I am just throwing this out because I feel frustrated. Other people might want to add their own comments (or just ignore this entirely).
I spent about an hour just now trying to read a screenplay from Zoetrope that looked as if it might have some promise. But, of course, it collapsed - and not because the story was bad, but because of really stupid mistakes.
So here it is, my advice.
When you write a screenplay about Puritan times in America, do not have your characters saying "Okay" to one another. The word is an Americanism that sprang up in the first half of the nineteenth century (a long time after the era of this story). Do not have them talking to one another with all kinds of contractions and using a diction that simply does not ring true for the time of the story. Do not have them taking out a small box of matches and striking one on the box. Do not have one character say to another that the library is about to close for the day (and then show a multi-storied library) with a grumpy librarian on duty. If you have based your script on a Hawthorne story in which he used the term "Goodman" with a surname, do not use Goodman as the first name of your character. (Goodman was a title like Mister - it was not a first name.)
I did not want to spend my time reading the script and then reviewing it. I thought I might just send the writer a note to tell him in a nice way that I liked his use of the story but that he had a lot of anachronisms in language and in physical objects, and that these problems made it impossible to take his script seriously. I will add that he also added a lot of worthless exposition that told us things about characters that the audience would never know - it was all just stuff for the reader, as if the script were a novel.
But then I looked at the Zoetrope bio of the writer, and I realized that I would be wasting my time. He presented himself as a graduate of the Blah-Harrumph School of Film and the writer and director of a couple of films. I knew that he would never listen if he had gotten that far and had learned so little about writing and about the need to achieve some kind of historical verisimilitude.
End of rant.
I spent about an hour just now trying to read a screenplay from Zoetrope that looked as if it might have some promise. But, of course, it collapsed - and not because the story was bad, but because of really stupid mistakes.
So here it is, my advice.
When you write a screenplay about Puritan times in America, do not have your characters saying "Okay" to one another. The word is an Americanism that sprang up in the first half of the nineteenth century (a long time after the era of this story). Do not have them talking to one another with all kinds of contractions and using a diction that simply does not ring true for the time of the story. Do not have them taking out a small box of matches and striking one on the box. Do not have one character say to another that the library is about to close for the day (and then show a multi-storied library) with a grumpy librarian on duty. If you have based your script on a Hawthorne story in which he used the term "Goodman" with a surname, do not use Goodman as the first name of your character. (Goodman was a title like Mister - it was not a first name.)
I did not want to spend my time reading the script and then reviewing it. I thought I might just send the writer a note to tell him in a nice way that I liked his use of the story but that he had a lot of anachronisms in language and in physical objects, and that these problems made it impossible to take his script seriously. I will add that he also added a lot of worthless exposition that told us things about characters that the audience would never know - it was all just stuff for the reader, as if the script were a novel.
But then I looked at the Zoetrope bio of the writer, and I realized that I would be wasting my time. He presented himself as a graduate of the Blah-Harrumph School of Film and the writer and director of a couple of films. I knew that he would never listen if he had gotten that far and had learned so little about writing and about the need to achieve some kind of historical verisimilitude.
End of rant.
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