An excerpt from my script review for Séance which will be available 06/07/21:
3.) Quality of Characters
Setting aside the #MeToo movement entirely…
As grown ass men, we should avoid writing these scripts with casts of all teenage women.
Why?
Well the answer is another one of Reals’ DON’Ts.
Page 3:
ALICE, 18, who is speaking. Alice is
conventionally pretty, with a haughty demeanor.
Laurel, a tall girl with modelesque features, shifts
anxiously.
Kerrie, a striking girl with glasses, shakes her head.
Three out of the six characters being introduced, you more or less describe as “pretty”.
In fact it’s as if you typed pretty into each description and just used the synonym feature to change it up.
Being that you’re pulling these characters out of your imagination and then dropping them into an all girls boarding school, making them shower, change, and enter promiscuous situations is rather…creepy.
Will the casting department place attractive actors in the roles? Certainly.
But your story shouldn’t come off as this “fan fiction” of encounters in a teenage girls academy.
You want to have an all female cast, fine.
Keep it simple and give us the stereotypes.
ALICE, the alpha.
LAUREL, the insecure one.
KERRIE, the bookworm.
How far you take those is up to you, but establish the dynamic of the teen clique without tingling my Dad version of a Spidey Sense.
Aside from that I had two issues with the characters.
First, they seemed to really not care too much as their friends died.
They said some right things, but then just went about business as usual.
Second, the fact that we’re putting a handsome twenty something Trevor around a bunch of teenage girls in full blown adolescence was just silly.
If this school is as prestigious as we’re told, there’s not going to be any distractions like that around, son of faculty or not.
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