Saturday, April 17, 2010

The Usual Suspects 2

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Blink Brother!

Okay, I get no joy from doing this but there are a lot of things wrong with these pages. You jump around too much, not allowing any scenes to develop, leading to a confused reader. Just as I was about to get into a scene, we'd jump to another country.

This also prevents you from establishing any characters. Establishing a main character in the first scene is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT as the audience needs someone to identify with and root for right away. Not a hard and fast rule, but one that 99% of movies go by these days.

Generally, I was just confused. I didn't know where we were, why we were there, what was going on. I had nobody to root for. These are BASIC THINGS you need for a script work. They're also things you learn over time, which is what I tried to warn you about. You don't tend to be aware of this stuff on your first script.

You do have some nicely written lines and paragraphs and some fun action. But that's not what a script is about. It's not a writing contest. It's a STORYTELLING contest. You have to rope us in. Give us someone to root for. Give us a situation (not 8 situations) with an interesting problem/mystery that we want to see solved/answered.

Keep reading a ton of scripts. You have some work ahead of you. But you can do it.