Gangsters Never Die by Seb Archer - Drama, Crime - What if your biggest enemy was your own brother? During Prohibition times a young ambitious agent named Edward Green struggles to cope with his own problems and to take down notorious gangster Jack Diamond. Unbeknownst to him, his own "golden child" brother his working with Diamond. 105 pages - doc, format 8)

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Sorry, can't believe I missed that typo in the plot before sending it in.

Any reviews WILL be returned. I can promise you that.

I tried to keep the script, for the most part, historically accurate.

Sorry for it being in Microsoft Word, my PDF kept exceeding the memory limit of the site.

Seb,

It's not that this script is a Word doc. instead of a PDF which will turn most people off. Instead, it's that the script was incorrectly formatted, due to it being written in Word. The main offender is your dialogue. Compare your script to a script which has been written with professional scriptwriting software, something like Final Draft or Celtx (which is free by the way, so I highly recommend you downloading that). Your dialogue often spans the width of the entire page, which makes this very hard to read. Furthermore, as your dialogue is incorrectly formatted, I predict that the real length of your script would be well above 120 pages when formatted correctly.

Despite this turn off, I will read the first 10 pages of this though.

Ok, firstly your characters are incorrectly introduced, as you have not capitalised them on introduction. Cut out all your "suddenly's", as these are unnecessary. Your writing is very passive as well. For example, "Ed starts running" should simply be "Ed runs." "Sonny starts sprinting" should be "Sonny sprints". You don't need "CUT TO's" inbetween every scene either. Dialogue needs a lot of work as well, as it sounded very stiff and unnatural. Quite a few of your scenes are devoid of conflict... they're just a bunch of people talking, ie, the dinner scene on page 10, or the scene on the porch afterwards. Make sure that the majority of your scenes have a scene goal, so feature a character who wants something. Once you have this, you can then have another character or an obstacle which stops them achieving your goal. I see you say that you love QT. And whilst his formatting and structure is highly unconventional, that man is a genius at writing scenes which pop off the page. One of the reasons why he does this is through making the majority of his scenes feature characters who are actively trying to achieve something. So yes, lots of his scenes do feature people talking... but yet we're rarely bored with what he writes, because his characters aren't merely discussing inane topics such as what they would do if they were president, they're discussing what it is they want to achieve (ie, Colonel Hans Landa trying to get the French guy at the beginning of Inglorious to tell him where the Jews are). Scenes without goals or conflict are boring scenes, as they're just a bunch of people talking.

Sorry if this comes across harsh, that's really not my intention. These are mistakes that we've all made at the start of our writing 'careers', mistakes which are easily rectified.

I'd recommend studying some scripts of films you love, trying to identify what it is which makes these scripts great. Then read some of the amateur scripts posted on these boards and comment on the things you think are great about those scripts, as well as the things you thought weren't so good.

Through doing this, you will get a good idea of how to write a more technically sound screenplay.

All the best and welcome to the boards.

Toby.

On from what Toby said, try writing a short before a feature - take one punching scene from your feature and work it as short. You'll learn a lot.

More sound advice.

As shorts take far less time than features in regards to either planning or writing, they're a brilliant way to get your style and technique near perfect before investing your time on a feature.

I would also heavily recommend checking out a website called scriptshadow.net as well. Whilst Carson (the owner of the site) has come under some quite heavy fire in the past (I definitely disagree with some of what he says), he has been known to post up some brilliant articles on how to write good scenes, develop characters, and produce structurally sound screenplays.

I mean, sure, developing characters and scripts in this rigid way can stifle creativity and result in scripts being carbon copies of others, but I would still recommend getting these fundamentals down before writing another feature, even if you choose to then disregard the information to a certain extent.

Unfortunately I can't open doc's (I really should have Word).  If you resubmit this in PDF, I'll definitely take a look.

Johnny

Quoted from Toby_E Seb, It's not that this script is a Word doc. instead of a PDF which will turn most people off. Instead, it's that the script was incorrectly formatted, due to it being written in Word. The main offender is your dialogue. Compare your script to a script which has been written with professional scriptwriting software, something like Final Draft or Celtx (which is free by the way, so I highly recommend you downloading that). Your dialogue often spans the width of the entire page, which makes this very hard to read. Furthermore, as your dialogue is incorrectly formatted, I predict that the real length of your script would be well above 120 pages when formatted correctly. Despite this turn off, I will read the first 10 pages of this though. Ok, firstly your characters are incorrectly introduced, as you have not capitalised them on introduction. Cut out all your "suddenly's", as these are unnecessary. Your writing is very passive as well. For example, "Ed starts running" should simply be "Ed runs." "Sonny starts sprinting" should be "Sonny sprints". You don't need "CUT TO's" inbetween every scene either. Dialogue needs a lot of work as well, as it sounded very stiff and unnatural. Quite a few of your scenes are devoid of conflict... they're just a bunch of people talking, ie, the dinner scene on page 10, or the scene on the porch afterwards. Make sure that the majority of your scenes have a scene goal, so feature a character who wants something. Once you have this, you can then have another character or an obstacle which stops them achieving your goal. I see you say that you love QT. And whilst his formatting and structure is highly unconventional, that man is a genius at writing scenes which pop off the page. One of the reasons why he does this is through making the majority of his scenes feature characters who are actively trying to achieve something. So yes, lots of his scenes do feature people talking... but yet we're rarely bored with what he writes, because his characters aren't merely discussing inane topics such as what they would do if they were president, they're discussing what it is they want to achieve (ie, Colonel Hans Landa trying to get the French guy at the beginning of Inglorious to tell him where the Jews are). Scenes without goals or conflict are boring scenes, as they're just a bunch of people talking. Sorry if this comes across harsh, that's really not my intention. These are mistakes that we've all made at the start of our writing 'careers', mistakes which are easily rectified. I'd recommend studying some scripts of films you love, trying to identify what it is which makes these scripts great. Then read some of the amateur scripts posted on these boards and comment on the things you think are great about those scripts, as well as the things you thought weren't so good. Through doing this, you will get a good idea of how to write a more technically sound screenplay. All the best and welcome to the boards. Toby.

Thank you for the feedback. I consider this to be really, my first screenplay, so I was expecting a lot of criticism. Dialogue is definitely hard to get down for me, even though I'm very chatty in real life aha. And yeah, I'm really trying to stop writing passively, but I still often make the mistake.

Some defenses though: I was not trying to emulate Quentin Tarantino at all. And yeah I have problems with having some pointless scenes in there, but most of the scenes are for the sake of character development for something huge that happens later on in the script (the younger brother kills the older one, so I have to build up a lot to why the brother would be able to do that, and make the audience feel sorry for both characters),.

Also I wrote this a year ago, during an Adderall addiction. (clean now though!)

Mostly I think my ideas for character development and endings are good, but I need to work on everything else, so that's why I'm here.

Thank you for the responses. I have an exam tomorrow, but the upcoming next week is a week off for me, so I'll throw some feedback back at you guys soon.

BTW, I downloaded Celtx after writing this screenplay! Working on my newest one on it.