This is certainly a step up from the last one I read.  The story is complete, and the characters drawn as well as might be expected given the length.  The requisite action passage had a nice flow with a choreography that was easy to follow.

I found it a tad on the talky side, and I felt the ending might have been stronger in regards to tying things together if perhaps some of the dialogue were cut back.  I did like the lobsters, though.

I should say that I figured out who wrote this based solely upon the reviews in this thread -- and once I had read the script itself, I was sure.

Anybody who cannot name this author is not paying attention.

Very effectively done. Well written, nice portrayal of action, and excellent build up and maintaining of suspense. Probably very much the kind of script they had in mind when they designed this OWC. Nice work.

#6 Her Cheating Husband -
A well to do family's idyllic existence goes straight to Hell when infidelity rears its ugly head. 12 pages.

Format: Perfect - Good -  Close Enough
Notes: Nice pg 6 conditional reveal, if no stunt coordinator on set to supervise really make sure your actors rehearse for a great deal of safety.
Action: H3ll, Yeah! - Good - Eventually - Needs More
Breakdown: There's not much action in this fairly decent twelve page action short. Three pages + a whack with the lobster dish.

Budget Considerations:
Locations - McMansion interior & exterior, racetrack grandstand and ticket window,
Props - Mtn Dew, (likely) gaudy jewelery for Channing, racetrack form, wad of cash that could look like $500, thick envelope, party set up and banner sign, portable stage, mic, speakers, drum, fake blood, bindings and gag napkin, large hunting knife, wine and wine glasses, stunt chairs, flower bouquets x2, big covered silver dish w/ ten live lobsters (WTF?)
Costumes - Chandra's outfit + purse, swim goggles, Catering outfit, likely Randy's outfit
Vehicles - Black Porsche Cayenne, silver Ferrari, convertible Mustang, catering truck, airport shuttle,
Actors - Piper, Sebastian, Channing, Marcos, Teller (if indie prod can find a horse track near Anytown USA/UK/Aus maybe they'll get lucky and find a suitable employee for this non-speaking role), Milos, Randy, Mr & Mrs Freesian
SFX - Make up artist for cut, blood spewing effect, cut into achilles tendon
Other - Menthol for tears, stunt pads for fighting and falling

Budget Guesstimate: Anywhere from $2k to $10k. Finding the McMansion and the racetrack will be the hard parts. The rest is all doable with a budget, especially finding the cars. Seriously, this could be done either very professionally or pretty inexpensively largely depending upon actors and available resources, a la SKYLINE.
What I like: The absence of gun play and the upscale setting.
What I'd change: Nothing, other than the live lobsters in the big covered silver tray. That was pretty goofy, although amusing to watch!
How I envision this looking: Like a David Fincher or Coen brothers movie.
What I'd like to know from the writer: Everyone gets a hum-drum doing-their-part role except Chandra. Her part's the best. How can you make the horse track teller's role as interesting as Chandra's?

Hmm.  Not an action script.  A good script, though.

Thoughts:

Hmm.  I guess my thoughts are mostly in line with the others here.  It's obviously one of the strongest entries, with a well-paced plot, defined characters, good overall writing, and tight dialogue.  It's nice and unpleasant, which is fun.  Although not my favourite of the scripts for the OWC, this is probably the best one (I said that about the last script I read, too...saved the best for last unwittingly, it seems).  

I guess my question is about Chandra.  As we eventually learn, she is an incredibly terrible person with not a shred of goodness in her.  Her husband, though, seems to think that she is a good and wonderful person, which makes me think that, at least way back when they first fell in love, she maybe was.

So what happened to her?  What is Chandra's motivation in this story?  And I don't just mean for her actions...why was she cheating?  Why is she so suspicious of her husband (although it would be a fair argument that it's because she's cheating on him...)?  Why is she willing to straight-up kill him?  Has she just always been completely insane?  How'd she raise such nice kids?

I feel like Chandra doesn't get a fair shake in this story.  She's just a b****.  I'm not sure if I like that.  I'd like to know why she's a b****.

I'm gonna re-read and further review this one once writers are revealed.  I am pretty impressed with it.

Thanks for the fun read and congrats on writing for the OWC!

having been a "racetracker" since the mid 70's, i've never seen a ferrari "parked" anywhere but at the valet stand...i'd rewrite that...also the way the bet was called isn't what one would expect from someone betting that amount...usually you refrain from saying the name to eliminate getting the wrong number...how cant that happen?...if a horse's name has a number sound in it...such as "kettle won"...a clerk hears "one"...so, it's best to call it like this: "Del Mar, race (whatever), five hundred to win on seven..."...not major sins, just an fyi

Ok I read this one

I am no grammer or spelling guru because its an area I need to work on myself lol But if something catches catches my eye I'll mention it. Nothing along those lines caught my eye.

Story wise this script started with a malevolent vibe, a potential affair between a father and his sons girl friend and his own wife looking for murder for hire with her lover.  

Nice set up with potential to go really really "dark" or end it the way you did. IMO kinda had a Cannon or Barnaby Jones type conclusion without any lead detective. And that is a totally valid conclusion and worked very well.

Overall I say good job!

Hey another Jake,

This one was the easiest read of the six I've tackled so far.
Pretty stout story structure and well mapped motivations.
I like showing Marcos manipulating Chandra with sex. Very nice touch.
It tells me how he wound her around his finger into believing things.  
The action works, it's definitely on. Strong antag vibe.

However, I never believed for a moment Piper & Seb were getting their freak on.
I needed more convincing, still, it plays out pretty well.
Flagrant disregard for the budgetary constraint.
But, if you're gonna disregard it, go for the gold, and you did.

I was fine with the comic touches, takes confidence to go for that in an OWC.
I admire that confidence and I think it would play well on screen.
It snapped me out of the hyper reality of the conundrum, grounding me.
That kind of reader manipulation on the page is pretty sexy.

Thanks for playing, fine OWC effort.

Regards,
E.D.

It's a tough one to comment on. Choosing the appropriate words - that is the key. This felt like an attempt at a torture porn/Basic Instinct flavour, and yet it ended up more Shannon Tweed. To say that I'm flabbergasted at its reception would be to say that bears shit in the woods.

The best part - and in terms of theme this is important - would be the action. The sexual undertones made for pretty uncomfortable reading, and it just didn't feel a natural fit for the story - why have Marcos essentially rape Chandra? It felt more of an attempt to imbue the script with a menace that wasn't properly integrated or conceived. Marcos as a villain was a pastiche of more meaningful characters and I just couldn't buy in to him at all. The character motivations made no real sense to me throughout. This script needs a stripping down (pun intended) and a refocus. I do agree that the narrative arc is complete but that alone does not make it a good script, IMO.

I feel the writer certainly has something, but it's not been applied to best demo their ability. #veryrushedscript

This was really good, obviously written by someone who knows their way around a laptop. Only quibbles are the cars, very specific in budget terms, but I'm sure substitutes could be found. Didn't really see Chandra in a Ferrari, more Bentley Continental! The scenes were tight, action direct, dialouge purposeful and there awas a nice flow to the piece. Good job.

I kinda thought this one was shitty.

:-)  All right.  Just kidding cause I figured out who wrote this one just from looking at the title page.

But also, now that I actually read it this morning, there were clues throughout the script to confirm it.

Anyway, I actually did like this one.  However, I think it should've been held out a little longer that Manning and Piper weren't actually loving each other.  It just kind of took some of the momentum out of the story finding out that early.

I'm going to have to agree with Ryan as to the ending.  It did feel like it should have ended with another revelation somehow.  Plus, not to mention, at first, I thought Chandra slit her wrist because of the blood that was dripping off her wrist.

I was also waiting for the Mountain Dew and Sub Zero fridge to come into play somehow because of the detailed attention to it.

I was also waiting for a car chase because of the attention to detail of the type of cars.

But it was a good story, all in all.

Hey, I wanted to thank everyone who read my script.  It's much appreciated!  THANK YOU!!!!

I had a total of 19 reviewers.  10 of those were non OWC writers, which is really cool to see.  9 of the 12 OWC writers provided feedback to me.  Ed (godonthewire) didn't read or review a single OWC script, which is pathetic!  I didn't get any feedback from Jordan or Darren, but with Darren, I'm sorry to say that's the norm, as he just won't read any of my scripts for some reason, so I guess I should completely stop reading his as well.

Anyways, I want to give a little back story to this story and then, I'll address some of the feedback in a separate post.

The idea came from an episode of Dateline (easily one of the best shows on TV and one that all writers should watch, as it's not only real life shit, but many of them are ripe for scripts ideas) I saw a few months ago.

In this episode, a wife (and also mother to the couple's 17 year old daughter) decided she was done with her well to do hubby, and hired a PD to tail him and get all the dirt he could on him, so the divorce would go her way.  The only thing he dug up was 1 late night of drinking with the boys, in which he actually ended up pulling out in front of him and had a cohort block him from the back, and then had police come in and arrest him for DUI.

Months and months went by and the PD thought his job was all done, when, out of the blue, he got a call from the wife, who asked to meet with him.  The PD had a weird feeling and begun recording and videoing his meetings with her.  Sooner than later, she asked him if he knew anyone who could "hurt" her husband, in a crippling way, like a car accident, or a fall of some kind.  As time went by, she decided that wasn't going to cut it, and she wanted him killed.  The whole thing was caught on tape and she was arrested.

Anyway, I got to thinking about this situation, in which the man is actually the innocent one, as opposed to how he's usually portrayed, and changed everything up, and came up with "Her Cheating Husband".

I wanted to set it up to look like he was indeed a cheating prick, who was actually banging his son's girlfriend.  As opposed to keeping the ruse going, I decided to change things up and reveal the mistake, right after I revealed that Chandra was actually the one who was cheating.  And also, reveal that Sebastian and Piper had actually been planning a surprise party the evening of the planned hit, making lots of opportunities for things to go many different ways.

I finally decided that the best twist to go with, was actually no twist at all.  Everything seemed ripe for multiple twist endings, but I thought they all seemed too obvious, so hopefully, in having everyone except the intended killer survive, you were taken by some surprise...at least that was my goal.

This was not rushed. It's actually the first OWC for me, in which I turned the script in, well before the deadline.  And I didn't really run out of pages, either.  Initially, I had an extra whole page to work with, but filled it in on the final rewrite.  The "ending" with the Freesian's (Piper's parents) showing up, seemed to be hit and miss with readers.  It was intended as a little comic relief in a way, just like the live lobsters flying everywhere after Milos whacked Chandra over the head with the serving dish.

IMO, it doesn't really alter the tone overall, but I guess I can see where some would think that way, or just dislike it.  I did want to remind everyone that there was a big event planned, and even though it obviously wasn't going to go down the way it was planned, I did want to show that there's always life outside of the action taking place in the script...as in just because we don't see it taking place, events continue to unfold anyway.

Hope that all makes sense and thanks again for the reads and helpful feedback.

Good work Jeff, enjoyed reading your script, you may not have got the reader's choice, but you made my top 5 and that's very important!

Nice work, Jeff.  This was one of the 3 I voted for.  I have to know; are you from San Diego or is the Del Mar Racetrack a coincidence?

I lived in Southern CA for a few years, back in the day.  I was a big horse track guy and Del Mar was always our favorite.

The script is set in the Del Mar area.  Bird Rock is a town in the area, thus the reference to Bird Rock Lane.

Thanks, guys.  Glad you liked it.