An excerpt from my script review for Green Room which will be available 05/30/16:
2.) Plot Stability
It’s amazing how a good plot can originate from an everyday mistake.
The brilliance of this script is everything goes wrong based on a single, simple object.
A cell phone.
Think about it.
NONE of the shit that happens to the band would have happened if Sam would have remembered his cell phone. (Or if Gabe arguably locked the door.)
It’s a sort of existential type mind fuck that makes you wonder about your own life, and if you ever walked a precarious fine line between living and dying without even realizing it.
But this is a story, so of course we need a catalyst, and aside from the brilliance of the idea, here’s the rest of the critique.
First off, I wish the script would have just jumped to Tad saying the show was cancelled, but mentioning the Venue and his cousin Daniel.
(No Mexican bean and rice for the sake of fart jokes!)
All the other shit was too much filler, and we could cut right to the action.
Too elaborate a setup for the band siphoning gas if that’s what was needed by Darcy for his plan at the end.
A simple shot of them running out of gas, and then cutting to them stealing it via siphoning fills in the blanks for us, and sets up Darcy’s ending.
Same with the bullshit interview creating a running gag of the bands listing their “desert island” bands throughout the script.
Stupid hipster bullshit is what it was, and again, the meat of this script is the band being forced into an uncomfortable show and accidentally witnessing a murder which fucks them.
We don’t actually get to the murder until page 26, and out of 115 pages, that’s too long.
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