Recalling Ernie's Death by Nathan Hill - Short, Dark Comedy, Crime - Scatterbrained PI Conroy Fitz attempts to recall a wild night in which his friend was killed. 15 pages - pdf, format 8)

An off-beat dark comedy here. Just wrote it with inspiration from Inherent Vice, haha.

Sorry, wasn’t a massive fan of this one. I thought 15 pages was very long for the actual content.

Just a few things I picked up along the way.

Quite a few spelling mistakes, missing words and grammatical errors. They would be easy to spot on another read through.

The black void thing was quite confusing to follow along with.

The dialogue is on the nose, an example would be:

"You look so amazing and handsome, Conroy... not in a homosexual way. I know you don’t like men, you are a ladies man..."

You also over use the ellipsis and em-dash and you have your own version; "-.. and -...", which are very over done and make for a hard read.

All your (O.S.) AND (V.O) are written below your dialogue. They should be written next to it. Parentheticals go below, they look the same but aren’t.

Can lose the CUT TO:, really no need for them.

Good luck with it.

Quoted from Warren Sorry, wasn’t a massive fan of this one. I thought 15 pages was very long for the actual content. Just a few things I picked up along the way. Quite a few spelling mistakes, missing words and grammatical errors. They would be easy to spot on another read through. The black void thing was quite confusing to follow along with. The dialogue is on the nose, an example would be: "You look so amazing and handsome, Conroy... not in a homosexual way. I know you don’t like men, you are a ladies man..." You also over use the ellipsis and em-dash and you have your own version; "-.. and -...", which are very over done and make for a hard read. All your (O.S.) AND (V.O) are written below your dialogue. They should be written next to it. Parentheticals go below, they look the same but aren’t. Can lose the CUT TO:, really no need for them. Good luck with it.

"You look so amazing and handsome, Conroy... not in a homosexual way. I know you don’t like men, you are a ladies man..."

The story is told to the two detectives from Conroy's perspective and he manipulates what Ernesto says here, it's intentionally over the top, haha.

I'll try and fix my parenthesis but the softwarre I use automatically places them above the dialogue.

I've got a bad habit with CUT TO's, I tend to use them for a sort of visionary, to represent a fast cut.

Thanks for the feedback, Warren, I'll make some necessary changes, perhaps shorten it down.

You need to get rid of transitions. This is up to the director to decide...

I know a lot of people who write spec scripts would like to do all the editing/directing as well but it just doesn't work that way. Focus on storytelling, tell WHAT happens, not HOW it happens. The rest is none of the writers business...

You also need to work on the sluglines.

INT. BLACK VOID is not a proper slugline.

INT. A LONELY BAR- MIAMI- NIGHT should be INT. BAR, MIAMI - NIGHT. The fact that the bar is lonely can be described in the action/description.