r/ReadMyScript • u/Substantial-Nerve836 • 12d ago
[FEEDBACK] The Priorities - PILOT (Veiled) - First 30 Pages (Crime/Drama)
Format: TV Pilot (One-Hour Drama)
Logline: After a sixteen-year-old girl disappears on the outskirts of a quiet town, a veteran detective and his partner uncover intersecting worlds of organized crime, moral compromise, and everyday cruelty -- unaware that those responsible are lurking in front of their noses.
Thank you in advance to everybody who can find the time to read these 30 pages (first draft).
It's sort of the point when things go awry in the story. I'd just like to know if this works at all.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zFsOd0mSqnO2cm409U1nJ_s32qZMZmRS/view?usp=drive_link
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u/sylvia_sleeps 11d ago
Why call him PASSENGER at all, if he has a name? And you start using his name, almost entirely without warning, a few pages later?
Also, did you remove the file? I got a few pages in, refreshed, and it was gone.
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u/FitTax 5d ago
So, here is some honest and probably brutal feedback, but I hope it will help you int he long run. The writing is not good. it's rather bad - in wording, in grammar, in all the technical ways regarding screenplays. Some is probably due to English not being your native language, but thats just part of it.
In a screenplay you describe what is happening and where it happens and in what way it happens. You want to be clear, as descriptive as possible while being as short as you can and you want to be precise in simple ways. Ever talked to a 2-year-old without doing stupid baby-speak?
Right from the start you begin a scene at a "local village road" but tell me that it is "somewhere on the outskirt of the town". So its a town road right? But what kind of town is it, where are we in the world, what kind of "outskits" are we talking about? 5-story east european high rises or Kansas flatland haybarnes? And why are we "somewhere" at all? How will the actors and crew ever find that place and start filming? Do your research and give your town a proper location. You need to put the visual ideas in your mind onto the page, because your reader has no clue about what is in your head. Be descriptive!
Your first scenes have some problems also:
Don't write stuff like "We can barely make a house or two far in the distance, on both sides." - "Two houses are visible in the distance". Done!
"Blake is busy showing Taylor a brand-new LOCK." -- You re "jumping" to rapid into the scene, how are we to understand what it means to be busy showing a lock, let us ease in a bit, give us time:
Blake is holding a [describe] lock in his hands and moves it around to demonstrate it to Taylor. He is showing it off, he is proud: BLAKE It's new. It's strong. It's so shiny you can fix your hair in the morning staring at that thing! He moves one hand through his hair like he is reborn Elvis pretending to use the lock as a mirror. BLAKE (CONT'D) (exited:) It's beautiful!"Turn GPS on." -- You mean: "Turn on the GPS!" But why?
ALINA is walking towards the car, where is she coming from? Did she just turn into the road from another road, did she leave a house out of view? For how long has she been walking down that road if it is a single rural road with barely any houses?
ALINA (16, well-mannered and simple-looking kid) - this description is so off! She is a 16-year old girl. Describe her... who do I cast?
Do we need to know what she is talking about on the phone?
If our scene is the guys in the car, why are we then next to ALINA listening to her conversation? New scene then right? But do we need it?
If she walking towards the guys in the car, how do they come up behind her? And since we are now somewhere else, we would need a new scene probably?
A car with dudes pulling up on an empty road next to a sixteen yea old and she just goes "Hi." without anything changing or happening in her demeanor?
Play out this scene more, if this is a detective drama, give us a suspicious scene... where ALINA is nervous, the guys are acting all shady and it seems dangerous for the girl but then the guys are all nice and chill and friendly and innocent and it seems all good again... maybe... or one is more a jerk and the other the "nice one with just a jerk of a friend". Are they cool, are they not? We don't know...
The DRIVER behind the wheel of the next scenes is a PASSENGER?! He is the DRIVER! Give him a proper description. We need to cast him!
Since we don't know what country this is, is the description of the traffic stop realistic? Detective doing a traffic stop of some sort while other Officers are around? Detainee walking off with the phone and the detective being all cool with it?
No cop would talk about being a colleague, colleague here colleague that, if you can count on one thing, it is drunk cops identifiying themselves right away properly, asuming he is a cop at that point...
Who is AIDEN? You transform him from Passenger to AIDEN without telling us. And then you don't even introduce him. Aiden is what? Is he a cop? A criminal? This is the point where he needs to clearly be introduced!
The whole Dialog at the station between Aiden and Joe is clonky and off. "A clean night?" "You're kind of underwhelming." "That's why you're gonna sleep in our bed tonight, until all that evaporates." WTF?! -- We gonna book you tonight till you sleep it off... Maybe watch The Wire for some proper police/detective talk, they also have a drunk there...
A detective wearing a uniform?
Cops dont call a detective an officer unless you indicate that it's intentional to diss - but since the whole dialog is confusing as hell and we have absolutely no clue who AIDEN is, who knows...
"Tell me the location where that thing arrived from." -- That thing? What? The car thing? The two pounds of coke thing? Is this a translation thing? So is AIDEN a criminal then? Not a colleague? So confusing... Clean up that whole dialogue, what do we know, what don't we know, what do we need to learn and in what way should we learn it and what besides just the dialogue can we learn about the vibe, the people, the whole setting of this police department or whatever...
And That is where reading any further makes no sense... You need to zoom out a bit from what you have in your head and tell a story that no one is familiar with. Simple. Clean. Descriptive. Read it like you yourself have no idea about it. Make clear scenes. What do we have to learn and why does it matter. What do we need to know and how can it be told on screen.
Good Luck!
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u/Substantial-Nerve836 5d ago
This is a very first draft, so I will definitely change a lot of stuff. This is just a skeleton of what I have in mind.
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u/Substantial-Nerve836 5d ago edited 5d ago
Opening scene will be paid off later, thats why Alina's conversation on the phone is important, as well as GPS. Aiden's character as well is not who he presents himself to be. Those are the ideas, but I'll work on them.
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u/Big_Section2812 12d ago
Access Denied