Gut Shot by Dick Icecorns - Short, Horror - A man carjacked, shot and left for dead thirty years earlier takes possession of a man traveling the same desert road in the same make and model Corvette Stingray.  12 pages - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Hi,

First off, the title here is Gut Shot. On the script it's Shot To The Gut?

Ok, this is the first one I've read, and it is well written. Seems sci-fi-ish at times. Never really full on horror. And maybe it's because I'm just awake, but it confused me quite a bit. Might have to re-read when I get done with the others.

As I said, though, well written.

Good luck :)

What comes across to me is the pop culture setting that weaves through it. Route 66, pop music from the eighties, and so on.
The story line doesn't seem to be linear, so it gets confusing to me. The ending lacked some punch for me.

Hello !

I really like the way it's written. I didn't really feel the horror, but I could visualize very well the scenes and the atmosphere.

There were a couple places here where I wasn't sure what was present and what was flashback.  You jumped back and forth between time and place in a couple of spots and it could've been worded a bit differently.  

I think Steven tossing the girlfriend's photo in the trash should've been his wrist watch.  Otherwise, the reader might not remember the ex girlfriend or why she was ever a factor.    

Some added dialogue where Steve comes out of the bathroom at the racetrack and all the sudden it's JJ's Garage would've cleared up what was happening to Steve.  "Where am I?" or something as simple as that.  

Otherwise, the switch from night to day and day to night becomes tiresome.  

More Twilight Zone-ish than outright horror and I got a little bit confused around page 8, onwards but it doesn't really matter. I really felt the suspense and the dread which was down primarily to some mighty fine writing.

I do think the story needs a bit of streamlining but it's certainly up there so far in my top picks.
Nice work, Writer!

Love the logline. And I love Corvettes.

Good luck finding that 1978 Silver anniversary Stingray should you ever want to make this. :)

Classic cars, 80's music, Route 66 what's not to love about all that.

Anyway, very well written and clean. Spacing too large between slugs however.

A few descriptions I had to read twice. Elbows down. Stephen reaches the watch back - ready to throw it over the ravine  etc. this is repeated throughout in various places leading to a slightly confusing read.

Like LC says, more Twilight Zone vibe than horror really. I could see it working as a segment in the new TZ show for sure if it was expanded out.

Great job!

I generally liked the vibe of this one. Although there were a few places where I got confused and had to re-read to get my bearings straight.

I think a couple of less songs would be better - it got redundant there.

Congrats on entering.

Let's start with the logline, which reads very confusing.

"A man carjacked, shot and left for dead thirty years earlier takes possession of a man traveling the same desert road in the same make and model Corvette Stingray."

A man carjacked" could mean that a man carjacked a car.  Biggest issue is you need a comma between "earlier" and "takes".  I'd change "earlier" to ago".  It just doesn't read well at all as written.

OK, sorry, let's get into the script...

Well, right away we have issues.  Your title is different than the title posted.  Also, you neglected to delete Page 13, which is a lazy mistake.

Spacing is off - after FADE IN and before all Slugs.  Looks like you have at least 1 extra line - check your software settings and get that fixed up.

Using "canvas" to describe the floor is an odd choice, and does it matter that the floor is hard wood?

So, we're in this "high end apartment", and you end the passage with "An empty room.", and then, you go into a Mini Slug of KITCHEN.  My question involves the word choice of "room" - what room is this? Surely this high end apartment has more than just 1 room.  Know what I'm saying?  Basically, your first Slug is missing detail to know where we are.

Why direct the shot by only mentioning the hand and watch?  I'm against this type of writing...other s may dig it.

"reaches the watch back" - very awkwardly phrased.

"Under a protective enclosure" - what does this mean?  Are you saying the car is covered and he takes the cover off to reveal the car?  If so, you didn't actually say that.

"Tolerance, NM" - Hmmm, interesting.  I looked it up and here's what popped up.  

http://www.johnleifer.com/tolerance-new-mexico

Interesting again - Hot in the City - 1982, Private Eyes - 1981, Who Could it be Now - 1981, Abracadabra - 1982.  So, we've gone back in time to 1982?  And then back to present?

Hmmm, writing style is good, but for me, too short and staccato.  I know others will love it.  I don't hate it, but like a little more visual writing.

OK, I'm confused..."Old" Route 66 runs through Albuquerque.  Truth or Dare is about 150 mile south of that.  Where are we?

Your Flashback is not properly formatted - don't put Flashback in the Slug - if you have more than 1 Slug in your Flashback, you'd have to keep on writing Flashback in each Slug, and you don't want to to do that.

Now I'm really confused!  Without your logline, I think everyone would be confused right now.

OK, the last few pages were extremely confusing, and alot of that is based on your choice of Slugs, and using/not using Flashback.

Lots of orphans here, some unnecessary wrylies, probably close to 1/2 a page that didn't need to be here.

Bottom line is that I don't get it.  I like the idea and I like the effort, but I don't see horror and/or suspense at all, and surely not inside a vehicle...but, again, I give kudos for the effort and because of how bad most of these entries are, you get a better grade than is probably deserved.

***

Okay.... here we go. First script I've read.

I didn't read the logline, because I like to see if a script can tell me the story on its own. And, in this case, it made things more difficult.

I spent most of the script in a state of confusion. I don't mind starting there, and I don't even mind hanging around there for awhile. But, by about page 8, I needed to know where I was in the story. That's the point where frustration began to set in.

The writing is pretty good, and I like the concept. This would be an expensive short to make, mainly because you got so specific... but, if you decide to work further on this, I'd look for ways to make it a bit more streamlined. Straighten out the story a bit.

I'll say, the multiple mentions of Tolerance, and the jump between modern day and the 80s made me think you were setting up some social commentary on the differences between the times... like tolerance was going to be a theme, and this poor chap was struggling to adapt. But, unless I missed it, you didn't end up going that direction. Too bad, because I was kind of excited to see how you were going to pay that off.

There were several points where I found the action confusing. For example, I read the first mention of the 78 stickers multiple times. Didn't understand it until you clarified several lines later. It's a small thing, but it really took me out of the story. A simple rewrite of that line would clear things up... tell me the stickers are on the windshield of his car in that first mention.

Suspense was good, and I definitely wanted to know where it was going to end. That's a good sign.

So, to bottom line it: confusing story, but well written otherwise (with minor exceptions).

Good job overall. Glad you entered. Can't wait to see how this stacks up against the competition.

Best,
Paul

Hi writer,

A fair bit of time is spent on radio station surfing and music, I don't think it adds anything to your story.

I'm done and I'm not entirely sure how best to comment. It was confusing to say the least. I couldn't get a handle on what was happening and why.

The dialogue feels very stilted.

I not sure what genre I would class this, but I don't think it would be horror. I couldn't quite pinpoint your suspenseful scene either.

Sorry this was too all over the place for me.

All the best.

Question: what's wrong with the title "A Shot To The Gut"? I mean, it seems easy to remember, but you subbed it as 'Gutshot'. On top of that the actual title isn't hard to miss. The fon't a a bit big, and not even in courier. Maybe the title should have been 'Shot Gut" since it's so careless.

Quoted Text On a marble island countertop rests a framed photo of him and an attractive young woman posed on the grass. Stephen stares at it with a sense of regret.

Aside from informing me visually that there's nothing else in the kitchen than a coffee maker and mug, now we get an overused cliche suddenly appearing out of nowhere.  And of course, Stephen has it on the island for no apparent reason - I mean, you know if he's packing up, why bother displaying the photo?  And like the classic cliche, the character takes down or examines an old picture with a loved one n it and gets emotional. Break out the kleenex.
Seriously- why can't we just have said picture ALREADY in the box, we see it on top, Stephen closes up the box, and the point is still made?

This better get better, and quick.

Quoted Text Stephen rests his mug on the rail and carefully removes his Cartier watch. With elbows down, he uses both hands to rub and caress the surface. He flips it over. To My Love Forever.

I guess not. The entire scene is pointless.  Doubling down on the kleenex.

Quoted Text Under a protective enclosure sits a vintage 1978 Silver Anniversary Edition Corvette Stingray. Stephen pops the trunk

Oh does he now? There's a reason why I highlighted the year and underlined "vintage".
That's a HUGE gaffe.  Guess what Corvettes pre-1982 didn't have?

"Hot In The City." and Stephen sings to it as the song ends. I don't know if anyone has brought stuff like this up,but you know what advice is given about putting in pre-recorded songs in scripts,let alone short ones. What if this gets filmed? He might be singing something else. However, if he just missed the song and the DJ mentions the song being on the chart, you might get away with it. But not today.  And having other songs as "Character dialog" is just plain wrong.  Wrong.

And by Toni Basil, I'm out.
Oh wait---let'sstop to see "what looks like"movie posters. Then you name movie posters.
Now I'm out.

Afraid this one lost me towards the end, just couldn't keep track of the timelines or who was in who's body when.

But clearly a good writer and I think with some judicious pruning this could work.

met the criteria too!

Sorry, I couldn't get past page 9 on this one.

Maybe it's just me, but it was incredibly difficult to follow. If things become difficult to visualise it's probably time to get another draft out there.

In this industry, readers will largely clock out as soon as the story loses impetus, or if they believe if's not cut out, so to it's important to make your story easy to access first and foremost.

There's a difference between having a convoluted plot that's presented clearly, and a script that is near impenetrable; for me, this script falls into the latter.

Through to page 7 you have a lot of focus on him leaving his place, and then on him skipping through radio stations; I think that's too much weight given on areas that don't really propel your story forward.

All this said, you got something down, and that's more than I can say for myself.

Solid. However, what are the odds Stephen would get the very '78 Corvette JJ owned and drive by the very place -- a couple of states away -- where he was killed? Of course, the answer is that the Racetrack Gas Station is on Route 66, and Stephen decides to take Route 66 out of town. Maybe there was an old Route 66 brochure in the car when he got it, or maybe Stephen is one of those people for whom Route 66 still has a mystique about it. Or maybe he's just a fan of the old TV show by that name.

Writing notes as I read.

The logline is overwritten, uh-oh.

IN THE KITCHEN...sits a coffee pot and one lone mug. And nothing else.” Is it on the floor then?

These brief 80’s tracks on the radio would cost thousands.

Lots of random weird stuff going on, not following this at all but the tension is cut abruptly by the stop at the gas station.

I get it now, he’s having flashbacks to JJ’s death. The flashing back and forth is confusing though, hard to follow.

At the end he just has a little chat to the ghost and it’s all sorted. That’s a bit quick and very convenient. I think you ran out of pages and just finished it as quickly as you could, which is understandable.

Didn’t feel like much of a horror, although there was some suspense. More of a twilight zone style fantasy.

-Mark

Hello writer

Some of the writing is leaving me a little confused - probably just me - did the stickers randomly appear on his own car? was it his car headlights lighting him from behind - quite confusing for me.

Music, vintage cars, brand new stickers - I think we have some kind of time travel situation here.

less than half a second from hitting him and still avoids him - reflexes of a cat - seriously though, we are getting a tad overwritten here.

Stephens reasoning with ghost JJ feels a little forced and not built up to - Like he suddenly understands him - maybe he does, but I'm still a little confused.

The ending was supposed to be some kind of link between Stephen and JJ? If it was, It didn't land for me - JJ was murdered and torn from his family, Stephen appears to have just had a breakup, I fail to see the connection.

So, I think this is a ghost story about a haunted car - it was very jarring at times and overwritten - after the challenge, it would benefit greatly from a rewrite.

The suspense was there but I had no feeling of horror, the car was heavily featured so well done there.

Well done for entering the challenge

Mattt

GUT SHOT

Code IN THE KITCHEN ...sits a coffee pot and one lone mug. And nothing else.

When I think of a coffee pot, I think of either a French Press or one of those jugs that come with coffee machines. I think something is missing here. I find it very strange that those items would be there but no actual coffee or wherewithal to make a cup.

Code The car HONKS. Over and over. Stephen HITS THE GAS. He looks ahead and spots the tall and bright lights of A VERY LARGE GAS STATION. And here come the HIGH BEAMS on Stephen's tail. The car once again HONKS like crazy. And Steven once again HITS THE GAS. But the car doesn't let up and RAMS HIS BUMPER. Stephen CUTS A HARD RIGHT into the busy lot of the multi-pump gas station.

Too much upper-case. It detracts from the writing - lessens its impact.



The writing is good in this if a little confusing at times but I think on screen it would translate better. I didn't get the point in showing the apartment in the first couple of pages. Seems to me, that could all be cut very easily.

The story tied up a little too nicely at the end and the speech about 'life goes on' is forced. Needs some work but a decent story.

"Short, sharp, shock.." -- Pink Floyd

Hm. It seems you are aiming for a sorta shellshocked vibe.

From my perspective, there seems to be a lot of heat, but very little light.  I mean, there's a lot going on here, but there's no real clarity to it.  Don't get me wrong -- a nice premise,  and believe it, or not, I did like it.  It just needs a bit more work.

What you choose to describe/or tell us, is a cue to the audience to pay attention. Details mean "this is important."  But...you dedicate a lot of lines to tell us what songs are playing.  Mind you, songs that probably won't be in the script If it were ever filmed.  Methinks it's unnecessary and misleading because I'm waiting to find out why you told me all that.  So I didn't connect what that had to do with anything.  Probably nothing, If so, fine, but you're wasting real estate.  I'd use that space for more important things.  If anything, I'd scale back...

Oh, one more thing, The Simpsons is a great study in pop culture anthropology.  Just food for thought. -Andrea

I don't understand this rash of extra blank pages in some of the submissions and the laziness to not delete them?! I'm curious if the three (or four?) writers use the same software.

Logline tells the whole story? Let's see....

What year is this supposed to be? Present day or in the eighties? The encounter on pg. 3 is quite confusing as written. A lot of spotlighting (is this direction or an actual spotlight?). The '78 is on his windshield now?

Thankfully the logline told me what was going on because I got lost. Still not sure exactly what happened but I think there is a decent story here. Somewhere. After the OWC is over, out yourself and give a synopsis of what you were going for. Congrats for entering, writer.

Well, I really enjoyed this but there were some gigantic bumps in the road (pun intended). The beginning sequence in the apartment I thought was well-described and got the sense of emptiness, abandonment. The start of the drive had a nice feel to it as well, though as another poster pointed out was a little overdone with the 80s music references -- in that it would be hard to license for the screen. But I liked ow it worked on page, like a Stephen King book (he sometimes includes song references). With that, I found it odd the main character finds more than one station that plays that music. I would think if anything he'd just get that one station and hang on to it for dear life,lol.


Now... the sequence of seeing the 78 stickers on the windshield. I had to read that two or three times to get what was happening. The sequence of the main character making hard turns to avoid phantom sights to the gas station lumbered and clunked along - the writing wasn't paced fast enough to convey the action it was supposed to.


The remainder of the script felt cluttered, although I was able to find the narrative through it all, but feel a lot of cleanup needs to be done. I felt the onlookers at the gas station were unnecessary and some aspects were far-fetched: Him opening right to the news article on the crash on his phone. Then some of the other characters in the gas station.


The ending was satisfying, with the whole analogy of letting go and moving on.

I hate to simply reiterate what everyone else has said, but I was confused for a lot of this. Even though it is very clean and nicely written, the story had me having to re-read a lot of the action. This led to the script not having a great flow for me and hurt the suspense in the end.

The horror is lacking and the script seems to lean more into sci/fi territory. I feel like this has been done before on Twilight Zone or Outer Limits type show.

The music references were overdone I think.

A decent entry but loses some points due to lack of horror and confusion.

-Really love your title and like your logline.
-Sounds interesting and I love a possession story and all in a corvette, nice!
-This is a pet peeve of mine, but I can tell you must use a non-standard writing software, the off spacing drives me nuts, but that's a my weird pet peeve thing.
-Love the way you have used the songs
-Love the way you have named the cities
--I think I'm a little confused at the wrap up on this one. Did JJ possess his body for a while.. was the corvette the connection? I think this story has a ton of good things going for it but feels like the end was rushed because it had me a bit confused. I will mention that although the writing is very good and I loved your dialogue, it takes a while to get the story going and I think the actions and descriptions need to be trimmed way back. We only need enough to visualize the scene.
--Good job here writer.

The bulk of reviews for GUT SHOT could be summed up as "I didn't get it" or "I gave up by page 8" and "I was confused by most of it".  

It's really the opening pages of a feature-length concept disguised as a short film.   I'd have to chalk this up to being mainly a feature length screenwriter who has little to no experience writing in short form.   I'm really used to writing in a slow-burn style that reveals only pieces of a mystery.  One small piece at a time.  

This may explain why this didn't quite work as a short script.  Or why it seemed unsatisfying and anti-climactic as I was in a hurry to "wrap things up" by page 12.  

It seems most of you were completely lost most of the time and didn't find the significance of the yellow stickers on Stephen's windshield.   Or why they appeared and then disappeared.  Or what it even means.   Or the significance of his girlfriend's breaking up with him.  

The intended suggestion was that Stephen's car may actually be JJ's car, before he was carjacked by the three gunmen in 1985.  This is revealed when Stephen finds the photo on the abandoned gas station wall and sees the same 78 sticker on the Corvette windshield.    

He gives JJ the speech about letting go of the past and realizes that he must too let go of his past life in LA with his girlfriend.  Hence, him throwing the photo of him and ex girlfriend in the trash.  

Yes, a hurried and rushed ending that was unsatisfying.  

The main area of confusion was my use of the two gas stations.  The Racetrack of 2019 and JJ's Auto Wreckage of 1985.  I saw spots in my description that could've made this a whole lot clearer and have since cleaned this up.    

I've seen sequences like this written out as...

INT.  JJ'S AUTO WRECKAGE - DAY (1985)

Or...

EXT.  ROUTE 66 - DAY (FLASHBACK)    

Or...

INT.  RACETRACK GAS STATION - DAY (PRESENT)

I read a few articles on how this is an accepted form of flashback if it is used sparingly and you are only using that location a single time.    

In closing...

I was surprised at how confused everyone was by GUT SHOT as I tried to simplify the descriptions as painfully as possible.  

Since last week, I've been working tirelessly on the feature version of "A SHOT TO THE GUT"

GUT SHOT got beat up pretty bad, for the most part.  I'd love for any and all feedback on the feature version which should be posted soon.  It's called A SHOT TO THE GUT and it's what this short was really meant to be.  A slow burn thriller with twists and surprises.  

I've taken all of your notes to heart and applied them to the feature version.