Friendships and Fuel-Injectors by Steve Meredith (SRUSteve09) - Short - When Jordan's old friend Kaitlin returns home from being away, the two discuss friendships, and the guilt that is often associated with having them. 8 pages - pdf, format 8)

Hi Steve. First off you’ve quite a lot of dialogue, grammar & format problems throughout.  

Grammar examples:

“Friendships at that school just seem like so much of a hassle anymore.”
Delete the “anymore” and “at that school.”

How about simplifying it e.g.“friendships are a hassle”.

“My whole point is that friendships at school is like this car.”

Again, not good grammatically and, “Is” should be “are” – plural.

Problems on the car. Should be “with” the car. freon, should be capped i.e. Freon. Likewise, Mustang should be capped – first letter.

… “That’s just more work work for you to have to take care of”  

You need a semi-colon after the first word “work” or delete one of the “work” words, and you also need Kaitlin’s dialogue here to be: (CONT’D) as it goes onto the next page.

Formatting:

Not too many passive verbs which is good but quite a few in your opening description.

“A woman, named KAITLIN BURNS, about the same age as JORDAN, approaches HIM in HIS garage.” Preferable just to write: KAITLIN BURNS (23) … etc.

Which leads me to All the caps. in your descriptions which are distracting & wrong.

“JORDAN shakes HIS head (a little bit) (as he) stares at his beer can. (HE) glances over at HIS car, (and) then back at KAITLIN.”

Only cap the character’s name when FIRST introduced. Also, NO caps on pronouns.  If you want to draw the attention of the reader to a sound (BOOM!) or an object (with caps) that’s acceptable but with minimal use only imo.

Be economical with your descriptions – they are often overly-detailed – strike-out suggestions above.

And, delete the colon next to all the character’s names i.e.      JORDAN:

There are a couple of slug-lines missing too. Specifically when they each open the car doors. Suddenly their dialogue relates to when they are inside the car i.e. you need: -
INT. CAR – DAY. Also, a couple of times you’ve written, for example: INT-JORDAN'S CAR-CONTINUOUS when there was no prev. slug.

PAUSE. JORDAN sighs, defeated.
Take out the PAUSE in your description/action line. It shouldn’t be there. Plus his "sighiing" SHOWS us his feeling of defeat.

The camera pans out on the street – better to give a visual of the street than a camera direction here.

Also, KAITLIN & JORDAN’S last lines should be (O.S.) not (V.O.) and I question whether this much dialogue works well here in (O.S.) mode as your final scene – not sure. I would have liked to see him laughing and in a lighter mood in the final scene.

Dialogue, as I said, overall is a bit laboured/clunky.

Kaitlin’s character uses the word “Exponentially.” (I query its use in the context) and then, “bat-shit crazy” in the one dialogue-stream.

So, overall you should go through the script carefully and edit. Spelling: overall fine – Jordan/Jordon.

Ok, now all that’s out of the way, to the story itself. The analogy of “fixing the car” and “friendships/relationships” didn’t quite work for me – I question its entertainment value. On screen there’s not a lot going on; no direct conflict between the main characters (I thought maybe they had been prev. lovers, but, no,) and no compelling story.  I feel like most of the story was only alluded to, and in your head, not on the piece of paper. “Jordan” feels a lot of guilt about something in his past, but we’re not let in on the secret.

Having said all this I feel your story’s got heart and potential to be much more. You just need to put it out there! All the best, Libby.

Hello Steve,

Gave this script of yours a read.

LC pretty much hit everything in his detailed post.

I thought the story was okay but felt you could have left the analogy out as this would be something said to a five year old.

If you can build on the story and have some sort of lustful feelings towards Kaitlin, then this might turn out to be even better.  Since Kaitlin appears to be trying to play matchmaker with this Julia.

All the best,


Javier