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Who Wants to Be a Princess? by Frank MacCrory & Cynthia MacCrory - Family - A young woman enters the prince's contest so she can change the kingdom's future, but a past she can't remember brings three royal families to the brink of war. 117 pages - pdf format
I just had time to read the first ten but i will get back to it.
I really like your writing. I don't know what draft this is but you've clearly spent the time on the rewrites and perfecting it. Writing a script set so far back in history is really tough because so much needs describing. I've seen a few unproduced scripts get tripped up by this, getting bogged down in long action lines trying to describe something an audience would see in a second if it was filmed. Your descriptions and choice of words are short and precise. It makes for an easy read.
Dialogue is also really good. There's no fat and there's a rhythm to the conversations. Again, i'm guessing this is another sign of good rewriting. I've only read the first 10 but i can already see the story playing out. A have a few notes but i do realise i have only read a very small part.
You set Holly up as feeling trapped in her life as a princess. Another day in hergilded cage.. I'm not sure we really see this. You get straight into the story which is good but i would like to see Holly's life before she leaves it. Why does she feel trapped? What relationships is she leaving behind? What's at stake if she stayed?
I'm also unsure why she just stays with that other family. We don't see them interact, she just never seems to leave.
One thing i'm really trying to improve is creating tension. Considering it's such a basic aspect of films it's amazing how easy it can be to leave it out. When the bandits try to kidnap Holly it just happens. It might add a bit more tension if we know its going to happen before Holly does. Maybe the bandits trick them? Just food for thought. Hitchcock gives a great example of tension regarding a bomb under a table as two people talk.
You also sometimes put things like... Evera has Holly reciting something during this time.
I think you need to actually write what it is is she's reciting.
Anywho, I'll get back to this soon but this is clearly a strong script and worth getting a few reads.
I just had time to read the first ten but i will get back to it.
I really like your writing. I don't know what draft this is but you've clearly spent the time on the rewrites and perfecting it. Writing a script set so far back in history is really tough because so much needs describing. I've seen a few unproduced scripts get tripped up by this, getting bogged down in long action lines trying to describe something an audience would see in a second if it was filmed. Your descriptions and choice of words are short and precise. It makes for an easy read.
Thanks, I appreciate that. It's what I'd call a first complete draft (only got rid of the last red-text-that-says-what-is-needed-here a couple weeks ago), but then went a couple rounds of polishing it to be suitable for SS consumption. The first few pages had been done for a while and received some great feedback on the work-in-progress board, and Final Draft's "read aloud" tool is really helpful for finding clunky dialogue.
(Hint for anyone else who doesn't want to spend an arm and a leg on voiceprints: the Windows default voices for other languages are perfectly capable of reading English, so you don't need to limit yourself to one male voice and one female voice.)
I made a conscious choice to use precise words rather than long descriptions, even if it means a couple readers need to look up a word or two.
Dialogue is also really good. There's no fat and there's a rhythm to the conversations. Again, i'm guessing this is another sign of good rewriting. I've only read the first 10 but i can already see the story playing out. A have a few notes but i do realise i have only read a very small part.
You set Holly up as feeling trapped in her life as a princess. Another day in hergilded cage.. I'm not sure we really see this. You get straight into the story which is good but i would like to see Holly's life before she leaves it. Why does she feel trapped? What relationships is she leaving behind? What's at stake if she stayed?
That's fair, I felt the need to get in a "hook" very early and get on with the main story, but may have sped things up a bit too much. I really like the idea of doing everything under the opening theme until the recital, but I won't cling to it if it gets in the way of storytelling.
One thing i'm really trying to improve is creating tension. Considering it's such a basic aspect of films it's amazing how easy it can be to leave it out. When the bandits try to kidnap Holly it just happens. It might add a bit more tension if we know its going to happen before Holly does. Maybe the bandits trick them? Just food for thought. Hitchcock gives a great example of tension regarding a bomb under a table as two people talk.
You also sometimes put things like... Evera has Holly reciting something during this time.
I think you need to actually write what it is is she's reciting.
There was originally a note saying "no audio other than the continuing opening theme" but it got very repetitive and annoying. The dialogue here would just be gibberish proper nouns to first-time readers, but there's no harm actually putting them there.
I don't tell people what I think is wrong with their stories, I only read with an interest in their style of writing. This is also not my genre.
Your writing is excellent and it took me all of half a page to figure that out. I have been pulled up a couple of times in that first half page though.
Code
The stern and silver-haired governess EVERA (60-ish),
her silver hair pulled into a tight bun that only makes her
look sterner, ...
I don't like the use of 'stern' twice in this, albeit one of them modified. You also mention her silver hair twice. You can try:
The governess, EVERA (63), her silver hair pulled into a tight bun that only makes her look sterner, ...
'that only makes her look sterner' instantly tells us that she looks stern even without her hair tied up.
Also, consider putting an actual age. I used to do the same as you, then a writer here (LC) asked me if I actually knew the character's age? Create your characters the way you want to, completely. Note the comma before the character name in this instance too.
Code
From under the sheets PRINCESS HOLLY VERMILLION (4) emerges,
pushes long brown hair out of her eyes, blinks, lets out a
resigned sigh upon seeing her governess. Another day in her
gilded cage.
Missing comma after sheets and also after her age. There's a missing 'and' after 'blinks'. Change 'her governess' to 'Evera'. Also instead of this:
Code
...lets out a resigned sigh upon seeing her governess. Another
day in her gilded cage.
Try:
lets out a resigned sigh upon seeing Evera - another day in her gilded cage.
Anyway, good luck with this script. I hope you sell it and it gets produced.
I don't tell people what I think is wrong with their stories, I only read with an interest in their style of writing. This is also not my genre.
Your writing is excellent and it took me all of half a page to figure that out. I have been pulled up a couple of times in that first half page though.
Code
The stern and silver-haired governess EVERA (60-ish),
her silver hair pulled into a tight bun that only makes her
look sterner, ...
I don't like the use of 'stern' twice in this, albeit one of them modified. You also mention her silver hair twice. You can try:
The governess, EVERA (63), her silver hair pulled into a tight bun that only makes her look sterner, ...
'that only makes her look sterner' instantly tells us that she looks stern even without her hair tied up.
Also, consider putting an actual age. I used to do the same as you, then a writer here (LC) asked me if I actually knew the character's age? Create your characters the way you want to, completely. Note the comma before the character name in this instance too.
Code
From under the sheets PRINCESS HOLLY VERMILLION (4) emerges,
pushes long brown hair out of her eyes, blinks, lets out a
resigned sigh upon seeing her governess. Another day in her
gilded cage.
Missing comma after sheets and also after her age. There's a missing 'and' after 'blinks'. Change 'her governess' to 'Evera'. Also instead of this:
Code
...lets out a resigned sigh upon seeing her governess. Another
day in her gilded cage.
Try:
lets out a resigned sigh upon seeing Evera - another day in her gilded cage.
Anyway, good luck with this script. I hope you sell it and it gets produced.
Thanks, Dustin. The double silverness was just poor editing on my part (she was originally described as "stern and elderly" but that didn't work because in a few pages she's described as running while carrying a child).
As for the missing "and," I've seen advice in various places that one should strip out as many "and"s and "then"s as possible from screenplay action lines without causing confusion. To me, it almost makes commas and periods interchangeable, and I'm not familiar enough with the format to have any real intuition for what "feels" right.
Thanks for the word about ages, my intent was to let the casting people know exact ages weren't important for some characters. Even when an exact age is given, the actor merely needs to pass for that age... which is much easier in animation.* That said, I assigned exact numbers for all the "mid-60s" and "late 20s" and so on later in the script.
*The "Holly halts in shock" scene would be really expensive to do in live action, and it's kind of an important scene. It might be doable with something like MASSIVE, though I shudder to think of the evil to which that modelset would be applied afterward. A live action version of the montage on page 7 would require heroic amounts of age-adjustment through CGI. Again, probably possible but not how I picture the film in my head.
Hi Frank. Congrats on completing a script, I really liked the writing.
So, this is a story of love I guess, right? Holly and Rolland are your two main characters I think. you have so little of them on the pages that it's hard to tell. but let me start from the beginning. you have silent scenes at first. it was hard to visualize them, and I dodn't know whete you are going with them. Lately I learned you wanted to show that Holly was suffocating there. you didn't show it at first. you told us some but it's not something that should make her not want to reveal her identity later. I thought of Alladin's Jasmin. she also wanted to experience a commoner's life, as a princess she had no friends. but she ran away only when her dad decided she should marry Jaffar - talking about the Disney movie here.
later you dont show how her new parents decided to keep her. It should be dangerous to do that. may be you could tell us they couldn't have children for a long time or something. but you can't skip it, otherwise it's a mystery.
later Holly decides to finaly fight for Rolland and become a princess after all. I absolutely dont get her. is she in love? that could explain her actions, but she couldn't fall in love after only seeing him once. we should see more of them together, I think. If Roland is important maybe even earlier. I suggest they meet when kids.
which brings us to the competition. how absent minded should roland be to make them go throughall the stages without making sure the one he loves wins. sorry if it sounds harsh but to me Roland is vain as written. i suggest they plot the competition together behind the scenes.
i also suggest you get rid of the majority of the girls. and the scenes - like Jades and Aimees talent show scene. and have more of holly and Roland instead.
You startedintroducing more characters at the end. do you need them. i say get rid of 2/3 of the characters that you have now and you'll be better without them.
good luck with the rewrite if you're planning one.
Hi Frank. Congrats on completing a script, I really liked the writing.
So, this is a story of love I guess, right? Holly and Rolland are your two main characters I think. you have so little of them on the pages that it's hard to tell. but let me start from the beginning. you have silent scenes at first. it was hard to visualize them, and I dodn't know whete you are going with them. Lately I learned you wanted to show that Holly was suffocating there. you didn't show it at first. you told us some but it's not something that should make her not want to reveal her identity later. I thought of Alladin's Jasmin. she also wanted to experience a commoner's life, as a princess she had no friends. but she ran away only when her dad decided she should marry Jaffar - talking about the Disney movie here.
later you dont show how her new parents decided to keep her. It should be dangerous to do that. may be you could tell us they couldn't have children for a long time or something. but you can't skip it, otherwise it's a mystery.
Thanks, I really appreciate that you invested your valuable time in looking over my script.
I envisioned the first few scenes (up to the start of the recital) as the opening credits sequence. It was my attempt of doing the "day in the life of the protagonist" with as little screen time as possible.
It's actually not integral to the story that Holly feels trapped in her life as a princess... that is simply so that the audience doesn't feel sorry for Holly suddenly growing up in different circumstances. That said, I will need to do a better job showing it, and it may not be possible to keep everything confined to the opening credits. (Besides, it's not like being a farmgirl is wall-to-wall freedom.)
Holly is supposed to have Hollywood Amnesia and not remember her origins at all, and I obviously did a terrible job of explaining that in this draft. She only remembered her name, so her adoptive parents ensured she'd remember her new home by drilling in that she's "Holly from Bosky Village." Without memory loss, a real four-year-old, even one who claims she doesn't like her parents, would have tried to get home.
Something else that I failed to explain is that the adoptive parents were having trouble having their own children. A medieval farming family with only one child born after at least nine years of marriage is in desperate need of an IVF clinic.
Definitely a couple serious weak spots in this draft.
later Holly decides to finaly fight for Rolland and become a princess after all. I absolutely dont get her. is she in love? that could explain her actions, but she couldn't fall in love after only seeing him once. we should see more of them together, I think. If Roland is important maybe even earlier. I suggest they meet when kids.
which brings us to the competition. how absent minded should roland be to make them go throughall the stages without making sure the one he loves wins. sorry if it sounds harsh but to me Roland is vain as written. i suggest they plot the competition together behind the scenes.
An earlier version of the story had Roland pre-picking Holly as the winner, and his father pre-picking Amity, but that left no agency for any of the girls in the story. In this version, Roland actually is vain in the sense that he doesn't really treat "little people" as individuals. The princess tournament is effectively a search query on a dating site, and he'd rather blindly take the "top result" on that query than any of the people his parents picked out.
Roland is called out for a similar attitude once late in the story, but I'll work out a way to point out this character flaw earlier.
i also suggest you get rid of the majority of the girls. and the scenes - like Jades and Aimees talent show scene. and have more of holly and Roland instead.
You startedintroducing more characters at the end. do you need them. i say get rid of 2/3 of the characters that you have now and you'll be better without them.
The contestants are what I'd informally call tertiary characters... they have bits of personality and have more than a line or two, so somewhere between a main/supporting character and a throwaway character like GLENWOOD CONTESTANT 8. If nothing else, they let me split up the exposition into bite-sized chucks from each character.
I'd be grateful if anyone knew of a way to signal their marginal importance. As it is, I had to contrive a way of saying each one's name in dialogue. Probably worth condensing at least some of them together.
Jade & Aimee's talent show is a lot of pages for non-essential exposition, so ripe for pruning. I think I have a different way of addressing the talent show altogether, though I still need some on-stage time to surround the birthmark reveal.
The only semi-important characters introduced in Act III are the diplomat and the rival knight. The rival knight was previously discussed during one of the disaster dates (Sarah gushed about him when she was supposed to be impressing Roland). The diplomat can be present during the recital, but there would be such a long gap that he'd basically need to be re-introduced anyway.
I think the best way to do it is to cut some of the contest in my humble opinion. The script cant be about a contest, it's about characters, what drives them, their motivations, their actions. the contest is to spice things up nothing more imho. well, it's your call...
I'm travelling right now and couldn't go over scenes to provede examples to what I call "not needed". I can do it later, in March if you like. I also wish more people read it. If you read and provede feedback to others here people reciprocate - just saying) I see that you already do)
I think the best way to do it is to cut some of the contest in my humble opinion. The script cant be about a contest, it's about characters, what drives them, their motivations, their actions. the contest is to spice things up nothing more imho. well, it's your call...
I'm travelling right now and couldn't go over scenes to provede examples to what I call "not needed". I can do it later, in March if you like. I also wish more people read it. If you read and provede feedback to others here people reciprocate - just saying) I see that you already do)
Hey, glad to have earned a bit of your WiFi use while traveling
I've been revising based on the feedback so far (not every last bit of it, but the overwhelming majority of what folks have said has been helpful) and hope to push an update to Don in the next few days. Want to make sure I check my changes for any ripple effects elsewhere in the story.
The draft everyone has now includes every single step of the tournament from 510 entrants to the final 2, which is unnecessary. Whittling that down gives me some space to flesh out parts of the story that were only sketched the first time around.
I didn't have time to read to whole thing so take these notes with an extra grain of salt. The writing is quite good. Very believable world and you've got all the pomp and circumstance down perfectly. I liked that scene with Princess Vanna rambling on about nonsense and Roland bored out of his mind.
I do think it's moving a bit fast at the beginning. It could do with more establishment of Holly's character before the bandits. Ideally, we'd get a sense of her weaknesses and how far our main character has to grow.
Your opening is somewhat similar to the opening of Kate & Leopold. I've never seen the movie, might not be good, but I do think script-wise it's a fitting example of what I'm talking about (have to get past the absurd amount of description writing till you get to the first dialogue).
The writer establishes Leopold's flaws. He's arrogant, lazy, self-pitying, etc. And as Uncle Otto suggests, he has room to grow. We see he needs to stop being such a whiny ninny and take control of his life. Once that foundation is established, the rest of the film can build on that, exploring those weakness and ultimately have the character grow and change before our eyes.
That same principle applies to most anything in your genre. Take The Lion King for example. It's established early on Simba has to grow up, take responsibility, in order to become a great King.
Pg. 2 of your script is prime position for this stuff. As written, Holly expresses a desire to play the flute but that's about it. Think about some flaws for your character. Is she naive, demanding, controlling, reckless, lazy, etc. Give us a sense of what she needs to overcome. You do a good job showing she's not content with her rich, sheltered existence. Build on that, explore it a little more in this scene.
Okay, that was a lot of notes for one scene. I get carried away sometimes.
I agree with other comments about that bandit scene too. I think you can work in a little more tension there. Maybe you can even bring up the threat of bandits earlier. For example, King Farrell could be reluctant to let her leave the Castle because of vicious attacks in the past.
I didn't have time to read to whole thing so take these notes with an extra grain of salt. The writing is quite good. Very believable world and you've got all the pomp and circumstance down perfectly. I liked that scene with Princess Vanna rambling on about nonsense and Roland bored out of his mind.
I do think it's moving a bit fast at the beginning. It could do with more establishment of Holly's character before the bandits. Ideally, we'd get a sense of her weaknesses and how far our main character has to grow.
Your opening is somewhat similar to the opening of Kate & Leopold. I've never seen the movie, might not be good, but I do think script-wise it's a fitting example of what I'm talking about (have to get past the absurd amount of description writing till you get to the first dialogue).
The writer establishes Leopold's flaws. He's arrogant, lazy, self-pitying, etc. And as Uncle Otto suggests, he has room to grow. We see he needs to stop being such a whiny ninny and take control of his life. Once that foundation is established, the rest of the film can build on that, exploring those weakness and ultimately have the character grow and change before our eyes.
That same principle applies to most anything in your genre. Take The Lion King for example. It's established early on Simba has to grow up, take responsibility, in order to become a great King.
Pg. 2 of your script is prime position for this stuff. As written, Holly expresses a desire to play the flute but that's about it. Think about some flaws for your character. Is she naive, demanding, controlling, reckless, lazy, etc. Give us a sense of what she needs to overcome. You do a good job showing she's not content with her rich, sheltered existence. Build on that, explore it a little more in this scene.
Okay, that was a lot of notes for one scene. I get carried away sometimes.
I agree with other comments about that bandit scene too. I think you can work in a little more tension there. Maybe you can even bring up the threat of bandits earlier. For example, King Farrell could be reluctant to let her leave the Castle because of vicious attacks in the past.
I appreciate you taking the time to read and comment. There's certainly a lot to do with the first few pages. Looks like the theme will end during her lesson, then we get a bit more of a day-in-the-life with the recital the next day. That's effectively inserting it at the top of page 2.
Cramming in a plausible character flaw for a four-year-old is a great idea, but will take some thought. She's four because as far as I know that the earliest possible age someone could actually demonstrate musical talent (and even that is using modern Suzuki instruments designed for small hands), and I want her as close to a blank slate as possible for her adoptive parents. Will take a look at Kate & Leopold, an early glimpse at flaws will give me a little more space to show some growth for Holly.
I personally don't like it when a movie telegraphs a threat, but ultimately the story needs to hang together in the audience's eyes, not mine.
"Hey, Bob, see that glass bottle labeled 'extremely dangerous virus'?" "Yeah, Joe. Looks fragile. Kinda careless that someone put it so close to the edge of the table." "Someone should probably do something about it." "The same someone who put it in that precarious spot?" "Now is not the time for puns, Bob. A large group of inattentive children are about to run through this room." "Right, no time to move that bottle; let's get out of the way."
Hopefully I can handle the issue with a bit more subtlety.
Maybe a Meg Ryan rom-com was not the best example. I blame my lack of sleep. Lines like this from The Lion King might be a better illustration:
SIMBA But I thought a king can do whatever he wants.
MUSAFA There's a lot more to being king than getting your way all the time.
Of course, you get to come up with any character you want. But films like The Lion King, Brave, How to Train Your Dragon, Big Hero 6, might be more instructive.
Rewriting continues apace, between working in the feedback here and shuffling around some of the original stuff (for example I realized that "I only came here because my parents made me" had to come from a princess; no one else would dare say it out loud), now I have to handle a bunch of ripple effects throughout the script.
The story is definitely easier to follow now.
When my wife looked over the new opening she said, "You can't let the audience know Holly had a pony if you want people to like her. Haven't you ever seen Seinfeld?" It'll be a fun balancing act