Shorts Week: Welcome to the final day of Shorts Week, where I’m covering 5 short scripts from you guys, the readers. Shorts Week was a newsletter-only opportunity. To sign up and make sure you don’t miss out on future Scriptshadow opportunities, e-mail me at the contact page and opt in for the newsletter (if you’re not signed up already). This week’s newsletter went out WEDNESDAY NIGHT. Check your spam folder if you didn’t receive it. If nothing’s there, e-mail me with subject line “NO NEWSLETTER.” The next newsletter will go out this Saturday night.
Genre: Family/Fantasy
Premise: Set in the 1950s, a young boy builds a jerry-rigged spaceship to rescue the Sputnik dog he believes the girl of his dreams has lost.
About: We have an Aussie writer here. But don’t call him by his real name, Dean. He only answers to Mr. Spleen!
Writer: Mr. Spleen (Dean Friske)
Details: 25 pages
Okay, so Shorts Week is coming to a close. What have we learned from this week? Hmmm, shorts are good for showing and not telling. Don’t write a short dealing with mundane everyday activities or everyday conversations. Shorts need to stick out and get people’s attention and that means thinking big. There are two types of shorts. TRUE shorts (10 pages or under) and SHORTS PLUS (10-30 pages). I wish I could’ve made the distinction ahead of time. A nice twist or “button” at the end of a short is encouraged, as it leaves the script with a pop.
I would add not to let low/no budget issues deter you from writing an exciting short. There’s this belief that if you don’t have a lot of money, you can only shoot a quick dialogue scene between two actors. And that’s the problem. No matter how you spin it, now matter how many times you hand out your link with the warning, “Now remember, we didn’t have a lot of money,” your short will always be considered just another “couple guys in a room talking short” and those bore the shit out of their audiences. Use time travel (cheap to shoot – i.e. Primer), cloning (cheap to shoot), teleportation (cheap), zombies (inexpensive make-up), use amnesia or danger or intense situations – anything you can think of that carries with it a “must-see” quality that can still be shot on the cheap. Above all, try to be original. Just like a feature script, readers respond to material that beats uniquely, whether that uniqueness comes from the concept, the execution, the writer’s voice, or all of the above. If you achieve a combination of any of these things, your script is going to feel fresh. Which is the perfect segue to Lost Dog!
It’s 1950s suburban America. It’s a time of optimism, the Golden Age of the American dream. About the only thing America doesn’t have going for it are those pesky commies, who they’re going head to head with on all things technology, the most important battle of which is space travel. It seems the Russians have beaten the Americans into space, launching the world’s first orbiting satellite, Sputnik, “manned” by the planet’s first astronaut, a dog!
Back on earth, we meet Davis, 10 years old going on 40. Davis is an inventor-in-training, and just now getting the fever for the opposite sex. And there’s one particular object of his affection – Carol. She may be 10, but you can tell this girl is going to be breaking hearts well into the second half of the century. And she’s getting started today.
UNLESS!
Unless Davis can somehow impress her. And what do you know, the perfect opportunity arises when Carol loses her dog. She’s got fliers up all over the neighborhood and when Davis sees one, he notices the dog bares a striking resemblance to the one they’ve shown on TV, the dog in Sputnik!
So Davis enlists the help of his neighbor and best friend, Emily, who he’s unaware is secretly in love with him, to help him get to Sputnik and rescue the dog. She’s reluctant at first, seeing as the whol point of this is to snag homewrecker Carol, but she likes Davis so darn much, she agrees.
The two – who are the most kick-ass team ever – create a shuttle via an elevator and a bunch of covertly rigged rubber-bands. They’re shot up into space without a hitch and once there, Davis has only a tiny window to space-walk over to the Sputnik satellite, grab “Carol’s Dog,” get back to their shuttle, and return to earth.
This process does not go smoothly, but Davis does get the dog and the two go shooting back down to earth, crash-landing in their town’s main park, the exact park where Carol happens to be playing.
With. Her DOG.
Yup, Carol’s found her dog. Which means that dog Davis spent so much time saving is, uh, not Carol’s dog. Devastated, Davis realizes he might not ever get the girl of his dreams. That is unless he sees that the girl of his dreams has been right under his nose this whole time.
Let me count the ways in which I love this script. I love how it’s set in the 1950s, giving it a classic vintage charm. I love how our two main characters are kids. I love how one of them is secretly in love with the other. Conflict. Dramatic irony! Dialogue that’s always charged. I love the whimsy of it all. I love how two kids develop a device to travel into space in a way that only kids can. I love the ingenuity and cleverness of all the details – using thousands of rubberbands to launch the elevator, using hair spray to steer in space. I love the immediacy behind everything (they only have 3 minutes once they’re up there to do the job). I love that it’s all built around a personal core (this is really about two friends). I love that you can’t help but wonder what Michael Gondry or Spike Jonez would do with this.
Having said that, there are parts of the script that were too loosey-goosey for me. And I’ve already spoken with Mr. Spleen about them. The set-up and payoff of the bullies is weak. Their storyline is too separate from the main plot (their big scene is attacking Davis in the school bathroom). With how irrelevant their actions are, you wonder if they should be in the script in the first place. That’s something you never want to forget. Only create subplots if they’re an intricate part of the main plot as well. For example, if these bullies found out about Davis and Emily’s plans and tried to sabotage them, now they’re an actual part of the story. Their actions have an effect on the plot. We’d also, then, want their storyline to be paid off. We’d want to see them go down. As it stands, with them bugging Davis in the bathroom for reasons that have nothing to do with anything else, we just don’t care.
Then there’s the guy they buy their parts from. There’s something not quite right about the sequence, although I’m not sure what it is. The character doesn’t feel fully formed or something.
On top of that, some of the dialogue could be worked on. At times it’s good but other times a little confusing. For example, early on Davis invites Emily to the park via his preferred communication method, a paper airplane note. When she gets there, he’s hiding out, staring at Carol from a distance. Emily’s first words are, “Carol?” Now after you’ve read the script, this line sort of makes sense. Emily’s saying, “You want to invite Carol to the dance?” But at this moment, we don’t even know there’s a dance yet. And we don’t know that Emily knows Davis is looking for someone to ask to the dance. So it’s odd for her to say something in relation to information she doesn’t have yet. Something like, “That’s why I’m here? You want to ask Carol to the dance??” would’ve been clearer.
Despite this, the combination of the idea, the cleverness, and the charm made Lost Dog a real treat to read. My favorite short of the week!
Script link: Lost Dog
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Show-Don’t-Tell Alert – Instead of Mr. Spleen using character dialogue to tell us Davis and Emily have been friends forever, he has Davis toss a paper-airplane message to Emily’s house, where, after she’s done reading it, she throws in a box filled with a bunch of other paper airplanes from Davis. That’s one of the things I really loved about this script. Mr. Spleen always tried to show rather than tell. And if that wasn’t good enough, the image ALSO told us that Emily had a crush on Davis. Killing two birds with one stone on a “show-don’t-tell.” That’s good writing!
