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Sample Coverage

COMMENTS: The underlying theme, the idea that true love conquers all, is not particularly new, but there is always room for a fresh take on this idea. So in terms of commercial potential, the idea could be a winner if the writer found a way to twist it and give it elements the audience hadn't seen before. Unfortunately the writer failed to delve deep enough and discover what makes his story unique. Admittedly the basic concept, that a certain two people are meant for each other, has been done so many times that it is difficult to find anything truly new. The script does contain some elements that could be twisted or expanded upon, however. For instance, the fact that the two lovers are constantly being cheated on by their significant others could be magnified to impart some of the freshness this script needs. Or the writer could use the idea of the gay guys helping Dan regain the love of his life. The writer probably should not dwell too much on the constant near misses, when Dan and Betty see the back of each other's heads or one happens to leave the room right before the other one enters, because they are too reminiscent of Serendipity.

Unfortunately the writer never picks one unique way to show us his theme. For instance, in Serendipity the near misses they were an organic part of the plot, but here, on the contrary, they feel tacked on for comic effect. The gay guys are much the same. They show up, help Dan once or twice, then vanish, never to be seen again. At least the cheating boyfriends and girlfriends are a running theme throughout the script. Their motivation and believability never is particularly high, though. More about that later. As far as concept goes, basically the writer needs to give us his own fresh perspective on how true love conquers all.

The unoriginal take on the concept is the script's first biggest flaw. Its second biggest flaw is the protagonist's lack of a clear external goal. He never has a specific external objective to drive his actions throughout the script. Instead he wavers in what he wants, sometimes trying to move on, sometimes trying to win back Betty. He is consistently passive. His friends encourage or force him to do things. His girlfriends ask him out and even propose to him. At no point does he get up and say, "This is what I want, and this is how I'm going to get it." As a result, there is never any real tension in the script. Tension occurs when we wonder if the protagonist is going to get what he wants. As the script progresses, his desires should recede further and further from his grasp, until it looks as if he could never attain them. If the character has been skillfully drawn and the audience is able to empathize with him, they will be on the edges of their seats as they root for him to prevail against the seemingly impossible odds. However, when there is no external goal, there is also no tension.

The lack of an external goal also means there can be no conflict. Conflict arises from other characters trying to keep the protagonist from getting what he wants. This script has repeated fights and break-ups, but it never has true conflict.

The constant near-misses with Dan and Betty seemed contrived and cut down on conflict also. There would have been much more potential for conflict if Dan had discovered in short order that she was the "dream girl" his roommate had just met.

There is also no real resolution because, again, there can't be one unless there is a clear external goal for the protagonist to either achieve or fail to achieve. The resolution also completes the protagonist's arc, so even if he fails to achieve his external goal, he must have satisfied his internal need. At the Act III climax he should finally "grow up," so to speak, meaning he overcomes whatever internal flaw has been keeping him from achieving his external goal. In overcoming the flaw, he satisfies his internal need. The way should then be clear for the protagonist to get what he wants or decide that because he has grown, he no longer cares about achieving his external goal. In either case, the resolution is satisfying because the internal need has been met. But again, without an external goal there can be no specific internal need or flaw, because all these things must be intertwined and complement one another. Without them there is no story, merely a series of events. And without them there can never be any emotional involvement, because we never see the protagonist on a specific quest that we can empathize with, a quest to get the one thing he most wants.

Because of the lack of a clear external goal, the story events never seemed to lead into one another, and the script never built on itself. Everything we need to know or see in subsequent acts should be set up in Act I. However, elements are constantly coming into this script out of nowhere. The frat parties serve a purpose and are ditched as soon as the writer no longer needs them. The gay guys appear and vanish without ever becoming a successful subplot. Jane comes out of nowhere and does not fit organically into the script. Her father's menacing nature is hinted at but never shown. Since the writer went to the trouble to set up the fact that her father will take physical vengeance on anyone who dates her and doesn't stay with her forever, he should take advantage of this when she betrays Dan. The father could blame Dan instead of Jane and send a hitman after him, which would add a nice element of conflict as Dan tries to patch things up with Betty. But instead the father accepts Dan's story at face value and writes him a check. Moreover, he doesn't really object as Dan demands more and more money. He draws the line at three million, but he never makes Dan pay for his effrontery. In this case the writer fails to exploit an element he set up; there is no payoff. In other cases there is simply no set-up, which undermines the script's overall believability.

For instance, Betty's death at the end comes out of left field. At no point in the script do we see any hints that she is unwell. In movies such as Guarding Tess or A Walk to Remember, which also involve an illness being concealed by an important character, there are hints to the audience that all may not be well. But although the hints are there, they are never emphasized. The audience is always given something else to concentrate on. When the illness is revealed, however, the audience remembers that it was foreshadowed, so it feels believable. In Betty's case, it never was foreshadowed, so it feels forced. If the script is supposed to show that Dan and Betty are meant to be together, then it should end with them together. If it is meant to show that life can part true lovers no matter how much they love each other, then that needs to be a recurring theme throughout the script, not something tacked on at the end.

The scene in the church is another scene that is never foreshadowed and does not feel organic. If Dan is supposed to find God or faith or some churchly peace at the end of the script, then we need to see him as a firm atheist or a lapsed Christian or something of the sort throughout most of the script. We need to see that he is consciously avoiding God, so that we can care when he turns to God in the end. Otherwise we merely think, "Oh, where did that come from?" If we are church-goers, we may think it's a nice scene, but we are not emotionally invested. The writer never set up Dan's deep internal need to go to a church to find peace.

The ending also alters the tone, which had been fairly light throughout most of the script. But a death, especially the death of Dan's true love, darkens the whole picture. It confuses the genre, turning it from comedy to drama. All the comedic elements vanish at this point, and the story turns tragic. There is even a reference to Romeo and Juliet in the dream that Dan and Betty share. When the dream occurred, this reader assumed that one or both of them would commit suicide, but instead the dream is never referred to again. It is set up, but there is no payoff.

Either the entire tone of the script needs to be altered from page one, or the ending has to go. The writer also needs to determine his exact theme. Then he either needs a new ending or he needs to adjust the rest of the script to fit the ending he has.

In fact, the writer's first decisions as he approaches a rewrite should be (1) how to twist the concept to freshen it and (2) what specific external goal his protagonist should pursue.

The pacing in this script was relatively consistent, but that fact means very little since there was no story. However, it may bode well for the writer's ability to pull off the pacing successfully in future drafts.

The hook shows us Betty breaking up with Dan. In his initial pages the writer established Dan's strong love for her. Naturally, when she draws him aside for a private chat, we expect her to break up with him. This sets the Pinky rolling. The two lovers are no longer together. The writer has also hinted that she and Tim may soon have something going, so her new relationship with him does not come out of the blue. The fact that Tim is Dan's best friend is good; it raises the stakes.

However, although the hook accomplishes what it was supposed to do, it feels unfresh. We do not get an exciting opening scene where Dan demonstrates his boundless love for Betty (by performing a wild stunt for her, for instance, or in some other cinematic, visual way). Instead we have a talking-head scene. Dan explains to us in dialogue how much he loves her and that he expects to stay with her forever. So we now know this with our heads, but we don't feel it with our hearts. We have been handed the information instead of shown it. Showing through action is always more effective than telling in dialogue. For one thing, it forces the audience to think and draw conclusions, which audiences find more emotionally satisfying. If we see Dan accept a dare for Betty's sake and almost kill himself performing whatever stupid stunt it was, then we realize how deeply he cares about her, so deeply he would die for her. If he tells us he loves her deeply and wants to stay with her forever, it's just talk.

The hook needs to be something we will remember afterward, something that sets the tone for the rest of the story and starts to establish the theme. It needs to be fresh, needs to sparkle, needs to really do its job and hook the reader so he or she will keep reading.

There were no true subplots. Boyfriends and girlfriends came and went, characters came and went. One contributing factor was that the time period was too long. We moved from high school to college to the job world, so we never got a real sense of the specific problems facing Dan and the others in each setting. The settings seemed to be there simply so that events could have somewhere to take place. They never served the story. Ideally each important character, especially the protagonist, should have a life outside of the main goal, and that life should mirror important elements of the main story. Everything in the script should be there for a reason. It should all contribute in some way to story, character, theme, etc. Nothing should be there simply as background.

As mentioned briefly above, the genre was unclear. Until the end it seemed to be comedy, but even before the end it never felt 100% comfortable with itself. In general it felt like a light comedy, but then there were elements of slapstick. However, not enough of them for the script to be a true slapstick comedy. The writer needs to define the exact tone he wants and make sure he sticks to it.

The writer also ignored some potential opportunities to make the script funnier. For instance, Jane's family was a ripe target for humor, but the writer never explored all the possibilities here. The father's desire for a son, his insistence on "playing" with Dan, the whole housekeeping scenario. All of these could have been kicked up a notch on the humor scale. They were alluded to, but the writer never used them fully, to the point of making us laugh out loud. Earlier in the script, the gay guys provided similar opportunities for humor, but again the writer stopped short of exploiting them to the fullest.

As a whole the script felt sort of cobbled together. This reader never got a sense that the writer had planned each scene and each bit of humor.

The dialogue suffered from ultra-realism. The characters in scripts do not say elaborate hellos or good-byes and do not explain where they are going or what they will be doing in the next scene. If they do, the script quickly becomes redundant. To give an example, the scene with Gary and Betty in the room and Dan and Diana in the bathroom gives us the information that Betty has made reservations for them for breakfast in ten minutes. She wonders if they will make it. So Gary says he will ask. At that point we assume he is going to talk to Dan and Diana. He then enters the bathroom to talk to Dan and Diana. He gives them the same information for the second time: breakfast reservations in ten minutes. Then he comes out and tells Betty they won't make it. This whole sequence of scenes could have been reduced to two. In the first Betty tells Gary she has made the reservations and wonders if they'll make it. Next we see her and Gary eating breakfast alone. We draw the conclusion that the other two didn't make it, and we don't have to hear the characters repeat things we already know. There are numerous similar instances in the script. In each case the writer needs to trim so that we get the bare bones, the essential information we need from that scene, no more and no less.

In the case I cited above, where Dan and Betty think each other's voices sound familiar, Betty could say so to Gary at the restaurant, while Dan could say so to Diana in the tub. The important thing is to avoid repeating information, especially information that is essentially unimportant, such as the time of their breakfast reservation. It slows the story and can make the audience lose interest.

The poor dialogue led to poor transitions in some cases. We never need to see a character tell us what he is going to do before he does it, unless his attempt to do it goes awry in some fashion that advances the story.

The ratio of dialogue to action was acceptable. Although some scenes were longer and less elegant than they needed to be, this reader never stopped to wonder when any specific scene was ever going to end. Their lengths seemed appropriate.

There were no distinguishable act breaks. In part this is due to the lack of a clear external goal for the protagonist. In scripts where the protagonist has one, his decision to pursue it and his efforts to achieve it automatically provide the appropriate acts and reversals, at least if the story is plotted in a standard fashion.

Because he had no clear external goal, the protagonist also had no clear arc. His arc should spring from his goal. In order to achieve the goal, he should have to change. Without a goal, there is no catalyst for change.

Overall the characters seemed superficial. We never saw their deeper motivations for anything they did. They fell in love at the drop of a hat. Even in the case of the main characters, who had enduring feelings for one another, we were never shown why they loved each other, merely told that they did. We were never emotionally invested in their relationship. Ideally we should have been rooting for them to get together. We needed to care deeply about these two characters. They needed to be flawed people who made mistakes for realistic reasons. We needed to understand their motivations. We needed to empathize with these people. In them we needed to see something of ourselves so that we could care about them. In a way they needed to be an expression for us of our own love lives, so that in rooting for their love to triumph in the end, we would be rooting for our own loves to triumph.

Instead we merely saw them hopping from one relationship to another. It was difficult to believe in their pain and desire for one another. The writer tended to show Dan crying when he was in emotional distress. This device was effective in the very beginning, when the teenaged Dan lost the love of his life for the first time, but it quickly became anticipated. It seemed like a crutch that the writer used instead of devising a fresher way to show Dan's hurt.

In fact we were never emotionally invested in any of the characters or their relationships. Tim, Gary, Diana, Pinky, Jane, Dad, Wendy. We never understand why they act the way they do, with the possible exception of Diana, who seems to be a complete bimbo. But take Gary, for instance. He meets the woman of his dreams: Betty. He can't believe his good fortune. They enter a committed relationship. But then he cheats on her with her best friend. In order for this turn of events to be believable, the writer would have to show us the extremely powerful, almost irresistible sexual attraction between Gary and Wendy. Gary should struggle as hard as he can to stay true to Betty, even if in the end he fails. Instead he doesn't seem bothered at all by the fact that he has a girlfriend.

The writer never seems to have explored the emotions of his characters. Unless we know what each character is feeling and why, we cannot empathize with them. Unless we see the connection between those feelings and the characters' actions, we will never accept their actions as believable.

We were never shocked or hurt when the latest boyfriend or girlfriend was caught cheating, because we never sensed that Dan or Betty felt any real affection for the people they dated. Their supposed love always seemed to boil down to having sex. Only a few times was anything deeper ever hinted at. Even in those cases it tended to be something that was spoken by one of the characters rather than shown. As mentioned earlier, it is much more effective for characters to take action to demonstrate their feelings instead of talking about it. If they have to talk about it, they should almost never come right out and say how much they love each other. They should talk about something else and let the love message remain in the subtext.

Yet the writer consistently showed his characters either having sex or saying how much they loved each other. If the intention was to demonstrate their love, the writer should have brainstormed for other more expressive and visual ways to do it. The fact that the relationships always boiled down to sex and "I love yous" meant that they all melted into one. None was distinguishable from the others in any way. In fact each one should have been differentiated. Each one should have had its own specific tone. Each person Dan or Betty dated should have engaged their emotions in some special way or satisfied some particular need. In real life no two relationships are the same. In a script like this, where the characters move so quickly from one relationship to another, the need to differentiate them is even greater.

But if the relationships were going to be deeper and more meaningful, the characters also needed to be deeper. Each major character needed specific flaws and needs and an overriding external goal. The characters, like the relationships, tended to be flat and unbelievable. Only Pinky seemed memorable. This was because he had some distinguishing characteristics, even if they were based primarily on his sexuality. He seemed more roundly drawn than most of the others. Every other character should also have had distinguishing traits or quirks to make them memorable. The smaller their roles in the script, the more quirky they can be. In addition to these traits or quirks, they each needed a goal, even if it was something as simple as sleeping with the person they had the hots for. Then they needed to take logical steps to achieve these goals. We also needed to understand the reasons why they wanted what they did. We needed to be able to relate to them and understand them, even if we might not approve of them. For instance, love and sexual desire are things everyone can relate to. If we saw someone who deeply desired Betty pursuing her with all his might, we would understand why he was doing it. Even if he was a villain trying to persuade her to dump her boyfriend, we would still understand his desire for her, even if we didn't approve of his actions. But these things needed to be shown to us through well-developed, easily distinguishable characters who came alive on the page.

The use of subtext would have contributed greatly to the characters' overall believability. There was almost no subtext in the script. Every character said exactly what he or she was thinking. Sometimes this is appropriate. For instance, it's difficult to ask someone to marry you without coming right out and saying it. But even in a situation like that there could be subtext in the question as a result of the context and the relationship between the characters. In general people tend to talk in subtext most of the time. They rarely come out and say exactly what they are feeling. Subtext is particularly important in a script, where what the characters choose to say or not say contributes to our perception of them. For instance, they could be talking about the weather or the dinner, but through their comments and body language we realize that they are actually talking about their relationship. What they say and do during the scene mirrors what is going on in their relationship. Scenes tend to be richer when they never come out and state the message they are supposed to convey to the audience. This technique requires the audience to think and become more involved in what they are seeing. Since audience involvement is what the screenwriter wants, subtext can be a very powerful tool.

Dan's children never seemed like an integral part of the story. It was never clear why they were there. They had no real purpose.

The writer's voice didn't come through in the writing, which was only so-so. He never gave us a sense that he was in control, leading us where he wanted to take us. Although his actions lines were nice and short, the language he used was too plain. It shouldn't be poetic, but it should be polished and interesting to read. In addition, the grammar was extremely poor. It detracted significantly from the read. The writer might want to invest in an English grammar handbook to improve this.

At times the writer gave us information we couldn't possibly have known based on what we were seeing. This is inappropriate except in character introductions, and even there the writer should be careful to be evocative in his descriptions, not merely pile on unnecessary details. The writer also failed to specify the characters' ages in introductions and at other points where it would have been relevant.

In terms of formatting, the writer used too many camera directions. At times the sluglines failed to reflect the actual location as described in the action.

Overall believability was undermined by the flat characters, who rarely seemed to have reasons for their actions. This made it difficult to understand why they behaved the way they did.

This script is not ready to be marketed yet. Although the love theme is universal, the details of the premise lack freshness and the execution is poor.

RECOMMENDATION: Although the concept does have potential, the writer has failed to put a fresh spin on it. In addition, execution is poor. Pass.