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It's Been A While by Sam Atkinson - Short, Comedy - When a young man returns to his home to ruffle up feathers and sink into his old misogynistic, destructive habits, he ends running for his life and avoiding old enemies. Will his past bite him in the butt or will he learn to become a better man. - pdf, format
The logline is written….oddly. Not sure if this is deliberate.
Now the script – Page 1
If in doubt, keep it simple and to the point. Examples:
“A phone begins to ring.” – A phone rings “Just then a car pulls into the driveway.” – A car pulls into the driveway
Who is PETE and who is BABY? We have no idea at this point as the characters have not been introduced and as we can’t see them on screen this should be a VO.
“Pan past a picture of a couple hugging then to a girl sleeping in her bed” – The action should describe what we the audience can see at this point in time, not the camera shots. That’s what a shooting script does and is at a later stage in development when the Director/Producer is involved.
“He gets dressed, goes down stairs, helps himself to some breakfast and makes his get away before her boyfriend returns from work” – You cover a lot of action in one sentence, which is a few seconds of screen time at the most. Action is usually described in blocks of three to four lines. Unless this is a montage (in which case you need to specify it) then you need to spread it out more and describe exactly what we can see, not what you assume the Director thinks you mean or what you assume the audience knows. The audience at this point has no idea he is getting away before the boyfriend returns, we’ve not seen any boyfriend yet.
Sorry Sam, the script is littered with bad writing and I’m finding the dialogue clunky and odd, it’s like this is set in the 50’s or something. I only made it to page 3 and then gave up. I hope my examples above help you progress with this.
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