Gatekeeper by Brandon - Short, Drama - A power hungry Harvard Admissions Advisor (Ray), has an interesting way of evaluating his prospective students. Trouble starts when pressure from above forces him to confront his integrity and personal biases.  9 pages - pdf, format 8)

Besides some dialogue problems with respect to the use of certain phrases, I found the script or first 10 pages of it a little out-of-focus. The quick change in the sequence of the scene headings at the very beginings is not helping either. You must try to convey the mesage of your story, no matter what that would be, with a little more information. Using action and dialogues in the proper ways, you could help us walk with you along the line of your story. I felt a little lost and "blind" with respect to the point of the story. The Mexican guy should have had a more latin name... like Diaz, gonzales or Garcia, for example. Sounders is not a Mexican last name, that I know of.
Anyway... I didn't mean to disappoint you about it, just encouraging to make it better. If I missinterpreted the script, don;t take it personally. We are all here beginners in a sense.

Sincerely;

MDZ :)

Well, it's never a good omen where's there's a glaring error in the logline - you're missing a key word in the second sentence.

And, as Miguel comments above allude to, there are many problems here. I won't go into the numerous misspellings and formatting issues, but I will point out two things:

First, try not to editorialize in the slug. If the location is indeed a prestigious office, you need to show us the prestige in the narrative - leather chair, opulent furnishings, etc. So the slug should simply be INT. ADMISSIONS OFFICE - DAY.

Second, on the bottom of page 5, you have the line "Ray shakes his head in disagreeably". There's no excuse for not catching something like that, assuming you proofread this, in a 10 page script.

Beyond that, I have story issues here. Actually, to be more specific, I have questions:

How exactly is Ray power hungry? What's his deal? Is he against diversity, or does he want more diversity? It's really not clear, and the whole admitting Marc Sounder thing is confusing. What side of the table does he line up on?

How is an assistant admissions director making these decisions, especially for an Ivy League university?  Wouldn't his decisions need to be approved by the director? Also, I'm not sure how it works in undegrad, but for all the grad programs I applied to, the admissions director was also a professor. I'm not sure how this person, who amounts to a flunky basically, is what he is at an institution like Harvard.

Also, Ray's speech at the beginning belies the rest of the script - in other words, it's written fairly well while the rest of the script has grammar and syntax problems, which leads me to believe that the genesis of this story is something you heard or saw on your own campus and lifted nearly verbatim. Which is okay - we all borrow from real life; however, the rest of the script has to match the level of Ray's dialogue.

And lastly, speaking to what I said earlier (SPOILERS), since any admissions director would likely also be a professor or person of respected standing, it's unlikely this person could be bumped down to bookstore clerk, regardless of his one nasty encounter with a Senator's son, so your ending amounts to the adolescent fantasy of someone who was rejected by a university.

And where's the drama in a jerk getting what he deserves? Are we supposed to care about Ray or root against him?

If you revisit this, I would of course first clean it up from a formatting and grammatical standpoint (reading others' scripts is a good way to do this), and if you insist on selling this premise I would (a) make Ray's motivations clearer and (b) as I said earlier make this whole thing a daydream of someone who was rejected by Ray.

Remember, in real life the Rays of the world are usually untouchable - hope this helps.

AJR

Brandon, I saw all the things mentioned above by the other board members. I think the problem is your storyline is very weak. Nothing happens and what does happen is not very interesting I'm afraid.

   I think your sentiments are a little misplaced and unfounded that a prestigious university like Harvard uses a picture to determine whether to accept a student  or not. If the student is not "white" enough he doesn't get accepted. I think this type of story is overused and doesn't really play very well.

   You had many formatting and other errors, but they can be fixed.  This story can't be. I applaud your efforts, however. Writing screenplays and stories in general is not an easy thing. Keep writing of course. I wish you well.  Marvin.