All screenplays on the simplyscripts.com and simplyscripts.net domain are copyrighted to their respective authors. All rights reserved. This screenplaymay not be used or reproduced for any purpose including educational purposes without the expressed written permission of the author.
I was quite confused with what was going on but that might be my fault not yours! Jack was a blast and reminded me of Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys. I am not very good with grammar myself but the use of colons was pretty annoying. I found myself speeding up as I read through this, the pacing and rhythm made me rush through. A great idea but needs tighter execution.
Got to be honest here, didn't even finish reading it. I think this is the first time I've ever done that to a script, put it down after the first two pages. Usually I'll tough it through, but the grammar, or whatever it was... just a little irritating for me.
Maybe I'll come back to it later when I'm in a more ambiguous mood.
Winston Wolf, eh. Bet this is Darren James (not Seeley).
As I go:
Page 1: "Hazy Jack stares :" Haha. Very Tom Wolfe, this particular sentence. Could use a few more colons, of course. Very cool visual to start us off.
Page 5: "Two hours". Wasn't expecting that. Jack must have known something prior; that was very quick to figure everything out that he seems to know.
Page 6: Will finally gets around (in a roundabout way) to asking how Jack knows all this stuff. Woulda been one of my first questions...
Thoughts:
Disappointed. I like the visual, I like the conversation, then we get Love and Bliss and pills and it just feels a little tired and a little like we've been here before. The place where you're really strong here is the mystery, not the reveal. The dastardly Party and their nefarious nurses would probably best be left as heard of and not seen, in my opinion. If you want Jack to be forced back down, show the Party reinstating him to a state of obliviousness, it'd be cool if you could find a way to do it that didn't involve more characters. Surely some understanding of the nature of the Party could be reached by Jack in the other half of the room that would be as effectively silencing as the nurses. If that makes sense.
I think I have more thoughts on this one but I think I have to read it again (that's a good thing!). Look forward to finding out who the writer is and hearing some of their thoughts, if they're willing.
I liked the atmosphere in this one and I managed to get a good visual on the room and characters, the problem was I just didn't really get it. There wasn't enough in there for me to really get the whole point of the story.
As mentioned by others the writing needs a tune up, but it wasn't so bad I couldn't finish it or had to stop.
The logline hinted at a Hitchcockian study of paranoia but in reality played out more like an Orwellian-tinged exploration of paranoia and prescience. Amongst trite, regurgitated criticisms (of the writing) from the the usual suspects, there was some great advice from Cindy:
"The writing though, you kept trying to tell the story through dialogue and film is supposed to be visual. Have your characters do something that people wouldn't see coming instead of telling the story."
That's spot on (although I diverge on what dialogue can achieve if in the right hands). As Breanne said, this story is well setup and has the hallmarks of a festival fave. Applying Cindy's advice to this promising premise and narrative, you could have something compelling. Love and Bliss are society's actors in (presumably) cleansing Jack and Will. The morality of such actions should be left to us to debate. This loosely mirrors how the government attempted to cleanse Alex in A Clockwork Orange. What made Kubrick so unique and brilliant was his ability to effectively translate the advice of Cindy to the intellectually stimulating material.
This and Remnant are two of the more thoughtful entries I have read on SS. Very intrigued to see who these writers are.
Format. I'm 50/50 on this. I see the other comments, and I'm not surprised. I think you read part of that Walter Hill link a few weeks ago; but word to the wise...not a lot of folks around here are into stacking. Believe me, I tried it a few times. Perfectly legal, some people like it. Others want to light the nearest match and light your draft on fire.
NHow long has Jack been there? He's ... thinks two hours, Will says he looks more that two days - note some folks didn't catch that.
But just so you know, there are anti-stackers on deck. Don't get discouraged.
This quoted from my earlier comment pretty much sums up some of the critique I have gotten as a whole, because these two out of three issues cropped up more than others.
- (Delusional) Jack saying he was there for two hours. The next line spoken by Will was "Looks more like two days" - a line which some readers chose to ignore for some reason.
- Sometimes I use OWC to try out some techniques and excercises. I knew going in that some people would take me to task for the stacking. When writers "stack" with broken up, chopped sentences, it does look like bad grammar even though the actions are understood.
as to the third...exposition. Some had problems with it, others didn't. Here's the thing. There's nothing wrong with it it would be if it was forced. Granted, I understood the challenge to be "one room" not "one location", and the first thing that came to mind was something like a bizzare psych test/study. A few nods to Orwell and I was good to go.
My previous post also was a bit of reflection. What would I do differently? Well, back to Jack's ranting. I might think about toning it down a bit. The ending. I wanted it open for interpetation, and I'm not going to tell you the meaning of things. That would be wrong.
In fact, this was even my orginal ending. Jack didn't go through the glass. He put his hand on it, and the other side was revealed to have the two women whose nametags read Love and Peace (changed to Bliss) and they were wondering if there was anyone on the other side. They are hooked up to all sorts of EEG wires and other contraptions.