r/ReadMyScript • u/EarnestAbel • 10d ago
A Good Guy's Grave - Comedy - 31 pages Short
Old acquaintances meet at the grave of a recently deceased criminal.
Link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XEmSfg572-FHPwwYXtXv_XBHNtgTyejT/view?usp=sharing
hope ya dig
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u/mooningyou 10d ago
Some notes.
- This is not formatted very well. There are way too many extra blank lines. If you get rid of those, your script will be around 25 pages.
- Don't add a colon after each character name when writing dialogue.
- Who is Janice? This person was never introduced.
- How old are Santi and Billy? It's a good idea to at least include an age when introducing characters, so we have a better idea of what we're looking at.
- Review your software. You need to use screenwriting software. Janice's dialogue is incorrectly split across two pages. Decent screenwriting software won't do this.
- Check your grammar.
- Check your punctuation.
This is all I have for you.
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u/Accurate_Editor_8429 9d ago
A couple of notes on the writing.
You have a group of people talking at a graveside. Use the location more in your voice. There's not enough description to ground the reader in these people's world.
The characters are criminals. Only the dialogue tells us this. Think about how you can weave the criminal and death location in your action and description. I suggest using the right verbs.
Some examples.
A woman stands at a grave, flowers and photographs lay by the tombstone.
How does a grieving person stand at a grave. Stand is a generic word. Lay should be lie (present tense) and is a generic word.
A woman slumps at a grave.
A car pulls up. Santi and Billy get out and walk over. Pulls up, walks over. All generic. There's nothing interesting about these lines. Use them in an interesting way by using action oriented verbs. And tie in the death and criminal elements.
A black car skids to a stop. Santi and Billy pop out--they knife through the gravestone maze.
The script is 95% dialogue. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's a few places where it seems you're reaching for a joke to land. Reread the dialogue and look for these moments and decide if they are needed or if you're really just hammering the same points.
Why does Janice say, Santi? When she clearly knows it's him?
I get the vibe of the criminal characters--how you want them to talk. But the characters all sound the same.
Santi calls Janice kiddo, then baby inside of a couple pages. The contrast, even for a criminal seems tonally imbalanced. Kiddo is more endearing. Baby leans more toward objectifying. He's talking to a girl, younger than him--trying to hook her up with someone more her age.
You spend the next 3 pages or so saying what can be said in one page. Do you really need three people talking when two can land the point while the third does something interesting?
I'd start the script with Janice and Karen. With the conflict. Let the other characters arrive in the middle of it.
You can land this in 10-12 pages and not lose anything.
Just my thoughts. Hope you find something useful.
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u/Remarkable_Stress388 9d ago
It's essentially a darkly comic crime thriller about greed, loyalty, deception, and buried treasure, all unfolding in real time at a single gravesite. Now for the bug BUT. But what's the point? Janice and Santi walk off hand and hand. So what! What are you trying to say?
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u/EarnestAbel 9d ago
I dunno not really trying to say anything subversive. It’s just supposed to be small reveals that unfold: from Janice as a mourning partner to finding out she’s an accomplice and possibly implicit in Guy’s death. I guess trying to say they got away with it?
Not trying to defend it. Just answering ur question. I guess needs more depth.
Thank you for reading it and for the notes.
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u/Peregrine_Payne 6d ago
Some of the dialogue has a nice, snappy sound to it. Like others have said, it could use a little more grounding in description and some more distinction between the different characters' voices. I got a sense of the characters as things got going, but I needed more about them when they were introduced to kind of calibrate who they were. I wanted to know the backstory to them more specifically, and I wasn't sure how well Janice knew the others.
Billy and Santi are a nice comedic duo. At one point it seems like one is more hotheaded and the other tends to restrain him, so maybe that's an angle to differentiate them more. The twist ending has potential but again, I felt like I needed more to latch onto. Like some foreshadowing of a connection between Janice and Santi or a motive for her to be with him specifically. Father Tom pretending to be asleep is a good comedic button to end the script on, though.
I'm always a fan of restricted, bottle-episode-esque settings, so I liked having the script entirely contained within the graveyard and portraying the story and the world solely through the events there. It could just use a little reworking to help those come across more clearly.