hey lots of feedback is appriciated and sorry for the formatting my computer has DS. EXT. TURKISH REVENGE-CITY STREET- MORNING Title Screen: Black screen with white letters, "Turkish Revenge". CAMERA is on two men who are walking down a busy city street. they are talking casually and smoking cigarettes. MIKE You ever hear of Turkish Revenge? JASON What the fuck is Turkish Revenge? MIKE You've never heard of giving somebody a little bit of Turkish Revenge? JASON No I haven't or I wouldn't be asking you, obviously. MIKE Ok, it breaks down like this: When you go to prison in Turkey, you're not allowed to try and kill anyone for any reason. But you are allowed to stab or shoot another inmate below the waist because that isn't considered "intent to kill" so all the inmates do is run around stabbing and shooting eachother in the ass all day long. JASON They just stab each other in the ass? MIKE Yeah, pretty much. JASON So why don't they just call it "stabbing somebody in the ass"? MIKE Because the Turks were the orginators of that kind of thing. Calling it "stabbing someone in the ass" kind of takes away from the dramatic effect of the whole thing. JASON It disturbs me that you're this well educated about Turkish prison customs. MIKE You've never seen "Midnight Express"? JASON Nope. I bet getting stabbed in the ass hurts. MIKE I garuantee. It's kind of ironic that stabbing someone below the waist is considered non-lethal because if you get stabbed in the that one vein that runs up your leg you'll die in like five minutes. JASON Femoral Artery MIKE Yeah,Yeah, thats it. CUT INT. TURKISH HASH - COFFEE BAR - NIGHT Title Screen: Black with white letter "Turkish Hash". CAMERA shows Mike and Jason sitting in a busy coffee shop taking with each other. Mike is obviously high. MIKE You ever smoke hash? JASON I've smoked resin but never any of that high quality shit. MIKE I have once or twice. Really, really dank and expensive Turkish shit. Hands down, the most stoned I've ever been. I swear to god I thought I saw a comet smash into the highway while we were driving. JASON (laughs lightly) They get nuts with it, huh? MIKE That shit makes you straight retarded. I knew a kid who got so fucked up that he stole guy's bar of hash and just ate it, right infront of him. He didn't even chew. He just swallowed it. I've never seen anything like it. 300 dollars of high-grade hash like it was nothin. JASON He get fucked up? MIKE Pretty much. He sat there for a few hours just mumbling to himself. He told me later that he forgot his name and shit. JASON I bet I'd forget my name if I ate a brick of hash too. MIKE You ever think about like planets and shit? Like how wild the concept of plants is? JASON What? MIKE I don't know.... I'm a.... JASON Stoned? MIKE Yeah, yeah thats it. CUT TO: INT. TURKISH DELIGHT - APPT. LIVING ROOM- AFTERNOON Title Screen: Black screen with white letters, "Turkish Delight" CAMERA shows Mike and Jason on a couch passing a doobie and watching TV. JASON You ever eat Turkish Delight? MIKE Yeah my grandma makes that shit. It's chronic. JASON Yeah it is. MIKE They eat it in that book about those faggy British kids that hang with that lion. JASON Dude, do you know what that books about? MIKE A Lion, a Witch, a Wardrobe, and some faggy British kids? JASON No man..that shits about pedophilia. MIKE Shut up. JASON I'm serious. MIKE Dude, shut up. JASON Those kids go and live with that old guy right? You can tell that guys got it hard for those little kids just by reading the book. He acts really nice to them, showing them around the house and shit and then they find the wardrobe. Now at first glance, its seems like its jsut some weird shit, but if you think about it that wardrobe reprsents the old guy taking the kids in a depraved land of perversion. when they get ther its like, "shit this place is fucked up." It's always winter. Winter represents sadness. And on top of that, all the characters are just manifestations of the old man. The evil witch tries to destroy those kids with brute force. Now that works with one of the kids but the other ones are too smart for that so the old man has to think of another plan. This is where the lion come in. He promises the kids all sorts of goodies and shit if they follow him and believe anything he says. He has to erase the witch manifestation to gain the childrens trust. He has to make them believe him fully. Eventually, the witch, who also doubles as a manifestation of the childrens lack of trust, is gone. The old man finally has the children fully under his control. The kids stay in this dream world of pedophilia until young adulthood, but are led out of the wardrobe by a stag, or God. Now when they get out of the wardrobe they are all still kids. That goes to show that their mentality is still that of child becuase of all the years of sexual abuse. The kids ask the old man about the "wardrobe" and he tells them not to talk about it because no one will believe them. The kids don't object to this because they are still some what under the old mans control. (Long pause) MIKE Dude...that.... JASON Blew your mind? MIKE Yeah, yeah thats it. CUT TO: INT. TURKISH BLENDS - BACK PORCH - MORNING Mike and Jason are sitting on a back porch in the early morning. Both are smoking cigarettes. JASON (Motioning to pack of Camels) You ever try one of these? MIKE No, I only smoke dollar packs. JASON Disgusting. MIKE Its all the same shit anyway. Its just about who makes them. JASON You're compleatly mistaken. Its all about growing the tobacco and the way its cured and rolled. MIKE Tobacco is tobacco is tobacco. Its the law of definite proportion. You can't change tobacco. JASON Ok, lets take the guys that make your dollar packs. they probablly grow the shit in their backyard and just grab it and shove it in some cardbord. Now these Turkish Blends are made to perfection. They take time and fetilize the shit and then the put it in special rooms to let it dry out. They put time and love into their product and it shows. MIKE Yeah you can really tell they enjoy giving people cancer. The way I see it we're both paying to get cancer. I just pay alot less for it. You never know when you're gonna run out of money. You know, its all about... JASON Conservation? MIKE Yeah, yeah thats it.
LOL. These sound like every stoned conversation I've ever heard, but it works. It's funny. This would make a decent film, shot in black and white and choppy scenes a la Clerks (1).
I dunno, it's not bad it's just boring... it sets up all these possible events and never goes anywhere. I kept waiting for something to come around full circle and it kinda doesn't. Is there some symbolism you're driving at?
i was thinking that exact same thing. its just my first draft though. im trying to work on something to make it more full circle besides the fact that they all deal with "Turkish" and all start and end the same.
First, there's too much white space. You should eliminate line feeds and blank lines in 90% of your work as shown. If you think my advice is useful, of course you can update in place. A lot of times the text editor doesn't enter extra line feeds when you use <shift/enter> instead of <enter>, but just how the present text editor does things remains a mystery to this cowboy. Content (sorry, Samhain, I still criticize content whether some people like it or not): You got onto something with this 'stabbed in the ass'/Turkish prison/Midnight Express theme, and then apparently you dropped it entirely and started talking about tobacco. So is the Turkish prison theme finished in your piece? If so, maybe you shouldn't have introduced it at all. What is you story line for this piece, start to finish?
I liked it-- it was definitely unpretentious... though I guess I must agree that I was anxious to see where you were taking the 'Turkish revenge' thing... and half expecting the character in the beginning to stab the other guy, or maybe the two of them would stab someone else... or at least make something happen!
Yeah... especially in film, it's a good idea to set things up early-- people often like to see sex or violence right away, and I think if something like that happened early on it might give the script a sense of momentum that it doesn't really have right now. I mean, for every crime there is a consequence... so having someone do that would set up the potential for him being tracked down by the police, or for someone to try it on him, or it would call into question what his motives were, etc... I like the way you write dialogue-- it's honest, and it's very natural... but there needs to be some kind of pay off. Maybe these conversations could somehow segue into the character's history, where they are, how they got there, who they are, etc... some stories about their past. Maybe you could use the Lion Witch and Wardrobe thing to illuminate some traumatic event in the characters' past-- you don't have to overdo it or anything, but you could do more to suggest that maybe something similar happened to the guy, and there's your motive for the killing...
EXT. TURKISH REVENGE-CITY STREET- MORNING Title Screen: Black screen with white letters, "Turkish Revenge". CAMERA is on two men who are walking down a busy city street. they are talking casually and smoking cigarettes. ------- Above is an incorrectly formatted. Should be: EXT. A CITY STREET - MORNING Two men, [since the two men are named characters you must name and describe them at this point, i.e., MIKE, a young man of 20 something wearing a pot leaf t-shirt, and JASON, his 30 year-old friend wearing a coat and tie ], are walking down a busy city street. They are talking casually and smoking cigarettes. --------------------------- DON'T write the title in the Scene Heading, or anywhere else on the page. Put it on a title page ONLY. TITLE SCREEN is not an accepted term; also writers don't place titles or credits - that's the Director and/or Editors job. "CAMERA is on" is not used. It’s redundant. Camera directions should be used SPARINGLY if EVER by the writer- again, that's the directors job. Also, it makes for a pretentious read. The conversation is boring- but only because you’ve got two wooden Indians walking down the street smoking. You MUST describe the action as the story proceeds (dialogue alone does not make a movie), i.e., Mike takes another hit off his cigarette and looks at Jason knowingly as they continue walking. Mike you ever hear of Turkish revenge? ----------------------- CUT TO: is improperly used, and should, in any case, not be used to transition scenes. Lots of white space between Scene Headings, Shots, Action, and Character Dialogue boxes is good, but the dialogue belongs directly under the character without skipping a line. ----------------- Bring some life to the scene- maybe Jason bumps into a passerby, or Mike chain smokes.
i know my formatting is way off. i have a program that does that for me. it just did do right on here. i the script doesnt really have apoint right now kind of like an episode of seindfeld or something. the characters would seem a bit more lifelike if you knew who they were. based off a friend and i. thanks for the help
If you're serious about screen writing, pm me- somethings are fancy and free(wink!) Admittedly, there's not much to go on, but it looks like cingery is for shooting scripts. What you're writing is a spec script. Personally, I think you might have a hint of a short here- no money in them, but plenty of credit and recognition. Ever look at craigslist?
Everytime you do a save on this text editor it adds lines left, right and center. I brought this to the attention of site management and they gave me a few options, none of which improve the situation. So just keep deleting all the white space you don't like before you do a save, and hope for the best. Most of this white space is NOT the author's fault!
