Critique my script, please...

i would really really consider a couple earlier recommendations of trimming off the flab and trying to make this a 20 minute piece.

i just cant imagine their being enough suspense in this to grip me for 70 minutes. let alone the average american who can hardly go 30 seconds without a cut.

one of my professors always left us with one word before we would go shooting and he'd say "simple." or on occasion "simple, simple, simple."

i know this is your first feature and most likely your baby but a lot of the guys around here, not including myself, know what they are talking about...but i think i do agree with the consensus on this one.

an incredibly well-written tense short will knock the socks off potential investors a lot more than a mediocore or even above average feature length will.

regardless of your decision with this screenplay i wish you absolute best of luck with the production and keep us posted. love to hear about your casting decisions, and technical aspects (boom guys, lighting set-up, etc.) for this shoot.
 
Themattewbone, I appreciate the input. Let me clarify one thing -- this isn't my first feature, it's my second. My first was the romantic ghost story 'Afterlife' (www.chapelgrovefilms.com/afterlife)

I understand what you're saying, but I hope you're wrong. :-) I think it is sustainable as a feature, but I think its target market, to be honest, is the 'chick flick' audience.

I'm getting a TON of feedback from actors and actresses -- mostly actresses -- who really like the script a lot. I know, I know -- "They may be just sucking up because they want a role." I thought the same thing. But I have to tell you, most of these people are willing to come to NC from L.A. and NYC at their own expense for a deferred-pay supporting role in 'Tangled Web'. To me, that's putting their money where their mouth is. I don't think they'd be willing to do that if they didn't truly feel inspired by the script and the concept.

So I'm torn. I can appreciate what's being said here about what people feel are the weaknesses of the story. And yet I have people in the business enthusiastically supporting it. And a good number of these people have some strong credits on their resumes. One or two are recognizable from TV, a few others have leading roles in movies available on DVD, still more have done supporting roles opposite some pretty big guns in theatrical-release features. What this tells me is they've read a LOT of scripts in their time -- and the fact that they really like mine is extremely gratifying, and I'm humbled by it.

So I'm still weighing all of the advice I've received here, because I DO want to make the script the best it can be. But I feel strongly that I want it to remain a feature. That may turn out to be a colossal blunder, who knows? But I'm willing to take that chance.

Thanks again to EVERYONE for their excellent input. I really appreciate it!
 
just started. so far:


the first scene with alex, the kids, and shannon rings a little false, specifically alex's characterization. it read like alex was a good guy being playful with his kids. i don't know if you meant to do this or not, but after reading on and finding out alex is supposed to be an asshole, i don't feel like you showed it enough, so it felt a little "written". i'd go over that little exchange again and make it more...naturally obnoxious (by the end of the scene it had gotten there, but then my perception was just confused and the writing again felt a little forced). that's kind of a hard thing to ask someone to do, but yeah, work on that scene a little, especially since it's our first time meeting these characters.

farther in, your alex has sort of become a caricature of an abusive father. with topics as common as abuse you need to have either a new or incredibly honest and true angle on an abusive character for that character to feel real. when he almost attacks his kids i'm not afraid for them or with them. i just sort of sit back and think, well here's an abusive parent. i don't have to pay attention for awhile, so i don't. you've lost me as the audience.

you overwrite shannon. all of her written reactions stray into melodrama. part of this also stems from the issues with alex's character; since he doesn't scare me, i feel her fear is cheapened and almost ridiculous. the situation isn't real or intense enough to merit the way she reacts. and perhaps it shouldn't be that intense; real abuse isn't always screaming and crying and beating on the floor (although you've stayed away from that, we're supposed to be afraid of it going there). similarly, you can show that alex is an abusive asshole in more subtler and more interesting ways than by him threatening his kids with his belt and semi-raping his wife.

which brings me to my next point. i feel like you're playing up alex's asshole-ness to suddenly reverse it. all well and good, but i can see it coming from a mile away because alex is already so monotone. the surprise works when it's a surprise. it's not. but hey, maybe i'm wrong and their is no surprise.

the first chat with taylor works well for the beginning, but once you get to the exposition i'm back out of it again. you need to either find a creative way to show us the situation or just weave it into the dialogue more subtly (a hard thing to ask a screenwriter to do, but i'm just critiquing it). once again, shannon's reaction doesn't fit the situation. you do a better job painting taylor as a nice guy than alex as a dick, but the whole stealth mode thing betrays him pretty quickly. he may be a nice guy, but watching a woman unbeknownst to her? that's just creepy. so i'm assuming he's the other part of the role reversal, becoming the asshole.

the second scene with kelly is the exact same scene as the first, the only difference being the birthday and kelly finding out about taylor. kelly and shannon have the same conversation. even though kelly tries to inject the idea that it's not actually that bad, shannon shuts it down, and since you haven't showed us any evidence that alex isn't all that bad, we're much more inclined to believe shannon. i sense you were trying to work a little different alex into this scene, but it just reinforced what i already thought.

the dialogue in the kelly-shannon-taylor scene needs a little work. a lot of it just rings false, no real suggestions for what to do other than look back over it.

the tech guy scene needs a lot of work. i almost laughed when shannon snapped at him. because we don't feel urgency with shannon, the stuff she says just sounds ridiculous. maybe if what she said was more real, more frightening, we'd feel it more, but it doesn't work. this scene also appears to have no point. even if it does and the tech guy comes into the story again later, the audience doesn't know that at this point and has tuned out what's happening since shannon started getting nervous.

the valentine's dinner scene is all right, but the novelty of the webcam communication has started to wear off. similarly, taylor's-creepy-lines-disguised-as-jokes are starting to become just taylor's-creepy-lines. the surprise of alex being there works on paper, but will be tough on screen as we can see the doorway. his abuse falls into the cliche that was hinted at earlier with the kids and the storybook. his drunken dialogue also feels like written drunken dialogue. we've seen this drunk before, we've seen people slur the end of their words before, there's not much compelling about it.

the next scene with taylor again becomes almost laughable. shannon just doesn't behave believably. i don't feel the same urgency that she feels. maybe if i did you'd be able to get away with that "animal in a cage" metaphor, but as is it really falls flat. her trying to kill herself feels campy. with all the "NO!!!"s and "I'M SORRY!!!!"s and "PUT IT DOWN!!"s it's just become another suicide scene. we know it's not going to happen before it does happen. the only thing that could really justify this is it actually working, a surprise that would definitely kick the thing into high gear. but it doesn't, and so the suicide attempt is just histrionics. those histrionics also continue throughout the scene. shannon has become a caricature of what she was before, which was already a caricature. it's not believable the way she acts. she seems like a sane person, and this guy, who she's never actually seen before, convinces her in about 30 seconds to kill her husband.

any credibility you've built in the last scene becomes destroyed by the next kelly-shannon scene. not only is it the same scene (do something about your abusive husband), but kelly treats it completely differently from shannon. if shannon is indeed being raped and beaten all the time, don't you think kelly would be much more serious about the whole thing? it's contradictory, and even if you had been able to convince us of the seriousness of the situation, you've lost it with that scene.

i like the development in alex over the next while, and fundamentally i think it's a good direction for the story to go, for him to try and leave her, but the scene when he confronts her about it devolves really quickly into those same histrionics. a woman can shout "I WANT MY BABIES!!!!" on screen, but only if she's backed up. i dont' feel with her, thus it's just silly for her to scream that.

the whole plot twist with kelly is completely over the top. the setup for it doesn't work, so it doesn't come as an interesting surprise. it's more of just a "what?" kind of moment. the whole "embrace for a passionate kiss thing" is rather cliched. similarly, the plot twist with taylor is over the top. i don't buy that they're all in cahoots for a second. nor do i buy shannon's "resurrection". even if they don't, as an audience member i assume a police officer would load his gun often enough to notice this. not only is the plot twist a reach, but the writing has also devolved cliches and such. this whole sequence needs serious reworking.

similarly, bobby the tech guy comes out of nowhere. and you haven't left us any clues to go back and find that this whole scheme of theirs is plausible. it just seems ridiculous. i feel like you're venturing into self parody by now, and i'm sure that's not what you're aiming for. the amount of plot twists, cheesy noir dialogue cliches, and all the rest has really dragged this down. since the build didn't work, the climax really didn't work.

so bobby fills the new "supposedly-innocent-nice-guy", i'm supposing. again he's too one dimensional for us to really believe he's genuine. a way you could get around this is by paying more attention to his characterization. the dialogue in this scene again feels false, more exposition. the last twist is all right, but not really deliciously ironic enough to justify it. bobby just seems like a creep. we don't feel a "here-it-goes-again" feeling, just a "ok, this is a creepy tech guy" feeling.



all in all, it really needs a lot of work. There's potential in there for an interesting story, and the webcam format could make a unique way of telling an interesting story, but the plot devices don't work because the characters fall short of what they need to do. they just aren't real enough to merit the situation. by the end, the most interesting character is alex, mainly because he goes somewhere we don't necessarily think he will. but he devolves in the last scene. i pretty obviously didn't see kelly's character change coming, but i think that's because there's just absolutely no evidence that she's anything in the story. she just feels useless and isn't compelling, so i didn't think about her.

take a look at the following things most of all:

1. dialogue. this is what killed you. if they had talked believably throughout, i would have believed it more, be more invested, have been more surprised, and just cared more about what was happening. i felt like the character's weren't speaking, the writer was. this is really an issue.
2. shannon. she is not believable. all of her reactions are much too large for the situation she's in. tone her down. give her something besides histrionics. right now even though she's the central character, she doesn't have much compelling about her. she's just a drama queen. also, her switch from drama queen to scheming femme fatale doesn't work. there's no evidence that would show this. something tells me shannon can't necessarily hide that big of an upset for such a long time and for so well; she found out that the person that she's apparently in love with is trying to kill her, don't you think she'd have some sort of reaction to that? we should see it if she does. if she doesn't, than she's not a believable character in my mind. for someone that's supposed to bear the emotional weight of the film, she doesn't succeed.


there's definitely potential, but this needs to serve as a very, very rough draft. it's got a long way to go, but that's the way writing is. work on it, work on it, work on it, and good luck.
 
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