An excerpt from my script review for It Waits which will be available 09/22/26:
4.) Dialogue and Description
The main thing we’re going to cover here is reviewing the amateur tendencies to include what we call overdescription.
Boy was this one chock-full of it!
Because it’s a scan, I can’t copy and paste, but let me share this little nugget from page 13:
The roof is slightly sloped and covered with thick shingles. We see a crank-style siren horn mounted on a steel stand in the middle of the roof. The legs secured to the roof with bolts. Because of the strong wind, Mike crawls carefully to the siren. He begins cranking the handle.
LONG SHOT – ROOF
From a distance we see Mike on the roof, cranking the siren. It produces an eerie, wailing cry which pierces the calm of the surrounding area. It sounds like an air raid warning siren and, in the open country of these mountains, can easily be heard for miles.
All of that to essentially tell the reader…
A crank-style siren on the roof.
Mike cranks it.
Its wail carries for miles, bouncing off mountains and through valleys.
In fact, you don’t even technically need that last line, because it’s a loud ass siren and we’ll be familiar.
All the other shit? It’s not important.
You’re writing a screenplay that (hopefully) audiences will one day watch on the big screen, they don’t give two fucks what the siren is mounted on or how it’s attached to the fucking roof!
And there more from there on…
Page 32 – We’re treated to four large blocks of text to more or less tell us Mike is standing on the edge of a lake in the woods and is scared.
But here we’re given how trees are positioned, the exact amount of them, the rock features surrounding the lake.
This is a fucking screenplay, not a novel, so unless the film is computer animated you better keep shit generic so any old lake in a wooded area will do for production purposes.
Shit, even if shot from the right angle, most modern day campgrounds could work, as the entire lake is rarely surrounded, leaving wooded areas for aesthetic purposes.
And one last example of being too detailed from page 86…
The wind is drying the blood and chilling his skin.
Okay…why…the fuck is this important?!
Sure it’s only a single line, but you’re wasting a reader’s time including shit like this because neither fact has anything to do with the plot, and the cool visual you think you just created not only can’t be filmed, but won’t because it’s fucking pointless!
Please…please…please…if you can only take one thing away from this and apply it to your own writing make it this.
No matter how cool you think a visual or scene detail is, if it doesn’t relate to the plot get rid of it!
And while on the topic…
This script is from the early 2000s…maybe it was more acceptable then but it’s plagued with wall after wall of text, and sometimes giving us “too similar” scenes.
One example is on page 64…how many times is this fucking tower going to be rocked back and forth as a “raise the stakes” type moment?
The first time it somehow broke the radio…under a pillow…and the second long drawn out version led to the mysterious native fellow getting stuck in the doorway and killed.
Diversify your shit.
On the dialogue, we’ll keep it quick…
So the monkey is probably there to give Mike someone to interact with, but all the cringe exchanges he had with Phil would make Michael Scott shudder.
And Roger…
Man…FUCK Roger…
“Hey cowboy! What’s up cowboy? <Insert stupid little joke here>, cowboy…”
Fuck off already.
(Based on one of the viewer reviews on RT, I’m pretty sure Roger’s lived through all the rewrites.)
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