An excerpt from my script review for Victor Frankenstein which will be available 12/01/15:
4.) Dialogue and Description
One thing that wow’ed me here was a single exchange…page 28:
ALISTAIR
(beat, awkwardly)
Inspector, I’ve been meaning to
say…I, that is to say, all of us
at the Yard- what happened with
Claudia is a tragedy, sir.
TURPIN
…Beg pardon-
ALISTAIR
Your wife, Claudia; her passing was-
TURPIN
I’m sorry, what relevance does
Claudia have to this?
ALISTAIR
Well, none but-
TURPIN
Claudia is in Heaven. Our
separation is merely temporary.
What is your implication about my
state of mind?
ALISTAIR
I didn’t mean-
TURPIN
Didn’t you?
Subtext via exposition.
Clever.
By having Alistair tell us what happened to Mrs. Turpin, we get his backstory AND Alistair politely hints, like an English gentleman would, that Turpin needs to take some time off.
Great technique, one I probably came across before, but this instance really stood out.
Two birds, one stone, and something we should all try to emulate in our scripts.
Page 39 – More subtext cluing us in something’s off between Victor and his father.
And then all the Turpin subtext that there’s more to the “why” he’s after Victor and the non-hunchback hunchback that ultimately leads to this, page 108:
Turpin, through the shock, is looking around at all the
technology; he didn’t understand, he knows that now. By god, he thought he knew, but he had no idea.
TURPIN
I-…I’ve made a terrible mistake.
“Oh my gosh, I judged a book by its cover. You were really a good person. Oh my!”
Seriously? Half baked kind of lesson, isn’t it?
Closing up the dialogue segment, Victor’s socially inept banter with other characters was funny.
Now the description.
For those of you who read my American Ultra review or watched the Screenwriting: Memorable Description video, VERY fond of Mr. Landis’s blackspace. (That sounds kind of dirty.)
Was this as fun as American Ultra? No, but it wasn’t comedy, so it shouldn’t be.
Those Landis nuggets were still in there though, and he’s a great writer to look at when trying to craft your own tone.
Page 22:
-WHAM! THIRTY FEET HEADFIRST INTO THE DECK. It ain’t pretty.
Page 70:
…in a private room cramped with sleeker, more
high tech versions of Victor’s equipment, lay the Baby
Winthrop on the table, and begin the process of prepping it.
We watch as they give it various injections, stretch the body to hold off rigor mortis…
And one more for fun’s sake. Page 100:
Victor wears a completely awesome looking buttoned up labcoat, with huge, gnarly looking goggles on his forehead.
Gnarly. Pretty, pretty gnarly.
One area that didn’t work for me was the sequence starting on page 113, where Victor and Igor fight the monster in the windmill.
Classic scene and setting, but the action was very hard to follow. It’s still not clear what happened to them or the monster, aside from the windmill collapsed. (In the middle of reading it, I almost wished for a “look, the action will be epic” type comment.)
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