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SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board  /  Drama Scripts  /  Stone in Love
Posted by: Don, December 14th, 2012, 5:25pm
Stone in Love by Peter Schmotzer - Drama, Musical - STONE IN LOVE is the love story of Danny and Sherrie Donovan.  It spans two generations and is told through the recent discovery of a shoebox full of old love-letters, and 18 popular, classic songs recorded by the band, Journey.  123 pages - doc, format 8)
Posted by: crookedowl (Guest), December 14th, 2012, 6:16pm; Reply: 1
Peter,

First off, don't mention the title of your script in your logline.

Your formatting is fine, as far as I can tell, but most people around here won't open things in .doc format. Not to mention formatting in Word is a pain, so I recommend getting Celtx, free software to format screenplays and make .pdfs, the preferred format for scripts.

Okay, so it's good to see you using a strong theme, but I worry that basing your script around Journey songs could cause problems down the line. For one, getting the rights to songs is very expensive, not to mention you'll probably need permission from the band if it's such a big part of the script.

Onto the script, you've got some problems with a mere glance at the page. Your action lines are huge blocks of text that can easily be broken down into smaller paragraphs. Generally it's best to keep action paragraphs 4 lines or under. Some say 3.

You also introduce many characters in your first paragraph, which gets confusing fast. I recommend only introducing one character per paragraph. Three characters clumped into one paragraph can be confused easily.

It looks to me like all of your action lines are combined into one paragraph in between lines of dialogue. Like I said, break up your paragraphs. Unfortunately, this will definitely add to your page count, and considering you're already at 120, you should consider cutting this script down.

Trim redundant descriptions, dialogue, and purge your scenes. Make sure each one serves the plot in some way. I'm positive there's something you can cut. There always is.

I think you should name Doctor. It's best to name all characters, even if it's just something like TALL DOCTOR or THIN DOCTOR. Anything to give us some kind of idea of their appearance.

Get rid of the copyright info at the bottom of the page. It's good to be careful, but this isn't necessary at all.

I haven't seen you around here, so I'll stop here until you make an appearance.

Read some scripts, and review other scripts around here. You'll get more reads that way.

Hope this helps.

Will
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