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Truth, Beauty and the Art of Madness by Christopher Irwin (diamondslug) - Drama - Update and adaptation of the play BAAL by Bertolt Brecht 89 pages - pdf, format
Ditch the transitions, (fades, cuts, etc, including fade-in at the beginning) Ditch the more's and cont'ds, considered out of style and old-fashioned. Don't number the scenes. Don't direct the scenes in the action. I noticed a lot of spots where your blocking was very specific. This gives me the idea that you don't just want to write, you also want to direct. Your script is a lot easier to read if you thin some of these directions out. And being easy-to-read is a basic goal of spec screenplays. Nobody is going to hang with something that is too dense. If you have a very specific idea of what the action or camera angles should look like then talk about them when you film it. At this stage it is better to shorten up the text and let the reader get on with the story.
Diaglogue is pretty chunky. Lots and lots of places where dialogue runs to five or six or seven lines. People don't talk like this. Short sweet stabs with mostly white space on the page...that is a script people will want to read.
Lastly it is dirty. Now, I'm no prude. I dig the skin. However, you must realize that the market for a movie like this is miniscule. You're making it harder and harder to find a real buyer.
Better to write in such a way that gives the producer some wiggle room. Shaving somebody's pubic hair is a fun scene to write but in order to convey the specifics to the audience you have to have a mother of a porn shot. On the other hand painting somebody's toenails can be just as erotic and convey a similar sense of comfort in a relationship without sacrificing the PG, or even the R rating you're shooting for.
Your comments welcome on: GOD GETS FIRED. Comedy, 89 pages. Humans are such a failure that God loses his job. Worse, his ex-wife is appointed to oversee Earth’s destruction. Luckily, God has a plan…but it’s not about saving us. It’s about winning her back.
This appears quite artsy - I guess the author's aiming at an intellectual audience (or at least an audience that considers itself intellectual).
There's no real log-line, so it's difficult to say what the story is intended to be about.
I also had issues re. the time-scale - the dialogue was a tad elaborate at times, and gave me the feeling it could have been from a number of different decades - just not sure which one.
I wasn't too sure about this piece of dialogue:
All women are whores, even when they're virgins, probably even more so, they don't know how filthy what they imagine themselves doing really is.
-- sort of climbed over itself.
DYON (laughing) Neither do I. -- should be 'As do I' ?
Well - I think you've concentrated on the dialogue as a vehicle to move the story forward - and although you do appear to be skilled in writing, this dependency can result in a one-dimension feel to the work.
I get the feeling that the story is going to be lazily explored - at your intellectual leisure - if you like; but I am (at page 12) beginning to wonder what exactly the story is ... ?
This type of script may have worked 20 years ago, certainly in England - but I don't think you'd find a sane producer in the US who'd be willing back such an aesthetically verbose piece.