critique First page

[Spike]

Here is the fist page of my one polished screenplay. It's gone through many many tweaks and this, finally, seems right.

https://www.keepandshare.com/doc30/114597/mts-open2-pdf-30k?da=y



Mars.

 

[Spike]

I'm just kidding, no person with an IQ over 70 has ever won the lottery. They rig it that way so the money gets back into circulation within the year. If they had ever given a genius the powerball, or the presidency, even one time, we'd have universal internet, electric cars, civilian spaceflight, cheap modular housing, reusable rockets, advanced polymers, brain interfaces, nano medicine, and giant tunneling machines for some reason.

Ha. I suspected as much. Actually I like the line: the lottery is a tax on stupid people .

I think the attractive thing about being a movie writer is that all the money stuff is somebody else's problem. You just get to hang out on the set, try to meet girls, and maybe run out for Egg McMuffins.

 

[CelticRambler]

I imagined something like this--absurdly anachronistic.

And therein lies the problem: it can only be anachronistic if we know what is normal for the time and the place. In your imagination, that's the style of a "mid 20th century residential subdivision" ; in my reality in France, that's the style of popular early 21st century housing. But neither of us know for sure what the Martians would build.

What felt off about this phrase is that it alone, amongst all of the description, made reference to a style - something that is not defined and cannot be assumed from the text. A phrase along the lines of "the roads and bland, homogenous houses of a small residential subdivision" would probably better convey the setting you've imagined.

 

[Spike]

Good notes, CR. Thanks . I will probably change to something along the lines you suggest. This is the first look at the life on Mars, and I have dispensed with "in the year XXXX Mars has been terraformed and sparsely colonized by blah blah blah," and have just jumped right In. Mars, it turns out, under the influence of a Trumpy real estate mogul, is surprisingly like mid-1960s Northern California, lol.

 

[CelticRambler]

Mars, it turns out, under the influence of a Trumpy real estate mogul, is surprisingly like mid-1960s Northern California, lol.

Damn! I thought this was going to be a work of unrealistic fiction.

 

[Unknown Screenwriter]

Yup, Nate, you're probably right. Although my sense is that there is room for some individual style, here. For example (and I posted this after looking at this) Here is a screen shot of the first page of William Goldman's "All The President's Men" script.

And here's what appeared on the screen. It's pretty close to Goldman's original vision. The only differences are, he imagined the sound coming in before the scene changed, and saw the transition as a "bleed away" where it ended up a hard cut punctuated by the carriage return, and the actual Nixon footage was different.. But pretty cool, I think.

It also happens to be the SHOOTING SCRIPT so of course, the movie is going to contain much of what you're reading here... I'm sure the original script did not have a lot of that in it. Just adaptation of the book.

I once hung out with William Goldman for an hour and a half as he explained to me IN DETAIL how he adapts books to screen which is why I'm saying what I'm saying.

 

[Spike]

I wonder what the difference is, re. formatting and such, between "shooting" and "original?"
(And not asking for an answer; I can eventually figure it out with stuff like this)

Spec Script vs. Shooting Script: Every Single Difference – Freshmen Screen Play

freshmenscreenplay.com

Anyway, I can't remember where I downloaded the script, but it feels like a draft, with pages like this:

 

[Spike]

And here is the first page of Butch Cassidy. This one has "Final" on the title page. It is similarly chatty, (to President's Men) kind of novelistic. I'm not questioning, by the way. I don't know, lol. I just like this stuff. I read his Adventures in the Screen Trade, and Goldman seems to be atypical.

 

[Unknown Screenwriter]

There's really no difference in formatting when it comes to shooting scripts vs. spec scripts or original adaptation of scripts from a book or some other material. It's what you LEAVE OUT when you write the original.

The original is written to be READ, plain and simple. I know a lot of members are not going to like reading that but that's just the way it is. A lot of eyes have to get laid on the original way before a shooting script ever gets TRANSCRIBED from said original. The original script has to go through many changes until damn near everyone in the development chain is in agreement that it's ready to be shot as a movie.

Once that decision's been made? A shooting script is developed from the original script. Now things like transitions, and extensive action and description are used in order to really nail down what the movie is HOPEFULLY going to look like on screen.

That's why we end up reading so many newbie specs that contain elements of screenwriting that simply do NOT have to be in there and truth be told? When cut out? Can often lead to a spec script that simply isn't long enough. Like a credits sequence in the beginning or camera angles in many of the scenes.

Send stuff like that to a producer, agent, or manager and they are very likely going to pass JUST BECAUSE they see all this extra writing that simply does NOT and SHOULD NOT be in a spec script.

At the spec script level? You just write a screenplay that's meant to be read. Yes, it should STILL help get the movie playing inside the head of the person reading it but make no mistake... It's meant to be read.

And? In my humble opinion? It's why a great number of screenplays fail right off the bat because the writer has ended up emulating a shooting script.

I'm not saying that it can't work... Sometimes it can if everything is JUST RIGHT. All I'm saying is that it's simply not the norm.

A spec or original script is written to be read. A shooting script is transcribed to be shot.

 

[Spike]

Good concise answer. Thanks.