Script Analysis

Every writer who enters BlueCat Screenplay Competition receives written screenplay analysis on their entry. We strive to hire script readers who are thoughtful, intelligent, fair and clear. How they present their thoughts will, of course, vary, and you might not agree with what they think. But hopefully you will be able glean some idea of how to improve your screenplay and gain ground on your objective of getting your script to screen.

What follows is an example of the feedback we send to our entrants. Remember: what you receive is one person's opinion.

Last Time

Archive # 580

What Did You Like About This Script?

I think I liked what this script attempted to do more than what it actually achieved. The story of one man's attempt to create a truly equal society is an interesting way to explore and comment on the nature of race relations today. The advantage of science fiction is that it allows us to illuminate the human condition by asking: "what if?" What if the world was overtly racist, where that was the accepted norm? There are several levels being explored in this screenplay, with different characters illuminating the various viewpoints.

The opening sequence, where the pilot exhorts the crowd to violence, where the protesters are the minority fringe group - shouted down and mocked by the masses - clearly sets us up for an off-kilter world where nothing is as we expect.

The visual settings are interesting, and add to the surreal air, and the characters are diverse, most of them with some clear motivations, and a character consistency.

The overall tone of the film worked quite well, with some good twists and turns to the story. The moment when Harriet Lonnie reveals herself to be one of the witches is excellent, and very creepy.

While I had some real problems with the story structure and some of the technical writing, I felt that this was a highly original viewpoint, and told a story that, while somewhat flawed in this version, does have some real promise to it.

What Do You Think Needs Work?

The descriptions need a lot of work. There are so many tense changes - some of them within the same sentence - that it's actually hard to understand what's going on. Just as an example, on page 8:" Tom just looks at the man, which is really all the man wanted to make an impression on him, to look as eerie as he did. Tom continued watching the man as he stood up."

Descriptions should always be in the present tense, and should be brief and clear. A lot of them are overwritten.

While trimming the descriptions, bear in mind that this is the screenplay for a movie. Anything that cannot be seen or heard shouldn't be in there. For example: "she runs into a fellow employee for Hoffman Jayhawk, a telemarketing firm. Mort Johnson is an athletically built dark skinned man, average height and modestly attractive facial features. ... Amused by the hair he's seen for the first time, HE CALLS AFTER HER."

We'll discover that he's a fellow employee when we see him working next to her in a later scene, right now the camera sees "an athletically built, dark skinned man" calling after her. If it's critical to know he's never seen her hair like this, that needs to come out in the dialogue.

Also, almost every line of dialogue is interpreted for the actors. The dialogue should speak for itself - if we can't tell that a character would say the line angrily, or seductively, or whatever, then there's some basic character work missing.

There are also some structural problems to this screenplay. I'm unclear by the end exactly what happened over the course of the story. I think this stems from a lack of focus on your major character. Whose story is this? The ending makes it fairly clear that we're meant to be tracking Mary's journey, from her realizing Hank is in love with her to her untimely demise... but that's only clear at the ending. By focusing the arc of this story on Ted from the opening scene, I think a stronger story structure will emerge; and that will allow the various subplots (Mary's transformation, the story of Toland, etc...) to play out without overshadowing the major through-line.

This reads like a first draft - there's simple spelling and grammatical errors throughout, there's a lack of clarity to the story and a lack of overall structure... but the basic core of the idea has a great potential. This could be developed into an amazing, powerful science fiction movie - I think it deserves the work.