this guy?” I can’t comment on whether it is good form or not. I can only say that I would never do that. I thought commentary like that and “WTF?” took away from the story, not add to it.

The accent of the Swedish antagonist is sounded and spelled out in the dialog. This made your script hard to read. It would be enough to put in the character introduction or in a parenthetical in their first dialog (which you do). After that, write what they say. Let the actor do the accent.

This is all I could think of. I mostly wanted you to know that somebody read this and liked it.

Thanks for reading it - and taking the time to comment with your thoughts.
One of the things I set out with in this script was to kind of just go for it and have the writing be a tad different than some of my other work. I've found some dig it and some aren't fans of that approach. I'll keep this stuff in mind as I continue to work on it, and moving forward on other projects. thanks again