Somewhere by Michael Park - Drama - Amidst the fierce and bloody rivalry between two football teams, two young men fall in love and start a relationship that they must hide from their families. 100 pages - pdf, format

Strange angle you've come from here. One of the problems you've lumbered yourself with is the strange acceptability that you have given to the gay people. Like it or not, films love conflict, and so much of the early pages just feel odd, because there is this controversial area that is treated like 'everyone's fine with it now', and really the script needs a little conflict to give it some heat.

Also this is made a little more implausible due to the fact that these are football families - football is still quite unaccepting of gay people, and portraying this in the way you do actually just gives the whole script a tinge of unreality. You may want to show things in a positive light, but you end up so far moved from reality that it comes over more 'twilight zone'.

It's a bit over-written - I think you could have got the first twenty pages inside 10 pages quite easily. There's quite a bit of unnecessary dialogue that could easily have been chopped down.

There is a slug line missing, when the two gangs meet each other, which was a little off-putting. The colors theme didn't work for me - I'd have liked to have seen names of teams.

Also, to be honest, I got really bugged by you saying X's Dad, X's Mum all the time - why not just give them names? The Max's Dad was a real bug-bear as Max was Rob's brother, so that when Max's Dad was talking to Rob, he was referred to as Max's Dad - when he was also Rob's Dad. Just odd.

So it's an interesting premise, but I don't think that it's really got legs - it doesn't boil down to any more than 'we don't mind you being gay, just don't date a green'. I think actually you'd have more to go on if you moved away from the classic interpretation (of R&J), and had two rival football gangs in a modern/realistic setting, where being gay was unacceptable - that would give the whole story a little more edge to it. IMO.

Is the author a member of the board? I've been clamouring to read more LGBT scripts on SimplyScripts. I'd like to know if he's around to receive feedback.