Oh man, I missed the big ending! It’s been such a long week that Sunday and Monday feel like they were a month ago. I’ll come back and read these tomorrow or Tuesday. Sorry to be behind, Stroogie.
Yeah. I’m way behind as well. Need to catch up.
No worries, guys. I appreciate any time you can give. Meanwhile, to add to the pressure, I have some cool news!
I booked a consultation session with a screenwriting instructor in L.A. named Pilar Alessandra. I’ve been listening to her podcast for a few months, and she’s incredibly wise and insightful. She’s also booked several months in advance, so my session was original slated for January 8th.
However, I paid in advance, so I was put high on the waiting list in case anyone canceled. Just today, I got an email from her assistant offering me a slot this Monday. I immediately jumped on it, which gave me just a week to take everyone’s feedback and write a second draft.
Then I got another email about an hour ago bumping me up to Friday!! Now I have about three days to bang out a new draft and send it off to Pilar for the consultation. I’m really excited about this.
So, any feedback you all can give me in the next couple days will be hugely appreciated, especially along the lines of the following questions:
I put the questions in spoiler tags just in case you stumble upon this page before you finish reading. If you like, you can PM me your answers, or just post them here, with or without spoiler tags. Whatever works. These questions are specifically designed to help me make the appropriate changes to the draft I’m working on for my consultation with Pilar.
Many Thanks!
[spoiler]
- Did the Base Camp scenes drag for you? Would you prefer less voice-over exposition here in favor of getting back into the story quicker?
- Did the Creeps/Protectors backstory make sense? Do you need more or less of it?
- Did Emily’s betrayal work, or did it seem out-of-the-blue?
- Did the Truck’s revenge motivation work, or were you left wondering what got it so angry?
- Should Emily have been the one to yell, “STOP!” or is it more effective with Joe?
- Were you satisfied with the end points for each of the characters? Was anyone’s thread left hanging, in your opinion?
- What else you got? Last chance to say something before I send this puppy off to get reviewed by a professional screenwriter! Woot!
[/spoiler]
4:30am, St. Louis time.
Finished with the second draft of Wanderlings, ready to send it off to Pilar tomorrow for our consultation on Friday.
I have to be at work in 5 hours.
Very tired, but very happy “Woot…” 
Best of luck with the consultation! I really enjoyed reading it.
Stroogie, I’m so sorry that I’m only now catching up on your screenplay. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks in chez Bayolo. I just wanted to say that I reallyl love the scene above. Well done.
Okay, so I just finished reading, about a week too late to help with your consultation. I’m sorry about that. It’s been a busy time for me too. How did it go? I would love to hear what Pilar had to say.
I think I missed a page somewhere because I missed the part where [spoiler]Emily joins the creeps and the creeps’ backstory. What are they, exactly?[/spoiler]
You write characters very well, particularly the younger ones, which I can’t imagine is easy to do. That’s the strongest point, I think, in the whole screenplay. I think the creeps could be an even bigger threat. The ending is a bit ambiguous but, like I said, I think, in my two week hiatus, I missed a page or two somewhere while catching up, so I’ll backtrack and see if that doesn’t answer my questions.
Congratulations on writing this, though. I’d love to read the revisions as you keep working on them.
Thanks, Armando! I’m glad you like the Grandpa scene. I’ve written and re-written it a couple dozen times, and it still gives me fits. I have an even newer version for the draft I sent to Pilar.
She gave me her comments page-by-page over a more than 90-minute phone call last Friday, the 6th. It was fun, constructive, and also intense. I have several pages of notes from our session that I’m allowing to percolate while I take a break and work on other scripts.
Don’t worry about missing a beat with the Emily storyline. Pilar found that one hard to catch as well, and we talked a lot about strengthening Emily’s character arc. We talked a lot about all the characters, actually. The major theme of her advice was to trim down the plot mechanics and focus on the characters.
So now I’m focusing on building a repertoire of scripts–a feature-length comedy, a feature-length drama, a couple example episodes of my favorite TV shows, maybe a one-act play–to showcase my writing. And then, if it all works out, perhaps a move to LA late next year? Pilar seemed to think I could do it, and I tend to believe her.
Thanks, everyone–Gryper, Talos, and all my faithful readers. It’s been a good ride getting this done and seeing your responses. Hopefully, there will be more to come.
Sorry, I got behind and never got myself caught up. No time like the present.
Having them appear, off in the distance, throughout the montage could establish their constant presence and menace, without overusing them per se.
I’d like to have the Wanderlings established before the Screamers show up—especially Seth, Shareena, and Joe—but did anyone feel it was too convenient that Larz and company popped up to save the Wanderlings from the Jeep Creeps when they did?
Maybe a little, but it seemed organic enough not to seem like a deus ex machina.
Yeah, that’s a bit of a problem. In most scripts I’ve read, I think it’s kind of assumed that if you don’t specify any ethnicity at their introduction, then the character is white (except for perhaps Morgan Freeman’s character in The Shawshank Redemption, who was originally Irish; and Morpheus in The Matrix, whose ethnicity was not specified, but was portrayed by Lawrence Fishburne so powerfully that I doubt anyone else could have created that character so well).
South Jude is supposed to be of mixed ethnicity and class (even if perhaps, they might not get along outside of the story in this script), so I wanted to establish at least a couple of for-sure African-American characters in order to have that diversity. BUT…Living in an archaically segregated town like St. Louis, I’m particularly concerned about my ability to portray a character like Shareena in a natural and fair manner.
Is the racial makeup of the group important beyond the fact that it’s mixed? There’s really nothing that requires that any particular character be any particular race, is there?
Please raise red flags if anything in the script strikes you as untrue or stereotyped (even a “positive” stereotype, like the Tough Black Chick).
What? No “Magical Black Man”? 
Fair point, and it got me thinking. Does anyone remember movies of yore, like The Goonies, when kids used real swears like S-bombs and such? How much do you think is too much? I purposefully stayed away from f-bombs in the script, and I’m not saying my characters are foul-mouthed creatures, but I want to be true (and I certainly want to use the whole arsenal).
For my part, I was joking. I think Armando meant he thot there was too much swearing, not that there wasn’t enough variety of swearing. OTOH, let’s face it, kids swear, even moreso when there aren’t adults around. So I don’t think you necessarily need to avoid swearing, but at the same time, you could tell the story just as well without it, IMO.
Duly noted. And a correct conclusion on your part, Badger. Fail on my part. It’s only going to get weirder from here, folks, so please call out any logic glitches you find. I think I have the situation worked out enough that it makes sense for the needs of the story, but I’ve had this thing knocking around in my head for going on four years now, and there may be assumptions I’ve made that in fact don’t make sense, especially to those reading through for the first time. I certainly hope it doesn’t turn into a clusterfrak by the end.
So far, so good. 
Is this a sound that the reader should be familiar with? :eek: